How Your Phone Maps Your Home, Work and Friends

How Your Phone Maps Your Home, Work and Friends

Your phone does not need to follow you around with a map open. It only needs to notice where it sits still. What does my phone's location really give away? Where your phone rests every night is your home. Where it rests from nine to five is your work. That is your address and your โ€ฆ

Same Encryption Does Not Mean Same Privacy

Same Encryption Does Not Mean Same Privacy

Somebody always says it in the group chat. Signal and WhatsApp use the same encryption. So they must be equally private. It is a fair thing to assume. The answer is not in the messages at all. Are the messages themselves really the same? Both apps scramble your messages end to end. That means only โ€ฆ

What a 50-Person Group Chat Gives Away About You

What a 50-Person Group Chat Gives Away About You

Somebody added you to a group with fifty people in it. You joined for the memes and the forwards. You never thought about what else you were handing over. What does a big group chat expose? Every number in that group is visible to everyone in that group. That includes people you have never met โ€ฆ

Your Child Has a Profile Before They Can Consent

Your Child Has a Profile Before They Can Consent

Your child has never opened an account. They are already in the system anyway. How does a child get profiled so early? It starts with the birth announcement in a family group chat. Then the photos, the name, the birthday, the school. Then the day their own number appears in other people's address books. Every โ€ฆ

Why 'I Have Nothing to Hide' Misses the Point

Why 'I Have Nothing to Hide' Misses the Point

Someone says it in every conversation about privacy. "I have nothing to hide." It sounds perfectly reasonable, and it is the weakest argument in the room. If I'm not doing anything wrong, why does it matter? You still close the door when you change your clothes. Not because changing clothes is a crime. Because some โ€ฆ

A List of Call Times Can Tell Your Whole Story

A List of Call Times Can Tell Your Whole Story

"They can't read my messages, so I'm fine." Here is the problem with that. They do not need to. What is metadata in plain English? Metadata is the record of who you contacted, when, and for how long. Not one word of what you actually said. Just numbers, times and durations, sitting in a tidy โ€ฆ

Five WhatsApp Tricks You Have Probably Never Used

Five WhatsApp Tricks You Have Probably Never Used

You have used WhatsApp for years. Every day, several times a day, without thinking about it. And yet a few of its most useful features sit quietly in plain sight. Here are five worth learning today. Can I send a message to myself? You can, and most people have never tried it. Start a new โ€ฆ

Back Up Your WhatsApp Chats in About Two Minutes

Back Up Your WhatsApp Chats in About Two Minutes

Losing your WhatsApp chats is genuinely awful. Years of conversations, photos and voice notes, gone in a second. A dropped phone, a failed update, a theft outside the station, and that is that. The good news is that setting this up properly takes about two minutes. Where is the backup setting? On both phones, open โ€ฆ

How to Backup WhatsApp Chats

How to Backup WhatsApp Chats

We've all been using WhatsApp for many years now. Some of us have chats that are ten years old and would be heartbreaking to lose. A lost phone, a stolen phone, one failed update, and they are gone. The good news is that WhatsApp will do the work for you, once you set it up. โ€ฆ

How to Clean Up WhatsApp Chats

How to Clean Up WhatsApp Chats

You are in eleven groups, and nine of them are talking right now. Good morning flowers, the same reel forwarded four times, a fifty megabyte wedding video from someone you met once. None of it is your fault, and all of it is sitting on your phone. Let us take the space back. Why is โ€ฆ