By Cody Shultz and Alec Harris — A joint series on privacy also available here: https://augmentedprivacy.medium.com/ According to the U.S. credit bureau Experian, identity theft affects about 1 in 20 Americans each year. According to Javelin’s 2020 Identity Fraud Survey, 13 million consumers in the U.S. were affected by identity…

Big data is not your friend. You though, my crypto owning compatriot, can turn the information sucking tools of the privacy pirates from the data broker industry against themselves. Their methods are so pervasive and so unscrupulous that its actually somewhat easy to manipulate. If you read the first article…

Gold, guns, diamonds, bonds, cash, and Bitcoin. If you have bearer assets, assets where custody equals ownership, then you should also be very interested in personal privacy. Admittedly, I’m kind of a one note band, so I think everyone should be interested in personal privacy. In the case of bearer…

Innovations in Bitcoin: Nakamoto Consensus I’m excited about the rise in Bitcoin price too, but the Bitcoin white paper didn’t mention anything about designing an asset with an impressive Sharpe Ratio. If investment thesis is what attracted you to Bitcoin, that’s fine, and I can relate. But, stick around for…

A cell phone has over 100,000x the processing power of the Apollo Guidance Computer which put a man on the moon. The 5.8in OLED screen flashes with the sum total of human knowledge, and stupidity, no more than a few taps and swipes away. Thanks to my cell phone I…

There are many threats to privacy. Some systemic, some cultural, some are even well intentioned, like when a bank asks you to prove you are you to open a bank account. Seems fair, right? It’s not. The problem is trust. Trust based systems are an existential threat to privacy. The problem is trust. Trust based systems are an existential threat to privacy. Let’s…

Its halving day aka Quantitative Hardening III. Like leap year, it comes once every four years and I’m kind of giddy about it. Much has already been written about the halving and most of it by actual smart people. I have a slightly different take on it though. Since I’m…

Given the wide distribution of WhatsApp and their parent company Facebook’s pathetic record on privacy I thought it might be fun to unpack the WhatsApp privacy policy in layman’s terms. I should caveat that no matter what we find, WhatsApp is not the worst messaging platform out there. It is…

Zoommorons — people who continue to use Zoom in spite of the company’s complete privacy and data protection failures. Not to be confused with Zoomorons who are the people you see at the zoo wearing tie dye panda t-shirts while eating Dippin Dots. …