Portmaster is a free and open-source application firewall that does the heavy lifting for you. Restore privacy and take back control over all your computer's network activity.

Searle's paper, titled "Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2," found that Google's widely-used CAPTCHA system is primarily a mechanism for tracking user behavior and collecting data while providing little actual security against bots. The study revealed that reCAPTCHA extensively monitors users' cookies, browsing history, and browser environment (including canvas rendering, screen resolution, mouse movements, and user-agent data) — all of which can be used for advertising and tracking purposes. Through analyzing over 3,600 users, the researchers found that solving image-based challenges takes 557% longer than checkbox challenges and concluded that reCAPTCHA has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of human time valued at $6.1 billion in wages while generating massive profits for Google through its tracking capabilities and data collection, with the value of tracking cookies alone estimated at $888 billion.

Veilid allows anyone to build a distributed, private app. Veilid gives users the privacy to opt out of data collection and online tracking. Veilid is being built with user experience, privacy, and safety as our top priorities. It is open source and available to everyone to use and build upon.

In materials provided to law enforcement, Fog states that it has access to a “near real-time” database of billions of geolocation signals derived from smartphones. It sells subscriptions to a service, which the company usually billed as “Fog Reveal,” that lets law enforcement look up location data in its database through a website. The smartphone signals in Fog’s database include latitude, longitude, timestamp, and a device ID. The company can access historical data reaching back to at least June 2017.

The government's approach to technological surveillance is leading us down a dark path, experts warn, as it prepares to give law enforcement agencies new hacking powers.

Currently before parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020 is the government's latest attempt to gain a watchful eye over cyber space.

Once the bill passes, it will dish out extra power to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), giving the agencies access to new warrants that will let them modify and delete data, collect intelligence from online communities, and even take over the online accounts of supposed criminals.

Instead, I have a computer that is designed largely to maximize the profits of the computer industry. Except for a handful of very over-priced models that I can't afford to buy, our computers are increasingly designed to be little more than advertising platforms and vehicles for maximizing the cloud revenues of their true owners: online data gatherers, advertisers, and cloud companies. Our computers have numerous hardware and software back doors that are designed to allow governments and corporations to spy on and track us around the Internet.

You are being watched. Private and state-sponsored organizations are monitoring and recording your online activities. privacytools.io provides services, tools and knowledge to protect your privacy against global mass surveillance.

WhatsApp, which is used by 1.5bn people worldwide, discovered in early May that attackers were able to install surveillance software on to both iPhones and Android phones by ringing up targets using the app’s phone call function.

The malicious code, developed by the secretive Israeli company NSO Group, could be transmitted even if users did not answer their phones, and the calls often disappeared from call logs, said the spyware dealer, who was recently briefed on the WhatsApp hack.

...

NSO’s flagship product is Pegasus, a program that can turn on a phone’s microphone and camera, trawl through emails and messages and collect location data.

NSO advertises its products to Middle Eastern and Western intelligence agencies, and says Pegasus is intended for governments to fight terrorism and crime.

But mostly to spy on people said governments don't particularly like, of course.

Top10VPN, for example, recently took a closer look at 150 VPN apps being offered in the Android marketplace and found that 90% of them violated consumer privacy in some fashion, either by the inclusion of DNS leaks, a failure to adequately secure and store user data, or by embedding malware:

"Simon Migliano, the head of this research, reports that at over 38 VPN apps tested positive for DNS leaks, exposing private data to hundreds of insecure links. Also, over 27 VPN apps were flagged as potential sources of malware when tested by VirusTotal.

Apart from this, the research also found intrusive permissions in over 99 apps. These permissions included user location, device information, use of the microphone, camera access and more."

"To be honest, the spooks love PGP," Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, told the Usenix Enigma conference in San Francisco on Wednesdy. "It's really chatty and it gives them a lot of metadata and communication records. PGP is the NSA's friend."