Good Monday, friends of privacy!

This week, we’re looking at private communication on Ethereum, encrypted email, AI agents gaining access to personal files, advertising inside ChatGPT, government pressure on censorship-resistant messaging and a major data breach affecting 8.8 million people in Denmark.

And as Tool of the Week, take a look at Mother of All VPNs — a free, open-source and self-hosted stack that combines multiple protocols to circumvent censorship in hostile network environments.

Tool of the week

• Check out Mother of all VPNs

Insights

• Bitchat disappears from Indian app stores following a government order
• Zipcoin shares its first-week results and roadmap for private publishing and payments on Ethereum
• Tuta brings encrypted email to Nextcloud through a new free integration
• Apple tightens full-disk access permissions to limit potential abuse by AI agents
• OpenAI begins displaying visual advertisements while ChatGPT generates images

Knowledge

• Denmark data breach exposes names, addresses and identification numbers of 8.8 million people
• New analysis challenges the claim that large language models genuinely reason
• US prosecutors secretly searched a journalist’s accounts without disclosing federal press protections
• Whistleblower who raised concerns about Howard Lutnick’s alleged Epstein links dies
• ZCash co-founder Zooko introduces HashSmash, an open project using AI to accelerate cryptographic research

Inspiration: Going On(Line) an offering of media from the web

• Get the book The Politics of Privacy: Autonomy and Power in the Digital Age
• 8 more privacy tools experts actually use by Proton
• Check the State of Decentralised Privacy report
• The Digital Independence They Don't Want You To Have by Naomi Brockwell
• Web3 Privacy Now courses in our Academy

Inspiration: Going Off(Line) an offering of IRL events

(new/changes in bold)

• Oct 9–11 - Interfug 2026 - Chemnitz, Germany
• Oct 15 - DC Privacy Summit 2026 - Washington, USA
• Oct 27 - Web3Privacy Now x MozFest Meetup - Barcelona, Spain
• Oct 28–30 - MozFest — Mozilla Festival - Barcelona, Spain
• Nov 2 - Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress #3 - Mumbai, India
• Nov 3–6 - Devcon 8 - Mumbai, India
• Dec 27–30 - 40C3 — 40th Chaos Communication Congress - Hamburg, Germany