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.
Silicon Valley could well be built on the principle of scrapping principles. Now Elon Musk, perhaps the ultimate tech bro, is shredding another well-regarded convention with an original business strategy.
Yes, you read the title correctly: we have merch now. Privacy Guides has partnered with HELLOTUX to create what we think are the finest garments in the land.
Privacy advocates have been calling for the United States to adopt strong consumer privacy protection laws along the lines of the EU's GDPR for a long time now, but the proposed Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act isn't the answer we're looking for.
It's finally here. After countless requests, Privacy Guides now has translations.
People have always asked us for translations to other languages because our team and community produces high quality, reliable, honest, and researched content. Our previous site never had a system for this. All translations were done manually, and translators would quickly lose interest. Translated sites would be outdated and lay unmaintained on domains that we didn't own. Privacy Guides now has a proper system.
EDIT: This change has been temporarily rolled back after discussions that took place in the Signal community. It will likely be the way things work in the future, but it seems that the old behavior is now back in place for the time being.
Signal has changed how it handles registration. This primarily affects people who are using a number for Signal that they don't have exclusive access to.
macOS Ventura was released this week, and the Apple users among us may be interested in the improvements it brings to your personal privacy and security. We always recommend running the most up-to-date version of your operating system available. Updates add privacy and security improvements all the time—and macOS Ventura is no exception.
There are a number of privacy and security-related settings you should consider changing in the Settings app on iOS.
People looking to use Signal Proxies to bypass censorship programs should be aware of a number of issues with Signal’s current proxy implementation. Currently, Signal does not tunnel all application traffic through the specified proxy, which means authorities could still track people using Signal.
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.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States, the US government enacted laws that weakened citizen privacy in the name of national emergency. This sent up many red flags for human rights and privacy advocates.
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.
GrapheneOS and CalyxOS are often compared as similar options for people looking for an alternative Android OS for their Pixel devices. Below are some of the reasons why we recommend GrapheneOS over CalyxOS.
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.