Our Constitutional rights were written without any concept of modern technology such as cell phones and the internet. Much of our privacy laws are still geared towards the pre-digital age. Even though the internet is many decades old now, the era of traveling with smartphones and laptops is still relatively new and the laws around privacy have not kept up. Today I’ll be speaking with Nathan Freed Wessler from the ACLU about device searches, particularly at the US border. We’ll also talk about how cases relating to location tracking have evolved since the landmark Carpenter case that Nate successfully argued in front of the Supreme Court almost 10 years ago now.

With the 500th podcast and America’s 250th anniversary approaching, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how we can be better digital neighbors and digital citizens. We’re all in this together. Your security and privacy overlaps the security and privacy of many others. It’s important to improve our own situation, but we need to also realize that failing to do so can put others at risk who may be more vulnerable and have more to lose that we do.

In the news: massive Fortinet breach; feds recover activists’ Signal messages; Visa partners with ChatGPT for agentic purchases; Anthropic models banned for export; US shortens cyber fix window to 3 days; EPIC endorses two new privacy bills; Canada’s spy agency hacks devices to clean out botnet; nearly half of LG smart TVs apps contain proxy SDKs; EFF calls out Amazon for shady Android devices containing proxies.

Most of the chatbots in the news today are trained on public data (often including copyrighted data). But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if you had a chatbot that could access all of your personal or company data, but hosted locally so that all the data was secure and private? You could ask it all sorts of interesting questions about that data, run helpful reports, and tease out important trends or do in-depth analysis that would be very difficult for a human to do. Basically, there are lots of uses for AI beyond ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude – and done in ways that preserve the privacy of your data and queries. Today we’ll discuss how we can do AI better with the CEO and Founder of Empathy AI, Angel Maldonado.

In the final part of my series on downloading all of your historical emails from the cloud, we’ll make backups of your archive and make sure we store them in multiple places, following the 3-2-1 backup rule. I’ll also tell you about an interesting open source email archive project that you might find interesting.

In the news: the FCC wants to kill burner phones; the WeedHack malware targets Minecraft players; a new surveillance company wants to add personal radio IDs to our license plate reader data; Apple debuts new parental controls; a 17-million-device botnet has been dismantled; Slate Auto has a cheap new EV that’s got some great privacy features; Meta quickly deletes facial recognition features from smart glasses; FISA Section 702 is allowed to lapse; Signal alums reveal “Encrypted Spaces” tech for encrypted group collaboration.

What would you do if you suddenly lost your bank account – and potentially access to all your funds? What about your credit cards? How long could your business stay afloat if you could no longer receive payments? Most of us take financial services for granted, but they can be taken away at any time – for almost any reason. And sometimes the reason is just that they don’t like you – or someone in power doesn’t like you, who can put pressure on the financial company. In many cases, this amounts to financial censorship. My guest today, Rainey Reitman, is the head of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and author of a book on this very subject called Transaction Denied. We’ll learn about how this happens, what the impacts are, and what we can do about it.

As part of my ongoing series on creating a full backup of all your old emails, we want to take some time to verify that we got everything okay. In today’s Tip of the Week, I’ll give you several pointers on how to go about doing this. In the last installment, we’ll make a couple backups and (optionally) delete everything from your email provider.

In the news: AI firms want your financial data; Google Search moves to AI chat format; AI bots transcribing all your meetings; Mayo Clinic using AI to transcribe ER visits; CISA exposes credentials in massive screw up; school buses are being turned into mass surveillance machines; FBI wants access to all the license plate readers; some in Congress are trying to kill license plate readers.

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When you’re working for your employer, no matter where you are, you’re on company time, using company equipment. Your employer has a responsibility to protect their assets – not just their equipment and facilities, but their data, as well. That gives employers several reasons to monitor you and any devices you might be using for work – including your mobile phone, potentially. While your rights to privacy are limited, they’re not eliminated. Today I’ll ask Jodi Daniels (Red Clover Advisors) and Jan Rosenfeld (iVerify) to help us understand what personal information might be gathered, how it might be used, and what we should do to protect ourselves.

In the next phase of withdrawing our email data from the cloud, we’re going to download a complete archive of every email we’ve ever sent. It’s not as easy as it should be, but it’s also not that difficult. I’ll give you an overview in today’s Tip of the Week, but you should read the full blog for detailed steps.

In the news: Venmo finally makes transactions private by default; FCC extends software update window for banned routers; Meta employees push back on surveillance; Proton Mail adds post-quantum crypto; turn off ChatGPT ad tracking; AI chatbots giving out people’s real phone numbers; Canada’s updated surveillance bill is still bad; Utah wants to effectively ban anonymous VPN use; LLMs want access to your health records; Microsoft Edge is a poor password manager; Canvas hacked during finals; Chrome installing a 4GB AI model on everyone’s computers.

Cindy Cohn has been on the front lines, defending your digital rights, for three decades. With the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), she has litigated several seminal legal cases that have directly impacted the lives of all Americans. As she retires from her role as Director of the EFF, she’s written a memoir about her time there and documents several of these legal fights called Privacy’s Defender. Today I’ll ask Cindy about the key parts of these cases, how we interpret our rights in the digital realm, and what we can do to ensure a free and open internet.

Probably the oldest online data you have – like, still have out there right now – is your emails. Did you have an AOL account? Or email through your internet service provider (ISP)? Statistically speaking, you probably have a Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook (previously HotMail) account. Unless you explicitly closed those accounts or deleted those emails, they’re still there. Emails are less like letters in an envelope and much more like postcards, unless you made a point of encrypting them. So today we’ll start a multi-step process to download that email history so that we can delete the online data before it’s slurped into some AI model training or leaked in a data breach.

In other news: Met Police win suit to use live facial recognition; Australian teens work around social media ban; big tech is ignoring your do-not-track signals; Meta threatens to leave New Mexico over AG demands; Meta is training AI on their employees; doctors are using AI to take session notes; Mythos suffers ‘unauthorized access’; AI agent deletes companies databases; and AI is empowering script kiddies.