For years, Her Majesty's Government has been pursuing a plan to use the Great Firewall of Britain to block all porn sites unless they collect and retain personally identifying information on every porn user attesting to their age, thus fashioning the world's largest kompromat database, which -- thanks to the use of credit-cards as part of the verification scheme -- could be conveniently sorted by its members' net worth by would-be blackmailers. Read the rest

One of the wonderful and terrible things about the internet is how it allows people seeking others with hard-to-find traits to find them: advertisers can find people thinking about buying a refrigerator; people who think they might be trans can find others in the same boat and make common cause; people with the same rare disease can form support groups, and Nazis can find sociopaths to march through the streets of Charlottesville carrying tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us." Read the rest

If you only look at porn with your browser in incognito mode, your browser will not record your porn-viewing history; but the porn sites themselves overwhelmingly embed tracking scripts from Google and Facebook in every page: 93% of 22,484 porn sites analyzed in a New Media & Society paper had some kind of third-party tracker, with Google in the lead, but also including trackers from some of the worst privacy offenders in Silicon Valley, like Oracle. Read the rest

Since the days of David Cameron, the UK has been pressing ahead on a plan to force every British person who wants to see pornography to register as an adult through a private-public partnership (administered by a Canadian porn monopolist that pretends to be a Luxembourg company) before they could see sexy times on the internet. Read the rest

Tinder has been added to the Russian "Register of Information Dissemination Organizations," a regulatory designation that requires companies to turn over user data on request, without a warrant, to Russian law-enforcement and state agencies (America has a similar regime with a few check-and-balance figleafs). Read the rest

In January 2018, Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd -- already an $93 million investor in Grindr -- bought out the company for a further $152m. Despite assurances to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States that the company would not access Americans' sensitive data via its offices in China, the acquisition led to a rapid drawdown of its US engineering staff through attrition and layoffs, and an increased emphasis on development and data-processing in Kunlun's Beijing office. Read the rest

Back when David Cameron was Prime Minister, he took advice from Patrick Rock (later revealed to be a a trafficker in images depicting the abuse of children) on how to stop children from seeing internet pornography. Read the rest

Singhealth, a Singaporean public health service, suffered the worst breach in Singaporean history, losing control of 1.5 million peoples' data; included in the breach was prescription data on 160,000 people, including Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. Read the rest