My first one in the wild! Black to play, mate in 5. Happy to have found it in a bullet game ^^

the colon key of my keyboard just died. I take all of my notes and do all of my writing in vim. this is… not ideal

Joined a virtual networking meeting that I wasn't sure would be worth my time, but someone joined the call while feeding a tiny teeny baby so it was definitely worth it.

Time for a ✨ new blog post ✨, highlighting some recent research that shows how vulnerable statistical data releases can be to privacy attacks ➡️ https://desfontain.es/blog/attacks-on-statistics.html 👀 (Spoiler alert: it's probably scarier than you think 😬)

Reading "On Revolution" by Hannah Arendt and feeling called out as a very uncultured French citizen 😶

It has been [0] days since I had to read a "whitepaper" from a privacy tech vendor explaining how their novel anonymization method provides strong privacy protection while preserving all the utility of the original data, even if you don't know in advance what you're going to do with it 🫠

Every single statement here is wrong, and even more amazingly, inconsistent with all previous statements. Truly impressive technology you've got there.

A nuanced take on the discussion sparked by @codinghorror on cookie notices. Did the EU cookie law have reasonable intentions, and is the current state a result of shitty practices and malicious compliance from most of the tech industry? Yes. Is it fair to blame a regulator if the combined […]

Sharing some happiness: today I paid myself a salary for the first time since I went independent =)

Hello here is a ✨ new blog post ✨ about lessons that privacy engineers have learned the hard way: https://desfontain.es/blog/five-hard-lessons.html 👀 (Also my first insert for my consultancy! Look mom, I'm doing marketing! 🤣) Feedback is welcome as always! 💝

Much-needed new blog post by @leevinsel about how to study and criticize new technological phenomena, like generative AI. You have to actually *listen* to people who are not like you if you want to learn anything! https://peoples-things.ghost.io/why-do-people-use-technologies-2/

Very nice blog post about the state of Web fingerprinting: https://pitg.network/news/2025/08/15/browser-fingerprinting.html

Just updated my DP deployment list, with half a dozen lesser-known data releases from the U.S. Census: https://desfontain.es/blog/real-world-differential-privacy.html ✨

Well that's a ridiculously impressive side project: https://blog.wilsonl.in/search-engine/ Also the first thing in a long time that has LLMs in it and makes me go "huh this is neat, I kind of want to use that".

Me: I should really focus on this eng design I've been promising to do on this open-source project Also me: Oooooh the Swiss National Bank is running a survey on the next iteration of our bank notes 👀 https://www.neuebanknotenserie.ch/?lang=en

I thought filling U.S. tax forms would be the most confusing administrative thing I'd have to go through to do business with large companies, but clearly I had underestimated the mandatory onboarding to the SAP Business Network 🙃

I really need to find a better solution for cross-posting stuff on Mastodon & Bluesky. @bsky.brid.gy is neat but differing character limits are a pain, and it's a bummer to not be able to see notifications nor logged-in only posts on Bluesky 😕

The German data protection authority asked for my input about privacy in AI models. I answered their questions here ️➡️ http://desfontain.es/blog/bfdi-consultation-ai.html 🌈 I know you can have strong opinions about this topic, so I look forward to hearing your feedback! 💖

Today in "Switzerland is so beautiful it's ridiculous sometimes"

It's very funny to me that I'm likely included in Google's claim that they have "350M daily active users of Gemini", just because every morning I tell my phone "set a timer for 3 minutes" to prepare my tea, and apparently Gemini does this now instead of the old "Google Assistant" 🙃

Some ✨ personal news ✨: I'm starting my independent consultancy, focused on helping organizations do good things with privacy-enhancing technology 🎉 It's called Hiding Nemo, and you can read all about it on our website ➡️ https://hiding-nemo.com 🪸

I enjoyed Ed Zitron's last piece, and especially the last part about sincerity in media: https://www.wheresyoured.at/sic/

Ils ont intérêt à avoir des bons gâteaux (cc @Owi )

Does GitHub has some equivalent of GitLab's To-Do list? As in, only shows you notifications relevant to *you* — review requests, CI failures, issues newly assigned to you, etc. — and automatically removes them once the underlying thing is resolved (e.g. issue is fixed, review is sent)?

ubs: so you want to open an account with us. which language should we use to communicate with you? me: english or french is fine ubs: ok but which language though. me: english then. english is good. ubs: got it! here is a bunch of administrative documents, all written in german

Great piece by @a3nm about paying for stuff using cash. Co-signed! https://a3nm.net/blog/defense_of_cash.html

friend came over with her two main coons. look at this ridiculous amount of fluffiness

Officially submitted my application to become a Swiss citizen! 🇨🇭 (And now, we wait 👀)

New at wreckage/salvage: Vernacular institutions, part one. New project. Old projects. Lots of projects. Bruegel? Bruegel. The struggle with email this month has been so absurd and I hope this makes it to your inboxes if you've signed up. https://www.wrecka.ge/the-work-at-hand/

Pour one out for the dozens of brilliant minds, world-class experts in privacy-enhancing tech, who spent years working on Google's "privacy sandbox" instead of other impactful privacy efforts, only to find themselves stuck between irreconcilable political requirements.

New blog post! Win some 🍫🇨🇭 fancy Swiss chocolate 🇨🇭🍫 by beating my best-performing strategy in this differentially private Wordle variant ➡️ https://desfontain.es/blog/wordpl.html ✨ Throw your hat in the ring ➡️ https://github.com/TedTed/wordpl/ 🤠

😬

✨ New blog post ✨ about the quest to design good empirical privacy metrics for synthetic data: https://desfontain.es/blog/better-empirical-privacy-metrics.html 🌈 tl;dr: it's hard! it's very hard! if someone tells you they have a definitive solution, you probably shouldn't trust them!

Just heard of https://cal.com, an open-source alternative to Calendly, which includes a LOT more in the free plan. They're also very open (https://cal.com/blog/open-startup) and have neat contingency plans if things go south (https://cal.com/blog/longevity). Pretty inspiring!

current status: writing a professional message in French and carefully wording things so that I don't have to figure out whether to use "tu" or "vous" because I rarely work in French and so am completely unaware of social conventions

So my employer just got acquired by LinkedIn. I have chosen the "I would rather not" option, so you can expect some ✨ career update ✨ from me in the next few weeks 🌈 (Barely) more info: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/desfontaines_whats-next-for-us-and-tumult-labs-activity-7312520884722847744-bErW 👀

ok time to review this paper. oh, I need to understand X before the paper makes sense. time to read another paper that introduces X oh, I need to understand Y also. time to read another paper that introduces Y oh, I need to understand Z also. time to

Strongly recommend the Mille et Une Orchidées exhibition in Paris. It felt like @jerry's personal paradise 🤩

I wrote a ✨ new blog post ✨ about privacy in AI: five things that privacy experts know about AI, but that might not be so obvious outside our community 😶‍🌫️ Link here ️➡️ https://desfontain.es/blog/privacy-in-ai.html 🌈

J'ai complété la trilogie @Owi pour Noël 🤩

Someone just sent me an email asking me questions and ended it with "and here are a few pics of my cats for compensation". Such a cheap way to push me to prioritize their request over other people's. Urgh. I'd be offended if only I weren't busy fawning at their cats and answering their email […]

I got to call LLMs and synthetic data "money laundering for private data" in front of a bunch of regulators at a technologist roundtable today, so that was neat.

Galaxus (big Swiss online shop) just sent me *one point four kilograms of chocolates* to apologize for a package being damaged in transit and needing re-order. Impressed by their commitment both to customer service and to Swissness 🤣

Totally in awe of @sereeena's ability to make talks fun and engaging — go watch her recent one about getting rid of the lock icon for HTTPS websites in Chrome 💖 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUAxmOFl78w

This piece about the UK liver transplant matching algorithm, by @randomwalker and @sayashk, is fantastic. Excellent example that algorithms that make real-world decisions aren't inherently problematic, but they can certainly be horrifyingly bad if not designed and tested carefully […]