Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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Yeah, that is true. But:
A large site often collects a lot more sensitive data about a users such as phone numbers, ips, devices, activities, browser fingerprints, and even correlates accounts
Because of the value and quantity of the data, large sites will be attacked more often
However, a large enough data breach to be publicly exposed is not the only concern. I think that large sites pass their un-encrypted communications through filters to detect 'illegal activities', and in some countries 'illegal' can mean simply criticizing a powerful individual. Companies also use unencrypted communications to mine information that may be valuable to advertisers.
I would not be surprised to learn that an intelligence agency has the ability to search through the plaintext of all of the DMs from a big site. Sites may give this ability to intelligence agencies in oppressive governments to track the activities of politically inconvenient journalists, for example. Laws can also change, and at some point it could be made legal to search through messages to detect even minor crimes. This may be unlikely, but it is possible.
The pressures and stakes are different, but I wouldn't trust either a big company or two guys. If it is important for you that your DMs remain private, then you should generate your own keys, encrypt messages yourself, and keep the keys safe.