The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

• Max Stirner

The erosion of digital privacy has been a decades long process, and it feels like it will only get worse from here.

If you’re one of the people who say things like “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” any time privacy is brought up, I’d like to respond with “if you have nothing to say then shut the fuck up”. Under international law, human beings have a right to privacy just like we have a right to free speech, and I don’t have to justify the exercise of my rights to anyone.

Why?

Let’s not dwell only on the abstract philosophy of rights and laws. Instead, let’s think about the practical need for digital privacy. Specifically, the need for the primary tool of achieving digital privacy: encryption.

Do you know what the internet is? It’s a series of tubes interconnected networks (thus the name) of computers talking to each other out in the open. Pretty much anyone can connect to the internet, meaning that pretty much anyone can listen in on that digital chatter. So what happens when (not if, when) there’s an eavesdropper on one of those tubes networks? Well, probably nothing. Not nothing nothing, but… look, just work with me for this little thought experiment alright?

In the year of our lord (J.R. “Bob” Dobbs) 1998±n 2025 CEADWhatever, almost all data going over public networks like the internet is encrypted. And eavesdropping attackers can’t decrypt the data without already having the key (unlikely), having a quantum computer (even more unlikely), or having more time than the universe will probably exist (the implications of such a being needing your credit card number are terrifying); now if an attacker controls where the encrypted data ends up, that’s a different story, but let’s not focus on that.

But if you still don’t care, why don’t you go ahead and send me your credit card number.

“Okay!” you relent. “Encryption is important for stuff like that, but why can’t we have encryption that only works for the good guys doing legitimate things and not for the bad guys doing crime?” you ask.

First, who are you to say who is good and who is bad? Sure, someone selling stolen social security numbers on some hidden forum is most definitely a bad guy. But what about a journalist reporting on how an oppressive regime is violating human rights? To you, they’re a good guy, but to that regime they’re a bad guy. To me, the Italian Partisans were good guys. To the fascist dipshits across the world they were bad guys. It’s all subjective. It all depends on who holds the power in a given situation.

The state calls its own violence ‘law’, but that of the individual, ‘crime’.

• Max Stirner

I have the objectively correct position on the Italian Partisans though. That fascist bastard ıuıʃossnɯ got what was coming. In fact, he got off too easy in my opinion.

Second, you cannot backdoor encryption without making it unsafe. To simplify things, think of encryption as a series of complex math problems designed in a way that only the people on either end of the exchange can easily solve them; anyone else has to expend so much time and energy to solve the problems that it becomes pointless to even try. But what happens if you make the problems easier to solve by someone else? Well, you make them easier to solve by someone else. And with enough time studying such an encryption algorithm, that someone else can be anyone else.

“Alright.” You, the strawman I have constructed for this scenario say. “What if we didn’t puncture a huge hole in the security of encryption algorithms in order to allow third party access, and instead just give copies of the keys to the government so they can see what you’re doing?”

Let’s ignore the facts that I’m advocating against state- and corporate-surveillance here. And also how dangerous such an idea is given that governments will abuse any power given to them. Instead let us think about how many literal nuclear weapons these people have lost. Do you really think they can do better with encryption keys? And don’t even get me started on how much worse advertising would be if those profit-hungry mega-corporations (who already sell massive amounts of your information for a quick buck) could read everything.

There is no such thing as harmless power.

• Nestor Makhno

TL;DR: if a message can be decrypted by anyone other than its sender or recipient, then the message is not secure.

There are no grey areas here. Either we all have privacy and security, or none of us do. And personally, I’d rather live in a world where I can protect my data from bad actors, even if those bad actors get the same protections as I do. Because it’s not just about hiding things. It’s about staying free. It’s about staying safe.

How?

We do not live in the world the 90s cypherpunks imagined. Very few people outside of weird internet circles give a shit about cryptographic signatures or anything like that. People want convenience more than they want safety and freedom. I’m no exception, and neither are you. Probably.

And frankly, just like all of our other rights, we need to give a little up to actually live. Not to the extend that we already have, mind you, but some. We give up our ability to walk into a crowded movie theater and yell “fire” in exchange for not being trampled to death by a crowd of frantic moviegoers. And I mean, if I really wanted to remain 100% private and 100% free, I’d need to move to a cabin in rural Idaho with nothing but a shotgun and a typewriter. And let me tell you, if I only had a single shotgun with me I’d be the least armed person in rural Idaho.

Even so, there are some things we can do, if not outright need to do, in order to reclaim and protect our privacy in the current era of democratic backsliding and mass surveillance.

Use Open Source Software

Free/libre open source software is not a silver bullet for privacy and security. Running it in place of proprietary software will not let you magically escape the various surveillance programs operated by the state and capital, but it can reduce the surface are for such surveillance. And open source software has far more eye on it than proprietary software, so any major security flaws that could be exploited by bad actors (be they criminals or intelligence agencies) can be found far quicker; that’s part of the reason why all the good encryption algorithms are open source, while the proprietary ones get broken constantly. Remember the XZ backdoor? If it had been closed source, there’s a chance the observant developer may have never found the backdoor, and then most of the internet would have been (and this is, I promise, the proper technical term) turbofucked. Now sure, if it had been closed source, maybe this particular backdoor would have never been added in the first place, but there’s plenty of backdoors included proprietary software just waiting to be used by someone other than the one who put them in (if they haven’t been already).

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser as of 2025, and while it’s based on the open source Chromium and gets some of the benefits of open source software development, it is not itself open source. On top of that, Google makes a significant amount of money from advertising, and if you use Chrome, your browsing data is being sold to advertisers as part of this. Hell, if you use any Google Services (Search, Cloud, Android, and so on) your data is being sold to advertisers and passed along to intelligence agencies. Now, it’s unlikely that you’re going to stop using Google in full (I still don’t even with knowing all of this), but you can make a few changes to limit what data they can collect on you.

• Use Firefox (or perhaps one of its derivatives like LibreWolf) instead of Chrome. Mozilla admittedly has its problems, but Firefox ain’t the leading non-Chromium browser for nothing. And in addition to being a move to support your privacy, using Firefox (or something else not based on Chromium) is also a way to ensure that one single for-profit company (Google) doesn’t hold de facto control over web standards. I’m not saying web standards are a bad thing, but they should probably be decided by the community of people who actually work on and use the web. Not one single group of people beholden only to themselves and their shareholders.
• Use GrapheneOS instead of stock Android. I guess LineageOS is fine too if you don’t have a Google Pixel.
  • Apple shares many of the same issues as Google (the harvesting of user data and participation in mass warrantless surveillance), so iPhones are not a more private alternative to Androids no matter how much lip service they pay to the idea at Cupertino.
• Use Proton or Tuta instead of Gmail. Proton also actually offers a suite of services to replace several other consumer-level Google services as well; like Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, and so on!
  • Proton is also integrated with SimpleLogin, so you can easily generate email aliases. No need to give out your real email address! Firefox Relay provides a similar service as well if you don’t go with Proton.
• Use privacy-respecting search engines like DuckDuckGo or StartPage. They aren’t perfect, as they still advertise and pull much of their results from less-than-ideal sources (Microsoft’s Bing and Google Search), but they’re still better than the alternative.

Microsoft and Apple maintain a near-total dupoloy over consumer operating systems. It may be true that only obsessive nerds use anything other than Windows or Mac OS X, but it’s also true that these two corporate behemoths use their software to harvest data on behalf of advertisers and intelligence agencies just like Google with its browser. Apple also loves their walled garden, and actively hinders your ability to run anything from outside their ecosystem. So what can you do to ensure your privacy and software freedom? Run Linux of course! Or a BSD I guess.

• Arch Linux and its derivatives are great for freaks like myself, but something like Fedora or Ubuntu is fine for normal people just looking to regain a bit of control; they both have strong corporate ties (Fedora to IBM by way of Red Hat, and Ubuntu does quite a bit of advertisement fuckery), but the concern is far lower than with either windows of Mac OS X.
  • Thanks to WINE (and Valve’s additions to WINE), many applications (and games) for Windows run seamlessly on most Linux distributions.
    • Using WINE can expose you to some mostly-Windows problems, like malware, albeit to a lesser degree than actually running Windows.
  • I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
    • I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as GNU/Linux, is in fact, systemd/GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, systemd plus GNU plus Linux.
      • I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as systemd/GNU/Linux, is in fact, xorg/systemd/GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, xorg plus systemd plus GNU plus Linux.
        • Everyone’s switching to Wayland now.
• If you’re coming from Mac OS X or prefer real UNIX (and not just a work-alike), FreeBSD may be a better choice for you. Mac OS X is actually part of the BSD family tree. And unlike Linux, which isn’t actually real UNIX, FreeBSD more-or-less descends directly from the original UNIX (much of the original UNIX code was rewritten, but that’s the way she goes). BSDs are also complete operating systems, and not separate components welded together as is the case with most Linux distros; that’s usually not a problem given they’re skillfully welded together in most Linux distros, but some folks may prefer the completeness.
  • I can’t speak from my own experience, but I hear that BSDs have decent enough compatibility layers for most Linux applications, including WINE (meaning Windows applications should probably run as well).
  • If you’re even more paranoid than me, but not paranoid enough to write your own OS or or speak directly to god, then OpenBSD would be even better for you.

Besides browsers and OSs, there are a number of other pieces of open source software that you can use in place of propriety software like LibreOffice and GIMP. Despite all of that, I’m not a zealot. I’ll use proprietary/closed source tools if they do what I need them to do, so long as I’m not sacrificing too much of my freedom to do so.

Use Ad Blockers

I’ve spoken quite a bit about advertisers, and while I won’t directly quote/link to Bill Hicks here, I hope my disdain for them came through clearly.

There’s nothing free in this world. I get it. If I’m not paying for something with money, I’m paying with my time or data. But why would I want to pay at all (no matter the currency) if all I’m paying for is fucking ads? I can’t even watch something on the streaming service my wife and I pay for (using real money) without being hammered by endless requests to purchase another product; in some cases the product is an upgrade to the next tier of the streaming service itself where you don’t get hammered with ads. It’s ridiculous. Advertisers pay to put the ads somewhere, and I pay to see them. If I want them gone I can pay a little more.

Personal gripes aside, advertisers rarely seem to do their due diligence in making sure the ad buyers aren’t absolute scum or malicious actors. So ad blocking has simply become a matter of digital self defense.

On my browsers (Desktop and Mobile), I’m using UBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, both of which I highly recommend. The latter should work on most browsers, but if you’re still using something in the Chromium family then UBlock Origin Lite should work in place of the former due to how Google is currently enshittifying the web with their capitalist vampirism.

While ad blocking web browser extensions are great, they only work within the browser. Your phone has applications. And I guess your TV and refrigerator do too now (which is fucking ridiculous). So you really do need something stronger to protect the devices on your home network from this constant stream of bullshit. And for that, I recommend running a PiHole or two to sinkhole DNS requests made to advertisers, trackers, and malicious sites. I run 3 (because I am insane) and in addition to the several lists of bad domains I’ve collected from various Reddit threads, I use cloudflared to send my DNS requests over HTTPS to Quad9 and Cloudflare’s anti-malware resolvers. This setup works so well that my wife actually complains about ads reappearing on various apps when we go out.

Encrypt Your Internet Traffic

When you’re not at home wrapped in the protection of your PiHoles that send secure DNS requests to anti-malware resolvers, a trustworthy VPN to encrypt your traffic and add an extra layer of protection is probably a good idea; it’s almost a necessity if you don’t trust the network you’re connected to, but just try to avoid connecting to any of those (or any open network). Hell, it’s still probably a good idea to use a VPN at home, but that may require you to do some network magic on your router and/or configure your VPN client to use custom DNS servers (those being your PiHoles). ProtonVPN and Mozilla VPN are my suggested choices, but there are plenty of others out there. Just be sure whatever you pick is trustworthy, as encryption can only go so far when you’re otherwise trusting them with all of your traffic.

In addition to a VPN, you should use Tor. I don’t mean at the same time. At least not all the time. This post from The Tin Hat goes over the benefits and drawbacks of using Tor and a VPN much better than I ever could, but the gist is that they are different tools with different (albeit related) use cases. That said, ProtonVPN lets you route things through their VPN and Tor pretty easily and without issue.

And don’t just use Tor alone. The browser bundle is great for general privacy and anonymity when browsing the web, but sometimes even that’s not enough. Consider using TAILS, the Linux distro intended to be run from a live disk (USB or DVD) that routes all of your computer’s traffic through Tor and leaves no trace on your machine.

I2P is also worth a mention. While it has a few outproxies to the clear web, it seems far more focused on hidden services than enabling anonymous browsing. Good thing you don’t have to pick and choose between Tor and I2P. You can use both!

Encrypt Everything Else Too

Your data doesn’t just exist in transit across the internet though. It sits, often unencrypted, on whatever devices you’re sending it from and receiving it to. So you should change that and use full disk/device encryption. On your desktop, your laptop, your phone, and your portable external storage. On everything! Most OSs have some feature built in to do this, but you can also use Veracrypt if you find that lacking for some reason. You should also be taking frequent backups of all your devices, and then encrypt those backups as well; make several (still encrypted) backups of important files and store them in separate places.

If you’re not using a service like Proton that already does it for you (or you are and just want an extra layer of security), encrypt your email with PGP/GPG. If you still use an instant messenger (like it’s 2002 again), encrypt your messages with OTR messaging. Stop sending plaintext SMSs and start sending encrypted texts with Signal. My soap says “Dilute!”. This blog says “Encrypt!”

Use Other Tools

Even if you encrypt everything, you’re fucked if you have weak passwords/passphrases that can be broken quickly. Current recommendations for password strength assume that you’ll actually be remembering all your passwords. But you know what’s even better? Remembering only one or two passwords that meet this recommendation and using long, strong, and random passwords for literally everything else and storing them in a(n encrypted) password manager. Also using (non-SMS) MFA. I’d personally suggest Bitwarden or Proton Pass (both of which have built-in MFA authenticators), but there are others out there. Just be sure to pick one that didn’t have three major security incidents over the past decade.

Financial transactions are a fact of life in our current economic system, so they are yet another thing to consider in regards to your privacy; a lot about a person can be figured out based on where they spend their money. Cash is nice for real world privacy, but cryptocurrencies are worth mentioning as a means of maintaining your financial privacy on the internet online due to their anonymity and decentralized nature. They aren’t perfect, however. Exchanges threaten their decentralization, and the level of anonymity provided by a cryptocurrency varies from coin to coin with Bitcoin actually being pseudonymous and not actually anonymous (if you want real anonymity then you’d probably want to use Monero or something of that sort, keeping in mind altcoins are generally not as spendable as Bitcoin). There are also legitimate concerns about the enormous amount energy required of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (which could probably be resolved if we switched to more renewable sources), rug pulls/pump-and-dumps orchestrated by grifters, and the ongoing state-backed crypto-fuckery we’re seeing in certain places.

A power drill is another necessary part of not only your physical toolkit, but your privacy toolkit as well. When you erase a file on a disk you should know that it isn’t really gone until you overwrite it, and until then, it can be recovered with enough knowledge and the right forensic tools. There is software that can be used to securely erase data (like nwipe), but frankly, nothing beats physical destruction of the disk.

In short, you should use as many tools as you can to keep yourself free and safe in the digital world. Using them may make things less convenient, but just like you sometimes trade a bit of of your freedom for rights, you ought to sometimes trade a little of your convenience for freedom.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man’s lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one’s self.

• Max Stirner (maybe)