Independent coverage of cybersecurity and digital privacy.
Millions of Americans trade in, donate, or recycle an old phone every year, and many of those devices change hands with far more than a cracked screen. We followed a researcher through the secondary market to see what survives a careless goodbye — and how to make sure yours doesn't.
The jokes, venting sessions, and voice notes Americans trade in family group chats feel ephemeral. Legally, they are anything but — and once a subpoena arrives, 'deleted' rarely means gone. A look at how casual messages become discoverable evidence, and what reasonable privacy hygiene actually looks like.
A privacy researcher offers strangers a deal: give her a name, an old address, and a property deed, and she will show them what the data-broker economy already knows. The results reveal how little information it takes to assemble a startlingly complete portrait of an ordinary American life.
A security consultant spent a week examining an ordinary Ohio family's connected home and documented every conversation their devices were having without them. The findings reveal how much household data routinely leaves through the front door — and how a single gadget can become a gateway for everything else.
Millions of American homes run on routers and smart devices that stopped receiving security updates years ago. A researcher's neighborhood-level scan shows why abandoned hardware is the quietest way into a network — and what responsible retirement actually looks like.
Most Americans have hardened their own accounts while leaving parents, siblings, and teenagers as open doors. We followed one extended family as it attempted to build a workable security culture — without turning every dinner conversation into a lecture.
A security researcher spent three weeks passively monitoring their own laptop's network traffic at airports, hotels, and coffee shops across the United States. The findings separate genuine risks from modern security theater — and suggest most travelers are protecting the wrong things.
Changing a password the day after a breach announcement feels responsible, but the evidence suggests the danger has barely begun. This longitudinal examination follows the eighteen-month lifecycle of a major American data breach — from disclosure-day chaos to the delayed fraud attempts victims never connect to the original incident.
Automatic Content Recognition turns America's biggest screens into its most detailed data collectors, logging scenes, timestamps, and even nearby devices. Here is how the trade in viewing data works, who profits, and what you can do about it.
Two-factor authentication has become the security industry's favorite advice, yet its most popular forms fail in ways few users anticipate. Security researchers walk through the real-world weak points — from SIM swaps to handwritten codes — and rank the options by resilience.
Modern vehicles log where you go, how you brake, and sometimes whether your eyes left the road — and that telemetry has become a valuable commodity. From insurer partnerships to FTC enforcement, here's what connected-car data collection means for American drivers, including the ones who never opted in.
A growing market of budget-priced services promises to scrub your name from hundreds of broker databases for the cost of a pizza per month. We look at what those subscriptions actually accomplish, why the broker economy is legal in the first place, and how to do much of the work yourself for free.
Everyone knows reusing passwords is dangerous, and nearly everyone does it anyway — including security professionals, if they're honest. This opinion-driven feature looks at the psychology behind the habit, what breach data reveals, and why passkeys, the long-promised fix, are still stuck at the starting line.
Modern vehicles record where you go, how fast you brake, and sometimes what happens inside the cabin — and much of that data ends up in commercial hands. We examine how automakers monetize telemetry, why opt-outs are so hard to find, and what an honest privacy label for cars would actually say.
Keystroke trackers, screen captures, and message scanners have quietly become standard equipment in American offices. We examine what employers can legally monitor, where state notification laws diverge, and how workers can find out exactly what is being collected about them.
Deepfake voice calls, payroll portals, and calendar invites have all been weaponized in phishing campaigns sophisticated enough to deceive trained security staff. Seven recently reported case studies reveal the psychological machinery behind them — and the habits that stop them.
From the shuttering of Silk Road to the international sweep that netted hundreds of suspects, law enforcement has repeatedly pierced the dark web's promises of anonymity. A news-focused retrospective on what those operations teach ordinary Americans about privacy, trust, and the limits of going dark.
Headlines routinely blame password managers for breaches, but the vaults themselves almost never fail. A closer look at the phishing scams, reused master passwords, and sloppy browser habits that actually put American users at risk — and what to do about them.