Privacy

I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce my dependence on online search engines.

Hister is a full text indexer for websites which saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore previously visited content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.

I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo/kagi more and more frequently.

The project is still heavily under development with a growing community, but the current version is in a fairly usable state in my opinion, so I wanted to share it here - perhaps some of you find it useful as well. (Or at least have some constructive criticism =])

The code is AGPLv3 licensed, available at https://github.com/asciimoo/hister website: https://hister.org/ read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/

About me: I develop privacy protecting and data liberating free software since 2008. I'm the author of Searx, Colly (https://github.com/gocolly/colly) and many more smaller free software/self-hosted projects (https://github.com/asciimoo).

Developer @asciimoo@lemmy.ml

Found it interesting, something worth keeping an eye on. Hasn't released yet, planned date end of 2026.

The founder did answer some questions on reddit (user ColeFromWalt)

As facial recognition spreads across police forces and retail stores, UK biometrics commissioners are warning that national oversight is lagging far behind the technology’s rapid expansion.

Last year, the Home Office admitted facial recognition cameras were more likely to incorrectly identify black and Asian people than their white counterparts, and women more than men, and there have been conflicting studies on their overall accuracy.

Ford just filed a patent for a truck that monitors your face, your eyes, your emotions, and your "fitness to drive", and won't let you use it if the AI thinks you're not calm enough. You pay for it. You have the title. But Ford decides if you actually get to drive it. Live feeds to insurance companies. Biometric scans running against criminal databases. Microphones capturing every conversation.

This is what happens when the DADSS precedent (mandatory car monitoring for drunk driving) opens the door for scope creep. Manufacturers aren't waiting for public debate. They're filing patents and building the infrastructure right now.

In this episode of The Long Game, we break down Ford's specific patent claims, explore what the monitoring system actually does, and explain why this matters for ownership, disability access, privacy, and your future. This is the second domino. And it's already falling.

📌 Sources & Further Reading:

Ford Patent US20240249706A1 — patents.google.com/patent/US20240249706A1 Right to Repair Movement & Control — eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/right-repair-movement-and-threat-right-manipulate John Deere Right to Repair Fight — eff.org/news/right-repair-fight-expanding Facial Recognition Bias Study — nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recognition-race-bias.html BMW Heated Seats Subscription — theverge.com/2022/7/12/23211500/bmw-subscription-fee-heated-seats-us-plans

It works like omegle, but users stay silent and strive to go for the highest rating of their face.

Privacy policy says they dont store or sell data, but who knows https://omoggle.com/privacy

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46331006

It's ironic to see those same global elites who love partying with the likes of known & convicted child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein now urging worldwide restrictions on E2E / VPN & promoting age, biometric, and identity verification online - all in the name of protecting children.

It’s also highly suspicious that so many of the world’s biggest countries are trying to implement this wider internet control at the same time.

Feels like a major push toward authoritarianism to me.

It's messed up how the people always have to fight to wrest any rights from those in power, and then fight even harder to keep them!

EFF is alarmed by recent laws in several states that have blocked public access to data collected by ALPRs, including, in some cases, information derived from ALPR data. We do not support pending bills in Arizona and Connecticut that would block the public oversight capabilities that ALPR information offers.

For the last couple of years, we’ve watched the same predictable cycle play out across the globe: a state (or country) passes a clunky age-verification mandate, and, without fail, Virtual Private Network (VPN) usage surges as residents scramble to maintain their privacy and anonymity. We've seen...

Has passed third Senate reading 15/4/2026

Has passed first House of Commons reading 30/4/2026.

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/64745676

A 10-month Commerce Department probe concluded Meta could view all WhatsApp messages in unencrypted form

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on April 27, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

An exchange of gunfire between an armed suspect and law enforcement outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday came days ahead of a deadline for extending far-reaching government surveillance powers, and President Donald Trump wasted no time in claiming that the attempted attack on the event proved that the FBI must be permitted to spy on Americans without obtaining warrants.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Trump repeated his previous remarks that he is “willing to give up [his] security” in favor of extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire on Thursday—and suggested other Americans should do the same for “the safety of our nation.”

Section 702 allows US intelligence agencies to surveil the electronic communications of foreign nationals overseas without a warrant. Since some of the nearly 350,000 foreign nationals whose communications have been collected under the law are in touch with Americans, Section 702 allows for the collection of emails, text messages, and phone calls of US citizens.

Fox anchor Jacqui Heinrich emphasized that “we don’t know right now” whether the suspect in Saturday’s shooting, Cole Tomas Allen, “was radicalized” by a foreign individual or group, but asked whether the attack drove home “the importance of having these tools to protect our country from these kinds of threats.”

The president responded by complaining that former FBI Director James Comey used FISA to obtain warrants to surveil a former Trump aide as part of the agency’s investigation into the 2016 Trump presidential campaign’s communications with Russia, before saying FISA has been used in the US-Israeli war on Iran and in the US military’s invasion of Venezuela earlier this year.

“It’s really needed for national security,” said Trump. “Iran is decimated, and we got a lot of information by using FISA… I’m willing to give up my security for the military because ultimately that’s to me the highest cause is, you know, the safety of our nation.”

Pres. Trump, under prodding from Fox News, exploits White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting to push for Congress to approve FISA domestic spying program: "It's really needed for national security…"

He reiterates that he's willing to give up his liberties for safety. pic.twitter.com/tmcepp0Wgn

— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) April 26, 2026

Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, wrote last week in a column at Common Dreams that while Trump, Republican lawmakers, and US intelligence agencies “make sweeping claims about the terror attacks that Section 702 has prevented, there is little publicly available evidence to support this.”

“According to the Cato Institute, there is only one well-documented, independently corroborated case of Section 702 preventing a terrorist attack on American soil: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot,” wrote Liz. “In that case, Section 702 was used by the [National Security Agency] to track an exchange between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi, who was living in the US. The NSA passed this information to the FBI, which identified Zazi and disrupted the attack before it took place. Importantly, however, the NSA allegedly received the courier’s foreign email address from the government’s British intelligence partners. At best then, this success was a byproduct of productive intelligence sharing between allies. Rather than proving the necessity of Section 702, this incident underscores how Trump’s inane attacks against key US allies undermine our national security.”

The suspect in Saturday’s shooting is believed to have acted alone, and no evidence has been released that he was in communication with any foreign entities. A document he wrote alluded to his Christian beliefs and to reports of the administration’s abuse of immigrants in detention centers, its boat-bombing operations in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, and the bombing of an elementary school in Iran.

The president has been pushing in recent weeks for an extension of Section 702. The program was last reauthorized in 2024, and earlier this month two efforts to extend the program—one for 18 months and the other for five years—failed, with opponents objecting to a lack of privacy reforms and to a loophole allowing data brokers to sell private information about Americans to government agencies that have not obtained judicial approval to seize the data.

After those proposals failed, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week unveiled a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years and require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans’ private data to an oversight official, as well as imposing penalties for abuse—provisions that were dismissed by privacy advocates.

The House Rules Committee was set to convene on Monday, a step toward advancing the new bill toward a vote in the House, and according to NPR, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) circulated a memo late last week urging his colleagues to reject the Republicans’ latest proposal.

The bill, he wrote, “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data… FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge.”

Four Democrats in the House—Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Tom Suozzi (D-NJ), Marie Gluesencamp Perez (D-Wash.), and Jared Golden (D-Maine)—broke with the party and joined the GOP earlier this month in supporting a procedural vote to advance the reauthorization of Section 702, and privacy advocates are ramping up pressure on them to oppose the latest proposal for an extension.

“It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, told The Intercept Monday, “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and [White House homeland security adviser] Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”

publicado de forma cruzada desde: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1074417

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She confessed her worries to her therapist: her marriage, her finances, and self-esteem. Therapists are legally and ethically bound to confidentiality, but two years later, a transcript of every word typed to her psychologist using the app Talkspace was produced in court by her former employer.

military contractor Palantir is helping the IRS analyze dozens of different data sets on Americans to investigate a broad range of financial crimes, according to records shared with The Intercept.

Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets.

Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says.

Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date.

Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.”

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The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating “left-leaning groups,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities,” American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to The Intercept. “Its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing, with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.”

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the IRS.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir.”

The contract documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that these “disparate sets of data” are vast. Palantir’s LCA allows the IRS to quickly search and visualize “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between databases maintained by the IRS and other federal agencies. According to the contract documents, this data includes individual tax form and tax returns as well as Affordable Care Act data, bank statements, and transactions, and “all available” data compiled by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Its view apparently extends to cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. “The application would sit on top of a singular repository of identified wallets from seized servers utilizing dark web data obtained from exchangers such as Coinbase,” the documents note.

The program places an emphasis on mapping social relationships between the targets of an investigation. That includes analyzing a “network of people and the relationships and communications between them,” such as “calls, texts, [and] emails events.” The use of “IP address analysis” within LCA allows the IRS to “Identify suspects more easily” and “Establish (new) relationships among actors.”

These investigative functions are continuously updated, the materials say, through ongoing close work between Palantir engineers and IRS personnel.

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Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers’ Health Data](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/24/palantir-new-york-city-hospitals-contract/)

The intermingling of sensitive data on millions of Americans comes at a time of increased global skepticism and opposition toward Palantir, which, despite its military-intelligence origins, has a thriving business with civilian agencies like the IRS. The use of Palantir software at the U.K.’s National Health Service, for example, has created an ongoing political controversy across Britain, while a similar contract with the New York City public hospital network was recently canceled following public protest.

The contract is also active at a time when IRS Criminal Investigations has been coopted to aid in the broader Trump administration’s aggressive agenda. In July, ProPublica reported that the agency was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide “on demand” data to accelerate deportations. Last year, the New York Times reported that Palantir, founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, was central to an administration effort to increase data-sharing across federal agencies.

“The question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against.”

The company’s right-wing politics and eagerness to facilitate U.S. and Israeli military aggression abroad, NSA global surveillance, and ICE deportations has also made many weary of its access to incredibly sensitive personal data. A recent post on the company’s Palantir’s X account summarizing a book by CEO Alex Karp triggered an immediate backlash from those unnerved by the manifesto’s fascistic bent. The bullet points extolled the virtue of arms manufacturing, argued the Axis powers were unfairly punished after World War II, called for a reinstatement of the draft, condemned cultural pluralism, and claimed that wealthy elites are unfairly persecuted.

“When the government can map relationships, track behavior, and generate investigative leads across data sets at this scale, the question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against,” Chukwu said. “Entrusting that infrastructure to a company known for opaque, security-state deployments only heightens those risks.”