Illustration: Em / Privacy Guides | Photo: Lilartsy / Unsplash
They all claim "Your privacy is important to us." How can we know if that's true? With privacy washing being normalized by big tech and startups alike, it becomes increasingly difficult to evaluate who we can trust with our personal data. Fortunately, there are red (and green) flags we can look for to help us.
Montage: Em / Privacy Guides | Illustration: @dopatwo@mastodon.social (1)
Increasingly, more and more people have joined Mastodon in recent years. The advantages provided by a decentralized network and using open-source software maintained by a nonprofit organization are undeniable. Mastodon offers much more robust protections for your privacy than commercial social media platforms do. This tutorial will show you how to make the most of it.
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides
In this guide, we will walk you through setting up a very powerful Monero server on TrueNAS. By completing these steps, you will be able to connect to your own self-hosted Monero node with the official Monero wallet and Cake Wallet, and you will be able to connect to your own self-hosted Monero LWS server with Edge Wallet and MyMonero.
Illustration: Privacy Guides | Graphics: Yubico | Logo: KeePassXC
If you are looking for a good remote password manager you can use from anywhere, there are plenty of excellent options to choose from. However, if you prefer to only store your passwords locally, KeePassXC is what you need. In this tutorial, we will set up KeePassXC to work with YubiKey as an additional factor to secure your local-only password database.
Photo: Yubico
If you are not familiar with it already, a YubiKey is a physical security key produced by Yubico that can be used for various authentication and security purposes. One common usage is to use it as a second factor of authentication for a service or product. This tutorial explains how to reset a YubiKey to factory defaults and create a near copy of it for backup purposes.
Photo: Dimmis Vart / Unsplash
Your browsing data — such as cache, cookies, and browsing history — can accumulate over time, potentially damaging your privacy. Whether you trying to free up storage, limit tracking, or protect yourself from digital forensics, clearing browsing data is an important first step on your privacy journey. In this guide, we will explain how to clear your browsing data on five popular web browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Brave, and Edge.
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides | Photo: Aleksander Dumała / Pexels
There is a growing number of people who no longer feel safe in their own home or country. Whatever the reason, many people might not feel safe to browse certain topics online. With all the information getting collected for each internet search, it is difficult to access sometime vital information without leaving a trace. These digital footprints might not threaten your personal safety if you are living with a supportive family, and in a democratic and free country. However, there are situations where someone might be put in great danger simply for looking at a website.
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides | Photo: Koshu Kunii / Unsplash
For most protesters, activists, and journalists, your smartphone is an essential tool you depend on for organizing with your peers, accessing and distributing information, and helping others. It also represents a great risk, as a tool that is easily appropriated by authorities for targeted and mass surveillance.
There are a number of privacy and security-related settings you should consider changing in the Settings app on iOS.
Signal is a widely regarded instant messaging service that is not only easy to use but is also private and secure. Signal's strong end-to-end encryption implementation and metadata protections provide a level of assurance that only you and your intended recipients are able to read communications.
Erasing data from your computer may seem like a simple task, but if you want to make sure the data is truly unrecoverable, there are some things you should consider.
Some sandboxing solutions for desktop Linux distributions do exist, however they are not as strict as those found in macOS or ChromeOS. Applications installed from the package manager (dnf, apt, etc.) typically have no sandboxing or confinement whatsoever. Below are a few projects that aim to solve this problem:
There are a number of procedures you can follow to make your Linux desktop system more secure, some more advanced than others. We cover some general techniques here.
When sharing files, it's important to remove associated metadata. Image files commonly include Exif data, and sometimes photos even include GPS coordinates within its metadata.