privacy
Privacy is a human right.
@kazani
Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does
1. "Privacy" has been hollowed out
In modern tech, privacy is mostly a policy promise, not a technical constraint.
If a system:
- collects identifiers
- stores metadata
- logs access
- can be compelled to disclose
Then "privacy" is conditional trust, not protection.
Most "privacy-first" products are doing risk management, not risk elimination.
That's not cynicism; that's architecture.
2. Anonymity is architectural, not moral
True anonymity means:
- the system cannot know
- therefore it cannot leak
- therefore it cannot comply
This is the only model that survives coercion.
If a service could identify you under pressure, it eventually will. Law, breach, insider threat, or acquisition - pick one.
3. The "Privacy Theater Playbook" describes how services collect user data incrementally through email registration, password resets, phone verification, and identity confirmation, despite privacy policy claims.
Incremental identity accretion is exactly how most systems launder surveillance while maintaining plausible deniability:
"Just an email"
"Just for recovery"
"Just for abuse prevention"
"Just for compliance"
Each step seems reasonable in isolation.
In aggregate, it recreates full-spectrum identity.
That's not accidental. It's incentive-aligned.
4. Possession = vulnerability
This is the core law most people refuse to internalize:
"If you hold the data, you are the risk surface."
No amount of encryption, policy language, or goodwill overrides that.
The safest data is data that never existed.
Privacy still matters - just not as a primary defense.
Privacy today means:
- data minimization
- compartmentalization
- harm reduction
It's a damage control layer, not a shield.
The term "privacy" in tech is often misused as a marketing tactic rather than an architectural reality, with many services collecting extensive user data while claiming to protect privacy.
True anonymity is an architectural decision that makes it technically impossible to compromise or identify users, even under duress or legal orders.
The core vulnerability in most services is possession of user data; services that do not collect or store certain data cannot leak or be forced to reveal it.
Mullvad VPN exemplifies real anonymity by using randomly generated account numbers instead of personal information, rendering them unable to comply with data requests.
Email addresses are identified as a primary mechanism that destroys anonymity due to their role as identity markers, trackability, persistence, and susceptibility to social engineering.
Crypto payments are accepted to decouple transactions from persistent identity, as traditional payment systems create surveillance infrastructure, though traditional payment options are also pragmatically supported.
Crypto ≠ anonymity by default
- Public blockchains are anti-anonymity by design
- Pseudonymity collapses under correlation
- Crypto payments only help if the entire stack respects anonymity
Otherwise crypto becomes the most permanent surveillance ledger ever created.
Anonymity is distinguished from impunity, security, invisibility, and zero trust, emphasizing that it's about architectural limitations on data collection to minimize damage when trust fails, not a license for illegal activity or complete invulnerability.
Privacy without anonymity is a promise.
Anonymity is a constraint.
Most users fail not because they misunderstand anonymity, but because they achieve it in one layer and leak it in another.
Email is one such leak - but not the only one:
- timing correlations
- writing style
- device fingerprinting
- payment rails
- social graph leakage
Anonymity is about not creating irreversible power asymmetry.
It's a defensive posture against:
- future regime change
- policy drift
- data reuse
- retroactive enforcement
- adversaries you haven't met yet
That temporal dimension is often missed.
Most products will never choose anonymity by default because:
- it breaks growth analytics
- it breaks personalization
- it breaks monetization
- it breaks compliance narratives
- it breaks VC expectations
Which means:
"Anonymity will not be mass-adopted.
It will be selectively adopted by people who understand power."
That"s the real dividing line.
https://paragraph.com/@kazani/privacy-doesnt-mean-anything-anymore-anonymity-does
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@kazani
Privacy will be the most important moat in crypto.
Why? Because secrets are hard to migrate.
Everyone is launching a new "high performance" blockchain lately. But these chains are hardly different from one another. Blockspace is functionally the same everywhere. And with bridges that make moving between chains easy, that blockspace is now accessible *from* everywhere. Mercenary users and capital quickly arriving on a chain to farm an airdrop can leave just as quickly to farm the next one on another chain.
The reality is that if your "general purpose" chain doesn't already have a thriving ecosystem, a killer application, or an unfair distribution advantage, there's very little reason for anyone to use it or build on top of it. Performance alone is no longer enough.
Privacy is the one feature that everyone agrees is critical for the world’s finance to move onchain. It’s also the one feature that almost every blockchain that exists today completely lacks. For most chains, it has been little more than an afterthought until now.
Privacy by itself is sufficiently compelling to differentiate a new chain from all the rest. But it also does something more important: it creates chain lock-in.
Bridging tokens is easy, but bridging secrets is hard.
As long as everything is public, it's trivial to move from one chain to another, thanks to bridging protocols like LayerZero. But, as soon as you make things private, that is no longer true. There is always a risk when moving in or out of a private zone that people who are watching the chain, mempool, or network traffic will be able to figure out who you are. Crossing the boundary between a private chain and a public one—or even between two private chains—leaks all kinds of metadata like transaction timing and size correlations that makes it easier to track you.
Compared to the many undifferentiated new chains whose fees will likely be driven down to zero by competition, blockchains with privacy have a much stronger network effect. When you're on public blockchains, it's easy to transact with users on other chains—it doesn't matter which chain you join. When you're on private blockchains, on the other hand, the chain you choose matters much more because, once you join one, you're less likely to move and risk being exposed.
This will create a winner-take-most dynamic. And because privacy is essential for most real-world use cases, a handful of privacy chains will own most of crypto.
https://x.com/i/status/1997002727516221511
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@deanpierce.eth
Neat, my favorite biohacking channel did a phone hacking video 🥳 also funny that they go hard vs Palantir at the start of the video, but the video is actually an ad for Cape, which is a phone company that spun out of Palantir.
https://youtu.be/UtwQ9APzYWA
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@thoughtcrimeboss
Axon is now building police body cameras with built in automatic facial recognition. Walk by a cop, get scanned. They built these despite their own ethics board advising against it.
If your profit is dependant on creating a Orwellian dystopia, maybe you should consider other ways to make money.
There are a few local jurisdictions in the United States that ban facial recognition, but outside of those cities, we will probably see this spreading soon.
It needs to be stopped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0G9FjldwfY
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@thumbsup.eth
Mullvad’s new gluetun alternative written in rust
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GotaTun-Rust-WireGuard-OSS
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@kazani
Tinder now uses biometric verification.
They're calling it a "safety feature."
This is how surveillance capitalism becomes romance infrastructure.
How we normalize iris scans to swipe right.
Privacy erosion doesn't arrive as dystopia.
It arrives as convenience.
Then it becomes mandatory.
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@icetoad.eth
Zcash has performed great over the last 90 days, but Monero has been on a slow, steady rise all year. They both have their advantages and it sounds like regulators are slowing coming around on privacy coins. I'm bullish on both of them!
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@thoughtcrimeboss
A new monero forum is doing a 1 XMR giveaway to one of the first 500 users.
Those are pretty good odds.
http://monero.forum/t/giving-away-1-xmr-to-kickstart-the-forum/14?u=thoughtcrimeboss
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@kazani
GotaTun -- Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/announcing-gotatun-the-future-of-wireguard-at-mullvad-vpn
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@kazani
Firefox is building an "AI Mode" users can toggle on or off. And its privacy-focused user base is furious.
This tension is everywhere.
One cohort wants AI embedded in everything.
Another wants the option to opt out entirely.
Enterprise buyers are starting to demand AI control surfaces by default.
Browser-level toggles today. OS-level policies tomorrow.
The future of AI adoption isn't just about capability.
It's about consent.
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@kazani
Facebook does not just know your name. It knows where you go, what you watch, who you talk to, what you believe, what you buy, and how long you stare before scrolling away. Even when you do nothing, it is still watching you.
These are the list of data being collected by Facebook.
- Name, Phone number
- Email address, Contacts
- Political or religious beliefs
- Sexual orientation
- Your payment info
- Purchase history
- Address, Your Precise location
- Emails, SMS or MMS
- Files and docs
- Browsing history
- Health info, Fitness info
- Photos, Videos
- Music files
- Installed apps
- Calendar events
- Search history
- Credit score
https://x.com/i/status/2001933661227409463
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@kazani
Reaction against the "illegalization" of VPNs in Denmark
The Danish Ministry of Culture presented a bill that would make it illegal to "use VPN connections to access multimedia content that would otherwise not be available in Denmark or to circumvent blocks of illegal websites". The rule, scheduled to come into effect on July 1, 2026, involved fines and affected both private and commercial uses.
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/denmark-wants-to-ban-vpns-to-unlock-foreign-illegal-streams-and-experts-are-worried
A survey indicated that 9% of Danes use VPNs to access foreign catalogs of platforms such as Netflix.
However, following the "public backlash" (Strong negative social/political reaction) and from groups such as the IT Political Association, the Minister of Culture, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, announced the withdrawal of the section on VPNs, clarifying that he does not seek to ban them in general or criminalize their use, but only to combat piracy.
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