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.
Illustration: Em / Privacy Guides | Photo: Edward Eyer / Pexels
On February 7th this year, Joseph Menn reported from the Washington Post that officials in the United Kingdom had contacted Apple to demand the company allows them to access data from any iCloud user worldwide. This included users who had activated Apple's Advanced Data Protection, effectively requesting Apple break its strong end-to-end encrypted feature.
Photo: Markus Spiske / Pexels
In my work as a privacy advocate, I regularly encounter two types of discourse that I find very damaging to privacy as a whole. The first one is the idea that privacy is dead, implying it's not worth putting any effort to protect personal data anymore. This is the abdication mindset. This attitude is the one that scares me the most because without giving it a fight then of course the battle is lost in advance. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, privacy is dead if you let it die.
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: Jair Lázaro / Unsplash
Biometrics are a convenient and secure way to authenticate our devices. Many of us use and trust the biometrics of our devices without much thought, but are they really secure? With so many options, which ones are the best?
Illustration: Jordan Warne / Privacy Guides | Photo: Christin Hume / Unsplash
If you have been thinking about migrating to a privacy-focused replacement to Google Docs, now is the time. Google products, as convenient and popular as they might be, are atrocious for data privacy (not to mention ethics).
Photo: ev / Unsplash
Data privacy is a vast subject that encompasses so much. Some might think it is a niche focus interesting only a few. But in reality, it is a wide-ranging field influenced by intricate relationships between politics, law, technology, and much more. Further, it affects everyone in one way or another, whether they care about it or not.
EasyOptOuts.com is a $19.99/year people-search site removal service which will search a number of different data broker sites and automatically submit opt-out requests on your behalf. They will perform the first search and removal process immediately, and then re-run the process every 4 months in case your data shows up on new sites over time.
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.
At Privacy Guides, we are always looking for ways to be more effective at our mission of promoting privacy and security for everyone. To help us grow, reach a broader audience, and provide more high quality educational resources, we are thrilled to announce the hiring of three talented individuals to our team! Each of them brings a strong passion to their respective roles, and we are excited about working with them.
The concept of a progressive web app is enticing: an application using web technologies that is inherently cross-platform (since it runs in a browser) and acts like a native app, even functioning offline. Support for PWAs in traditionally locked-down platforms like iOS means that PWAs can give users the freedom to install apps without having to go through Apple’s App Store. But there are problems with web content that PWAs haven't solved.
Multi-Party Relays (MPRs) are a technology that aims to provide better privacy protections than VPNs do. MPRs showed a lot of promise when they first emerged, but years later there are fewer options than ever. What happened?
We are thrilled to announce the opening of three new job positions aimed at enhancing our mission of promoting personal privacy and informed digital choices. As a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering individuals with the knowledge and tools they need to navigate the internet in a private manner, we are excited to expand our team with talented individuals who share our vision. They will play a key role in helping us reach new audiences to spread our message in multiple formats, and make sure we are the authoritative source for trustworthy and unbiased consumer privacy resources on the internet.
Search the App Store for "Tor Browser" and you'll be flooded with a variety of ways to connect to the Tor network from your iPhone. However, there's only one solution officially endorsed by the Tor Project themselves: Onion Browser.
The Privacy Guides community is one of the best privacy-related communities on the internet, and I think we have generally done a good job at promoting a positive and respectful environment where people can learn and grow.
Unfortunately, as a public forum we are not immune to the small minority of individuals who feel empowered to spread anger, hostility, and divisiveness by their anonymity and general lack of consequences on the internet.
Proton, the Swiss creators of privacy-focused products like Proton Mail and Proton VPN, recently released the latest product in their ever-growing lineup: Proton Wallet. Announced at the end of July 2024, it promotes itself as "an easy-to-use, self-custodial" Bitcoin wallet that will ostensibly make financial freedom more attainable for everyone.
We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone for Privacy Guides: the addition of our first paid staff member, Jonah Aragon. This achievement is a testament to the unwavering support and generous donations from our incredible community. Another major donation came from Power Up Privacy, a privacy advocacy group that funds privacy-related research and development, which helped us achieve this goal earlier than expected!
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides
In February, the OpenCollective Foundation (OCF)—our fiscal host of 4 years—emailed us to announce that they would be shutting down, and they would no longer be able to collect donations on our behalf (or for any of the hundreds of projects they provided fiscal hosting services to). We immediately began to consider multiple options for the future of this project, including forming our own non-profit or finding another fiscal host.
Image: Unsplash
"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions.