The DigiSafe Newsletter is here! Read on to learn about how all of our car travels can be tracked, a word of caution about browser extensions, and a super easy tool to use AI without compromising your privacy!
đź“° In the news
License plate tracking unleashed
In Texas, an officer in a sheriff's office searched a database of 83,000 automated license-plate readers across the United States to locate a woman who was seeking an abortion. Automated license-plate readers are surveillance cameras that record the license plate of every car that drives by. They are locating in mall parking lots, on highways, and in cities, and can reveal where and when a car was located.
In just a few clicks, the Texas officer was able to know if the woman's car had been spotted not just in Texas, but anywhere in the United States. The Sheriff claims that they performed the search to check on the woman's safety, but we should take this with a pinch of salt—especially coming from a state where abortion is illegal and when other states have used digital surveillance to imprison women who seek abortions.
Beyond this specific woman's case and the frightening implications for women's bodily autonomy, this story shows that privacy no longer exists when we travel by car in the United States—and places outside the U.S. may not be far behind.
This is a type of surveillance that is particularly difficult to escape, especially for people who are dependent on their car because robust public transit isn't available where they live. Without an easy solution to protect ourselves, the main takeaway here is to remember that in today's world, driving a car is in itself enough to reveal your whereabouts.
And if protecting your location and movement is important to you—because you are attending a protest, seeking an abortion, or simply because you don't want your government to track your every movement—you can ride in a friend's car, use public transit as often as possible, or call a good'ol taxi—yes they still exist!
DigiSafe
đź’Ş One quick privacy win
Think twice before adding browser extensions
Browser extensions (sometimes called 'add-ons') are great ways to save time on tasks you perform very often in your internet browser: translate a page, block ads, or fill in your passwords, etc.
The name "extension" make it sound benign, but an extension is basically just an app—one that runs from inside your browser. And while we often exercise caution when installing apps on our phones and computers (if you don't, you should!), we don't think very much before installing a browser extension.
But we should: we often don't know who develops these extensions, and browsers have little safeguard to make sure those extensions are safe. And indeed, many browser extensions collect sensitive personal data without our consent.
The best way to protect ourselves against malicious extensions, then, is simply to minimize the number of extensions we use and only use extensions from reputable companies or organizations. Always check who develops the extension you're thinking of installing, and if you don't recognize or trust the name of the company or organization, don't install it!
🛠️ One tool we like
AI chatbot without compromising your privacy
While AI chatbots are still quite inaccurate and riddled with ethical concerns, many of us still rely on them daily to summarize text, help us draft documents, or perform other menial tasks.
But almost all AI chatbots—from ChatGPT to Gemeni or Copilot—save everything you ask, including personal or sensitive information you include in your questions. And like with regular search engines, the questions we ask can reveal a whole lot about our lives: who we are, what we're interested in, what kind of activities we engage in, and more.
This is why we love duck.ai is so useful: in line with Duckduckgo privacy-preserving search engine, duck.ai lets us use AI chatbots to do everything we expect from them, but without collecting any information about us!
Try it out, it's incredibly easy to use!
We Want to Hear From You!
If you found this newsletter helpful, please forward it to people in your life who could use a little privacy boost. And let us know what you think simply by replying to this email – we read every reply!
