Wade's Privacy Guide 21

[cwade12c]

Introduction

Hi all! I wanted to take some time to put together a comprehensive privacy guide with the goal of offering viable solutions to common services and software that are privacy oriented.

 

When determining my recommendations and suggestions, I am mostly utilizing the following criteria:

• Follows the GNU four freedoms
• Services not based in mandatory key disclosure jurisdictions
• Audited or transparent

 

Motivation

"That's great Wade, but I don't have anything to hide." This is a fallacy I would like to disrupt. Voluntarily giving information away is perfectly reasonable, so long as one understands the costs/benefits and risks. There are security considerations that many people fail to realize when they suggest that privacy is not important. Humans can be the greatest vulnerability and easiest way to gain unauthorized access to a system; simply knowing information, especially that people voluntarily provide or publicly make available, can be valuable in the information gathering phases of an attack. An attacker can use this information to social engineer you or people related to you, causing potential financial damage to you or those around you.

 

Some in the intelligence community suggest that reducing privacy is a necessary cost for increasing security. I look at this differently. Strong privacy goes hand-in-hand with security. I will attempt to demonstrate this in a related thread, Twenty+ Reasons Why Mass Surveillance is Dangerous.

In the meantime, you are welcome to view my original publication on Packet Storm Security titled, Twenty Reasons Why Mass Surveillance is Dangerous.

 

Additional resources I'd like to recommend on why privacy is important, to support my motiviation:

• The Value of Privacy by Bruce Schneier
• When Did You First Realize the Importance of Privacy? by EFF
• The Little Book of Privacy by Mozilla

 

Table of Contents

---- Providers

-------- Cloud Hosting

-------- DNS

------------ Resolvers

------------ Clients

-------- Email

------------ Hosts

------------ Clients

-------- Image Hosting

-------- News Aggregation

-------- Search Engines

-------- Social Networks

-------- Text Hosting (Pastebin)

-------- Video Hosting

-------- Web Hosting

---- Software

-------- Calendars and Contacts

-------- Chat

-------- Document and Note Taking

-------- Encryption

-------- File Sharing

-------- Metadata Removal

-------- Password Managers

-------- Web Browsers

------------ Browser Specific Tweaks

------------ Browser Specific Extensions

---- Operating Systems and Firmware

-------- Desktop

-------- Mobile

-------- Routers

 

I will update this thread and table of contents as the subsidiary topics are created.

Edited August 2, 2021 by cwade12c