4 October
What happened on this date in privacy, anonymity networks and censorship. Every year on the same date we add a new look back and keep the earlier ones as they were.
2026
Permission usage history on your phone
On an Android phone, you can open the Privacy Dashboard to see which apps used the microphone, camera and location in the past 24 hours or 7 days. On 4 October 2021, Google released Android 12 to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), and its developer blog said the new dashboard gives users better visibility into when apps access the microphone, camera and location. Two years later to the day, Google added a section to the location permission dialog in Android 14, shown when an app's developer has declared that the app shares location data with third parties. Both cover only what apps do, not tracking code on websites, which is what our story the same day is about (see Tracking pixels that sent doctors' appointments to social platforms). To see which apps have used these permissions recently, open Settings, tap Security & privacy or Privacy, and then tap Privacy dashboard.
Also on this day
- The US president authorised the Department of Defense, including the NSA, to collect foreign intelligence by electronic surveillance to detect and prevent terrorist acts within the United States, an authorisation the Director of National Intelligence declassified only in 2013. Source: US Department of Justice
- Responding to a Guardian report on US and UK intelligence agencies targeting Tor, the Tor Project said the methods described relied on a browser exploit, with no sign that the Tor protocol itself had been broken. Source: The Tor Project