Privacy Wiki
Welcome to our Privacy Wiki!
Here, the Privacy Guides community is building the comprehensive resource for understanding digital privacy, the threats we face, and the tools we can use to protect ourselves. This wiki is a living document, and we encourage you to contribute if you have something to add.
This is a selection of featured pages, but you can browse the sidebar for more topics, or use the search bar to find something specific. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, start here to learn about why privacy is important, and then check out our threat modeling guide to learn how to make informed decisions about the software and services you use.
Getting Started
In the modern age of digital data exploitation, your privacy has never been more critical, and yet many believe it is already a lost cause. It is not. Your privacy is up for grabs, and you need to care about it. Privacy is about power, and it is so important that this power ends up in the right hands.
Balancing security, privacy, and usability is one of the first and most difficult tasks you’ll face on your privacy journey. Everything is a trade-off: The more secure something is, the more restricting or inconvenient it generally is, etc. Often, people find that the problem with the tools they see recommended is that they’re just too hard to start using!
Technology Tips
Passwords are an essential part of our everyday digital lives. We use them to protect our accounts, our devices, and our secrets. Despite often being the only thing between us and an adversary who’s after our private information, not a lot of thought is put into them, which often leads to people using passwords that can be easily guessed or brute-forced.
Virtual Private Networks are a way of extending the end of your network to exit somewhere else in the world. Normally, an ISP can see the flow of internet traffic entering and exiting your network termination device (i.e. modem). Encryption protocols such as HTTPS are commonly used on the internet, so they may not be able to see exactly what you’re posting or reading, but they can get an idea of the domains you request.
Often people sign up for services without thinking. Maybe it’s a streaming service to watch that new show everyone’s talking about, or an account that gives you a discount for your favorite fast food place. Whatever the case may be, you should consider the implications for your data now and later on down the line.
Broadly speaking, we categorize our recommendations into the threats or goals that apply to most people. You may be concerned with none, one, a few, or all of these possibilities, and the tools and services you use depend on what your goals are. You may have specific threats outside these categories as well, which is perfectly fine!
Moving On Up
Tor is a free to use, decentralized network designed for using the internet with as much privacy as possible. If used properly, the network enables private and anonymous browsing and communications. Because Tor traffic is difficult to block and trace, Tor is an effective censorship circumvention tool.
Data about your buying habits is considered the holy grail of ad targeting: Your purchases can leak a veritable treasure trove of data about you. Unfortunately, the current financial system is anti-privacy by design, enabling banks, other companies, and governments to easily trace transactions. Nevertheless, you have plenty of options when it comes to making payments privately.
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