We are thrilled to announce a significant milestone for Privacy Guides: the addition of our first paid staff member, Jonah Aragon. This achievement is a testament to the unwavering support and generous donations from our incredible community. Another major donation came from Power Up Privacy, a privacy advocacy group that funds privacy-related research and development, which helped us achieve this goal earlier then expected!
In February, the OpenCollective Foundation (OCF)—our fiscal host of 4 years—sent us an email to announce that they would be shutting down, and they would no longer be able to collect donations on our behalf (or for any of the hundreds of projects they provided fiscal hosting services to). We immediately began to consider multiple options for the future of this project, including forming our own non-profit or finding another fiscal host.
"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions.
Silicon Valley could well be built on the principle of scrapping principles. Now Elon Musk, perhaps the ultimate tech bro, is shredding another well-regarded convention with an original business strategy.
Yes, you read the title correctly: we have merch now. Privacy Guides has partnered with HELLOTUX to create what we think are the finest garments in the land.
Privacy advocates have been calling for the United States to adopt strong consumer privacy protection laws along the lines of the EU's GDPR for a long time now, but the proposed Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act isn't the answer we're looking for.
It's finally here. After countless requests, Privacy Guides now has translations.
People have always asked us for translations to other languages because our team and community produces high quality, reliable, honest, and researched content. Our previous site never had a system for this. All translations were done manually, and translators would quickly lose interest. Translated sites would be outdated and lay unmaintained on domains that we didn't own. Privacy Guides now has a proper system.
EDIT: This change has been temporarily rolled back after discussions that took place in the Signal community. It will likely be the way things work in the future, but it seems that the old behavior is now back in place for the time being.
Signal has changed how it handles registration. This primarily affects people who are using a number for Signal that they don't have exclusive access to.
macOS Ventura was released this week, and the Apple users among us may be interested in the improvements it brings to your personal privacy and security. We always recommend running the most up-to-date version of your operating system available. Updates add privacy and security improvements all the time—and macOS Ventura is no exception.
There are a number of privacy and security-related settings you should consider changing in the Settings app on iOS.