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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.