Overview
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General Paradigms
This is a loose set of guiding principles that underpin the strategies in this guide.
- Your data is your property.
- Data is the most valuable resource on earth.
- America does not have adequate privacy laws. Protecting your privacy is your responsibility.
- Privacy rights are in decline globally.
- General cultural sentiment for privacy standards is eroding.
- Places with no privacy rights are, by nature, authoritarian.
- Today, protecting your privacy is an act of resistance.
- Provide as little personal information as possible. Apply Principle of least privilege to your own life.
- Value anonymity.
- Use aliases when possible.
- Do not associate your real name and address, or real name and phone number.
- Never perform ID verification or allow your ID to be scanned.
- Avoid highly centralized, closed source, big tech companies.
- Prefer FOSS (free and open-source) apps and ecosystems that are externally audited and do not store or sell your data.
- Read privacy policies.
- Know your data and privacy rights.
- Prefer managing your own data (as opposed to cloud services), prefer transferring by wire (as opposed to over network).
- Encrypt and back up all of your devices.
- Use a password manager.
Privacy vs Security vs Anonymity
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Threat Models
Broad threat models !TODO
Privacy Rights in Decline
Power Centralization
- Big tech
Online Anonymity
Data Mining and Sharing
- Behavior
- Location
- Biometrics
- IoT
Personal Security
- Identity theft
- Account hijacking
- Financial accounts
- Reputation / slander
- Data breaches
- Compromised devices
Authoritarian Governments
Surveillance Capitalism
Surveillance Capitalism is a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff to describe the prevailing business model of technology companies since Google unlocked the value of personal data with its AdWords platform in the early 2000s. The core of this model is the collection and commodification of user’s personal data, and the invention of new technologies and products to mine untapped domains of human experience. This data, also called “behavioral surplus”, is valueless in its raw form, but can be fed to machine learning models to produce extremely accurate predictions of human behavior, which are sold to advertisement companies in a behavioral futures market to guide ad targeting.