This is our home for privacy-related news stories, product reviews, opinion pieces, and other important articles.
Unlike the rest of our website, these articles don't represent a consensus viewpoint of our community. Instead, they present the opinions of trusted authors within our community as-is. You may even find multiple articles on the same topic with competing viewpoints, intended to further privacy discussion.
Leon Seibert / Unsplash
If you, like myself, have been inhabiting the internet for a few decades, you're probably familiar with the old adage IRL: In Real Life.
The acronym was used a lot when the distinction between online life and offline life was much greater than it is now. In today's world, can we really keep referring to our digital life as being somehow disconnected from our "real life"?
Illustration: Em / Privacy Guides | Photo: PicJumbo / Pexels
If you have been looking for a password manager giving you full control over your data, KeePassium is a fantastic option. The application available for iOS and macOS keeps your password database offline by default. KeePassium still offers synchronization and backup options, but allows you to choose which storage provider to trust with your database, and change it whenever you want.
Photo: Flyd / Unsplash
Last week, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman announced in San Francisco that the World project he co-founded, formerly known as Worldcoin, is opening six stores across the United States, allowing users of the project's app to scan their eyeballs.
Simply put, the premise is this: scan your eyeball, get a biometric tag, verify yourself, buy our apps (and cryptocurrency). The scary part is the for-profit company developing the project has now gathered millions in venture capital investment, powerful partners, and is ready to expand and impose its Minority Report style technology everywhere. Welcome to Dystopialand.
Photo: Kyle Glenn / Unsplash
Age verification laws and propositions forcing platforms to restrict content accessed by children and teens have been multiplying in recent years. The problem is, implementing such measures necessarily requires identifying each user accessing this content, one way or another. This is bad news for your privacy.
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides
Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser users should be aware of a flaw with the Security Level slider: Not all protections advertised by the browser are properly engaged until the browser is fully restarted.
Illustration: Em / Privacy Guides | Logo and icons: The Tor Project
You might have heard of Tor in the news a few times, yet never dared to try it yourself. Despite being around for decades, Tor is still a tool too few people know about.
Today, Tor is easy to use for anyone. It helps not only journalists and activists, but anybody who seeks greater privacy online or access to information regardless of location. But what is Tor exactly? How can Tor help you? And why is it such an important tool?
Background Image: Thomas Ensley / Unsplash
Services that require authentication can correlate your activity on that service with your account, and that account is normally linked with payment information that could potentially link back to your real identity. With the Privacy Pass protocol, it doesn't have to be that way.
Photo: Matt Artz / Unsplash
Contrary to what some policymakers seem to believe, whether naively or maliciously, encryption is not a crime. Anyone asserting encryption is a tool for crime is either painfully misinformed or is attempting to manipulate legislators to gain oppressive power over the people.
Photo: Flavio / Unsplash
In the digital age, nothing is more important than convenience and easy access to data. Unfortunately, there has been an alarming trend among technologists to implement End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) in their applications, to the detriment of all the important work being done by countless organizations, including the best and brightest intelligence agencies and big tech companies.
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides | Photo: Micah Lee
If you don't know who Micah Lee is yet, here's why you should: Micah is an information security engineer, a software engineer, a journalist, and an author who has built an impressive career developing software for the public good, and working with some of the most respected digital rights organizations in the United States.