Good Monday, friends of privacy!

A new week has started, and as we prepare for our Web3Privacy Now x MozFest meetup in Spain, it’s time to look back at what happened last week. The news features E2E encryption for Brave AI chats, resistance to surveillance, digital identity concerns, new perspectives on digital dissent and developments in ZK verification and Web3 payments.

Our Tool of the Week is Freedom Tool—an open-source platform for anonymous, verifiable voting powered by zero-knowledge proofs.

Tool of the Week

• Freedom Tool - an enabler of private and verifiable voting with zero-knowledge proofs

Insights

• Brave brings end-to-end encryption to conversations with its Leo AI assistant
• Signal refuses to comply with Canada’s proposed metadata-surveillance requirements
• Germany advances its EU Digital Identity Wallet despite concerns over biometrics and privacy safeguards
• zkVerify explains how zero-knowledge proof verification works
• Polygon enters the payments market through its acquisition of Coinme

Knowledge

• Court records reveal what Telegram sharing user data with US authorities looks like
• Congress struggles to regulate AI while lacking sufficient technical expertise
• SFLC examines the growing suppression of digital dissent in India
• The “textpocalypse” explores a world increasingly filled with machine-generated language
• Researchers warn that protest footage could fuel the next wave of surveillance and repression

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
• 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 21 - ETHVenice 2026 - Venice, Italy
• Oct 23–25 - Encode London Hackathon - London, United Kingdom
• Oct 24–25 - ETH Shenzhen 2026 - Shenzhen, China
• 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
• Nov 5–7 - ETHGlobal Mumbai - Mumbai, India
• Nov 12–14 - Zero Day Hackathon - New York City, United States
• Nov 16–19 - 48th Global Privacy Assembly Annual Conference - Brussels, Belgium
• Dec 2 - Data Protection & Privacy Summit 2026 - Mumbai, India
• Dec 27–30 - 40C3 — 40th Chaos Communication Congress - Hamburg, Germany