I noticed something weird about a year ago that I couldn’t quite explain at first. I’d been watching this obscure cooking show on my laptop, nothing I’d searched for anywhere, just something a friend put on when she was over, and two days later my Samsung TV’s home screen was suggesting three different cooking shows […]

I found out I was being tracked in a way I didn’t understand during a conversation with someone who worked in digital advertising. We were talking about targeting how ads find specific people across different websites and I made some comment about how I always used incognito mode when I didn’t want to be tracked.

I actually clicked a phishing link once, fully, all the way through to a fake login page, and typed in my actual email password before something finally made me pause, hand hovering over the submit button, staring at the page for a second too long and just feeling like something was off in a way

I needed a simple video converter a while back, nothing fancy, just something to change a file format for a project, and instead of going straight to the actual developer’s site, I did what I suspect a huge number of people do without thinking twice  typed the software name into Google and clicked the first

I installed a PDF to Word converter extension a couple years ago, purely because it had a decent looking icon and promised to save me from constantly uploading files to random online converters, and I clicked through the permissions request without actually reading it, the way I suspect most people do with basically every install

I logged into my router’s admin panel for the first time in genuinely years a few months back, mostly out of idle curiosity after reading something about home network security, and the username and password were still the factory defaults printed on the little sticker on the bottom of the router. Admin and admin, or

I went digging through my browser’s permission settings a while back purely out of boredom, honestly, one of those late night “let me see what’s actually in here” moments, and I was genuinely taken aback by how many random sites had location access, camera access, notification permissions, all sitting there quietly enabled from years ago,

  A few years ago, before I got properly paranoid about this stuff, I nearly typed my card details into a fake shoe store website. I say nearly because I got about halfway through the checkout form, paused for reasons I genuinely can’t fully explain even now, closed the tab, and Googled the site name

I want to open with something that genuinely humbled me a bit, because I think it’s the most honest way into this topic. I’d spent a solid chunk of time getting really comfortable with browser-level fingerprinting  canvas, audio, fonts, User-Agent strings, all of it  and I walked into a scraping project feeling pretty confident I’d

I do freelance design work on the side, nothing huge, mostly small branding projects, and because of that my laptop has this genuinely absurd pile of fonts installed on it  half of Adobe Creative Cloud’s font library, a handful of Urdu and Arabic script fonts I picked up for a client project a couple years