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.
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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 We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.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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This depends on your threat model and circumstances:
Old versions of OS are generally a security risk.
Old hardware may lack some modern security features near the hardware level. However these usually protect against tampering with BIOS or bootloaders. In general threats like this need physical access to the machine. I don’t know much about TPM and keystorage in general, but those are what this might concern.
Other than that, old networking hardware might have vulnerabilities that are either not patched with software or are impossible to path. This extends to any device and all device-drivers, but network-devices to me sound the most exposed surface.
This risk however depends on not just the device but the usage as well. If you use it inside a local network, you lose a layer of defence. If you use it in an untrusted network, you are exposed directly.
I would usually not be concerned about old hardware as long as it can run a modern OS I trust. This means most laptops are fine, but phones not so much.
Especially phones with no access to patched applications become less and less secure as time goes by. Old hardware is a small risk; old OS is a concern; old browser on said old OS and you can bet there is at least one serious, well-known and already used vulnerability.
I’m personally tinkering with an old 4th-gen iPad, hoping to secure it or at least jailbreak it. However I am not expecting it to ever be a safe device after that, but a glorified IOT device.
This is not a good suggestion because even with up to date and modern operating systems, hardware vulnerabilities can often be leveraged