Privacy on Tom Meurs

Data Poisoning: Reclaiming Your Privacy Through Offence

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:43:00 +0100

Here’s how privacy works today. You read the policy. You dismiss the cookie banner. You hunt through three settings menus for the opt-out toggle that someone buried on purpose. All of that to exercise a right that should’ve been the default. And while you’re still on the first paragraph of the terms of service, every click, scroll, hover and the exact timing of your keystrokes has already been harvested, packaged and sold. Somewhere along the way I stopped finding that strange, and that bothers me more than the harvesting does.

Why Privacy Matters More Than Ever

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Your phone logged where you slept before you woke up. You check Gmail, search something on Google, message a friend on WhatsApp, pay for coffee with a card and walk past a dozen cameras before lunch. None of that feels like surveillance. It feels like a normal morning.

It felt the same five years ago, and I want to show you what changed in between. The comfortable version of privacy, “I have nothing to hide”, has quietly stopped being true, and I think most people haven’t noticed. Three things happened at once. On its own each one is manageable. Together they’re what worries me.

Self-Hosting for Everyone: A Vision for Digital Agency

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Most people keep their photos at Google, their mail at Gmail, their documents in whatever cloud came with the phone and their passwords in a browser built by an advertising company. Every byte sits on a server they don’t own, under terms they didn’t read, in a country they didn’t check. Nobody finds that strange anymore, because the alternative looks like a second job.

I want to talk about that alternative, and about why it sits behind a wall most people will never climb.

Why I self-host everything: on sovereignty, agency and control

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:00:00 +0100

For a long time the cloud was just the water I swam in. I provisioned managed Kubernetes, clicked through the console, pasted a Terraform module someone else had written, and shipped. It worked. The bill landed every month, the dashboards stayed green, and I didn’t look underneath. Why would I? I trusted it the way you trust a lift. Press the button, doors open.

Then one afternoon a managed service fell over and I sat there with nothing to debug. No host to SSH into, no log I was allowed to read, nothing underneath it I could open up. The status page said “investigating”. Refreshing a page someone else controlled was the whole of my afternoon.