Same Day, Years Apart
One event a day from the history of privacy, anonymity networks and censorship, with a new look back added on the same date every year.
After each day's stories, we look back at something that happened on the same date in an earlier year and follow it to where you stand today. On 29 September 2023, for example, Cloudflare let websites encrypt the site name that a connection reveals, and that entry covers whether your browser uses it now and where it has been blocked.
Every year on the same date, we add a new paragraph to the page and keep the earlier ones as they were, each marked with the year it was written. Over time, a page shows how far an event sits from the present and how our own reading of it changed. We check facts with what we can find at the time of writing, put anything we learn later into the next year's paragraph, and mark corrections with a date when we get something wrong.
October
- 1 October Real-name verification for comments in China
- 2 October Data that can still identify you after names are removed
- 3 October Passwords and security questions in old accounts
- 4 October Permission usage history on your phone
- 5 October Wiretap capability built into phone networks
- 6 October How long your phone records are kept
- 7 October Import rules for the encryption in your phone
- 8 October Hong Kong's anti-doxxing removal powers
- 9 October Apps removed from the App Store at government request
- 10 October Wikipedia access in mainland China
- 11 October End-to-end encryption and law enforcement access in messaging apps
- 12 October BBC Chinese access in mainland China
- 13 October Safari fraudulent website warning and Tencent Safe Browsing
- 14 October End-to-end encryption in Zoom meetings
- 15 October Reporting channel for personal data breaches
- 16 October Patching of Wi-Fi encryption weaknesses
- 17 October Apps blocked in India and the law behind them
- 18 October Search terms on public Wi-Fi
- 19 October IP addresses logged by websites as personal data
- 20 October Certificate warnings on sign-in pages
- 21 October Default passwords on home security cameras