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.
Photo: Georgy Rudakov / Unsplash
Privacy is a human right that should be granted to everyone, no matter the reason. That being said, it's also important to remember that for millions of people around the world, data privacy is crucial for physical safety. For people in extreme situations, privacy can literally mean life or death.
Illustration: Jonah Aragon / Privacy Guides
There is a growing sentiment that the US shouldn't be relied upon for the technologies that many people and businesses use every day. Lately, the US has been unilaterally cutting off access to critical technologies to European countries, prompting calls for "radical action" to bolster European tech stacks from EU lawmakers.
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.
Illustration: Em / Privacy Guides | Photo: J W / Unsplash
In privacy, we talk a lot about how to protect our own data, but what about our responsibility to protect the data of others?
If you care about privacy rights, you must also care for the data of the people around you. To make privacy work, we need to develop a culture that normalizes caring for everyone's data, not just our own. Privacy cannot solely be a personal responsibility, data privacy is team work.
Illustration: Jordan / Privacy Guides | Photo: Gowtham AGM / Unsplash
Passwords are annoying, vulnerable to attack, and prone to human error. The multitude of issues with passwords has cost millions of dollars and forced terrible band-aid solutions in how we handle signing up for, logging in to, and securing online accounts. I'd like to break down some of these design paradigms that have entrenched themselves in our lives and how passkeys can lead to more secure and private online accounts.
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.