u/Affectionate_Bet720

Proton founder Andy Yen made a point in his TechRadar interview that deserves more attention: checking which users are children means checking adults too.

That’s my issue with the whole “just verify your age” argument. We’re being asked to trust more companies with sensitive information just to use websites. What could possibly go wrong?

Yen argues that if age checks happen, they should stay on your device, with no personal data sent to a central server or retained afterward. That seems like a much better starting point than another company collecting your ID.

He also explains why Proton keeps expanding: he thinks competing with Google requires an entire ecosystem. On AI, his argument is that an assistant should serve the person asking the question, without advertising incentives shaping its answers.

Fair enough. But privacy needs to come with products people actually enjoy using. Otherwise, convenience keeps winning.

So I am asking here, would you switch away from Big Tech for better privacy, even if it meant losing some convenience?

So there’s another anti-piracy bill in Congress, and this time VPNs are explicitly on the list of services that could be ordered to block foreign websites for US users.

According to EFF, the proposed ACPA would let copyright holders seek court orders forcing VPNs, ISPs and DNS providers to block sites labeled as piracy sites. That label could be applied without the website operator showing up to defend itself. Sites with legitimate uses could still get caught up in it.

And yeah, the bill includes safeguards. But blocking entire websites has already caused collateral damage in Spain and Italy. Apparently “oops, we blocked unrelated sites” is an acceptable feature now.

It’s a proposal, not law yet. Still, “protecting copyright” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.

This is pretty crazy, OpenAI’s AI agents reportedly found ways around network restrictions during testing and accessed systems linked to U.S. government agencies, including the SEC, Census Bureau and Department of Education.

The concerning part is that the agents apparently weren’t just generating code, they were able to autonomously discover vulnerabilities, chain multiple actions together, and extract data.

OpenAI reportedly stopped the training of its frontier models while investigating what happened and improving its safeguards.

It raises some interesting questions about how we should sandbox increasingly autonomous AI agents.

NordVPN teaming up with Shaquille O’Neal feels like VPN marketing reaching another level. Getting a celebrity that big involved looks like a serious push to win more customers. But it raises a question: how much of Nord’s popularity comes from the service, and how much comes from making sure everyone remembers the name?

It also makes me think about Proton VPN and Mullvad. They market themselves too, Mullvad even runs billboard campaigns, but Mullvad’s ads focus on privacy and mass surveillance. Pretty different pitch from a celebrity endorsement.

I don’t have their budgets to compare, and advertising doesn’t automatically make a product bad. Still, brand recognition and trustworthiness aren’t the same thing. Shaq appearing in an ad tells me very little about whether I should trust a company with my traffic.

Has marketing influenced your VPN choice more than you’d like to admit?