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 We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.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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The VPN service fad is full of a LOT of great marketing campaigns, but it really isn't all it's cracked up to be. VPNs are incredibly useful for certain use cases, but for individual privacy and security it's very 'meh'.
There are a lot of methods for tracking locations other than your public IP, and so long as you're using personally identifiable accounts it doesn't really matter if your IP lists you in Panama. Unless you're using the VPN to bypass firewall restrictions on your local network, access remote resources, or establish a site-to-site connection between locations, the only thing that's really accomplished is shifting the burden of trust from the ISP to the VPN provider.
My advice, spend the money on ice cream instead. If you need to lookup something anonymously, use vanilla Tor and don't sign into any accounts that could be traced back to you while on the Tor network.
**edit: spelling
These days I was thinking about what you just wrote. I use iOS as mobile and Mullvad vpn. But few days ago I just log out and started to use just Nextdns and orbot for surfing in site like Amazon. My question as been: is it useful to use a vpn in Apple ecosystem in which they know my identity?
What do you think about that? Using https connections (no vpn but just nextdns) make my surfing less vulnerable from isp eyes?
Thank you
I just don't want to be tracked and profiled, especially for ads. I only sign into accounts with personal information for absolute necessities and browse websites without accounts. Plus my ISP openly tracks and sells history to third parties. It's not viable for me to use tor for daily usage.
Yeah, this trust shift argument doesn't work the way people think it does. A VPN does just shift trust from your ISP... and your ISP is known to sell your data. And you're paying the VPN provider not to do that. And most of them are audited. And they'll stop making money if people find out they're selling the data.