Category: Privacy & Security

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
– Edward Snowden, 2015

The Best Online Privacy Guides (updated July 2022)

The Best Online Privacy Guides (updated July 2022)

This is a collection of the best, most reputable and generally most acknowledged online privacy guides on the web. The list is updated frequently.

Links are sorted in alphabetical order to avoid any biases, and each of them contains a short snippet quoted from the respective sites. I have not and will not add privacy guides that are created by VPN “review” sites or other such entities that create content just to spam it with affiliate links.

I dare to say that these guides together cover all the bases when it comes to the best privacy practices, OPSEC, and basic online anonymity – even for the advanced users. However, if you think I’m missing a guide, please leave a comment below and I’ll happily review and possibly add it to the list, thank you.

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Why Quitting the Big Five is Bad Privacy Advice

Why Quitting the Big Five is Bad Privacy Advice

The big five – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google & Microsoft – have got a stranglehold of our digital life. Not just our digital identities, but almost all of our web experiences are reliant or connected to the technologies of these five companies.

Recently, Daniel Oberhaus from Motherboard and then Kashmir Hill from Gizmodo both experimented by completely “quitting” the Big Five, for four and six weeks respectively. Both of their stories are very insightful and definitely recommended reading for anyone. However, quitting the Big Five is exactly the kind of take on privacy that turns many people off from becoming more privacy aware.

I’ve seen this happen time and time again in r/privacy, where people who have just tipped their toes in the world on online privacy and security are getting barraged with comments like “LOL IF YOU’RE NOT USING LINUX YOU’RE SCREWED” and “YOU NEED TO DELETE ALL SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS”. But if we as a privacy community would dial back our tone just a bit, I think we could do way more good than what we’re doing right now.

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Is DNA Based Healthcare Worth the Risk?

Is DNA Based Healthcare Worth the Risk?

All of us are built differently. That’s why our bodies can handle different foods in different ways, different workout routines yield varying results between individuals, and some of us seem to always get the seasonal flu while others stay stuffy-nose-free (seemingly without trying really hard to do so). So figuring out what’s the healthiest – the best – way of eating, exercising and living your life seems like a reasonable and even rational goal.

So how can we figure that out? With DNA testing, or to be more exact, analyzing genome and blood biomarkers. However, this type of testing has some obvious privacy repercussions. Let’s weigh the pros and the cons.

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Controlled Identity Exposure as a Doxxing Countermeasure

Controlled Identity Exposure as a Doxxing Countermeasure

Usually when talking about personal data in the context of increasing (online) privacy, the discussion is revolving around either one or two of the following subjects:

  1. Removing as much of your data as possible
  2. Populating data about you with disinformation

What I see talked about less (or barely at all) is the active management of your online data and the controlled method of data disclosure. Maybe some dismiss this as a no-brainer, but in my opinion there’s some easy and powerful wins to be gained by giving this third subject the attention it deserves.

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Is There Privacy with Wearables? Case Oura Ring

Is There Privacy with Wearables? Case Oura Ring

Out of all the information we generate (willingly or unwillingly) out there, nothing gets more personal than health data. Traditionally, health data has been collecting dust in some public healthcare sector’s file cabinet, but thanks to fitness and wellness gadgets and services, that data is now scattered across the world.

Workout heatmaps reveal secret military bases left and right, DNA testing services get breached and fitness trackers go bankrupt leaving data who knows where. Is there any hope for privacy left in this field?

After 8 months of waiting since preorder, I’m now an owner of a new Oura ring – one of the most advanced wellness and sleep trackers on the market. Among other things, Oura gives its user (wearer?) every day an overall score for Sleep, Readiness and Activity. I decided to return the favor and go through Oura’s Privacy Policy with a fine comb and give Oura a Privacy score. This is how it went down.

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The Inconvenient Truths about the Cambridge Analytica Files

The Inconvenient Truths about the Cambridge Analytica Files

I reluctantly joined Facebook back in December 2011. During the couple of years I had the account, I learned more and more about the shadowy monster that provided us with our daily hourly doses of dopamine in the forms of likes, shares and status updates.

This brings us to the first inconvenient – and most obvious – truth about the so-called Cambridge Analytica case: there’s absolutely nothing new in any of it.

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Perceived Privacy vs. Revealing Reality – Case Vero

Perceived Privacy vs. Revealing Reality – Case Vero

After my previous blog post got some unexpected publicity, there were some curious instances of Vero apologists defending the platform. Two main cases they presented were:

  1. No matter how shadily Vero might treat your privacy, it’s fine since it’s covered in their Privacy Policy
  2. Every other social media platform does the same thing anyway

I’ll give it to them, the second point is almost 100% accurate, but it simply doesn’t make it any more OK to invade users’ privacy. However, it’s the first point that really grinds my gears, especially when it comes to Vero.

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PSA: Vero App Stores Your Phone Contacts Even After You’ve Disabled Its Access to Them

PSA: Vero App Stores Your Phone Contacts Even After You’ve Disabled Its Access to Them

TL;DR: if you allow Vero to access your phone’s Contacts even for a brief moment, instead of one-time reading them, it quietly stores them all, links them to your account and uses to shape the user experience. It also gives users who have given access to their Contacts a way of connecting with users who have explicitly denied Vero’s access to their respective phone’s contact list. As an icing on the cake, there’s no way you can delete that info from the service afterwards. This blog post examines how this works.

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I Have Been Pwned… Five Freaking Times and Counting!

I Have Been Pwned… Five Freaking Times and Counting!

When I started drafting this blog post a while back, the title was “I Have Been Pwned Twice Already”. That number has since risen to five, and I’m assuming it will continue to rise as old breaches come to light and some long forgotten accounts get popped. So far, no immediate harm has been caused to me from these breaches, and I’ll contribute that silver lining to the reactive and since then proactive steps I’ve taken to ensure that’s the case now and in the future. This is how also you can harden your online presence against these (inevitable) breaches.

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10 OPSEC Tips That Everyone Should Follow

10 OPSEC Tips That Everyone Should Follow

Following in the footsteps of two great guides, “10 Commandments for a Safer Internet” and “0x0A Hack Commandments”, I was inspired to give something back to the community. For the average Joe, operational security – or OPSEC for short – is basically just about risk management through identifying specific pieces of information requiring protection, and employing measures to protect them. Sounds intimidating? Don’t worry, because you’re already doing it.

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