Privacy, Anonymity, and Paranoia
Learning outcomes:
- Identify what your browser, smartphone, search engine, and social media know about you
- Explain how tracking methods such as cookies, browser fingerprinting, and app permissions work
- Evaluate your own privacy settings, and choose changes that protect your information
- Create a threat model for a situation, and prioritize the risks
Would you like to download my PowerPoint to follow along?
- What does your browser know?
- Your IP address
- Tracking cookies
- Browser fingerprinting
- Network monitoring
- See for yourself: What every browser knows about you
- What does your smartphone know?
- App permissions
- Sensors and location
- Supercookies
- Sound and video
- Wi-Fi broadcasting
- Terms of service and EULAs
- What does Google know?
- Search history
- Email contents
- Purchases
- Associations
- How to opt out of Google's AI training
- What does social media know?
- If you have the app, anything you gave it permission for
- What you interact with
- What you look like
- Knowledge based questions, and your answers
- How to opt out of social media platforms using your posts for AI
- What does the AI in everything know?
- Meta: since December 16, 2025, chats with Meta AI are used to target ads, with no opt-out in the US (TechCrunch)
- LinkedIn: uses member data to train AI by default, so you have to opt out (TechCrunch)
- Google: a 2026 settings change keeps more of your uploaded images, audio, and video to improve its AI (TechCrunch)
- Microsoft Recall: screenshots your screen every few seconds. After privacy experts raised alarms, Microsoft made it opt-in, and apps like Signal now block it (CNN)
- Hidden or confusing opt-outs are a dark pattern, a design meant to push you into a choice
- What your "likes" say about you
- Protecting yourself
- EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense
- Privacy Guides, recommendations for privacy tools
Suggested Activities and Discussion Topics:
- Activity: visit webkay and look at what your browser shares. What surprised you?
- Activity: check the app permissions on your phone, and turn off at least one you don't need.
- Discussion: how much privacy are you willing to give up for convenience?
- Activity: find the AI training setting on one account you use, such as LinkedIn or Google, and turn it off. Was it easy to find?
- Follow the instructions on this PDF (accessible HTML version)
- Sample threat models, for scenarios that aren't in the lab. Don't copy them.
- Protecting a streamer's identity: PDF (accessible HTML version)
- Trigger warning: domestic abuse and stalking. Staying safe when leaving a controlling partner: PDF (accessible HTML version)
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