A User's guide to Privacy and Security

2017-10-05

Have you ever wanted a document to hand to your friends and family outlining basic computer security so you can stop helping them recover their email account?

Are you that friend or family member?

Have you ever wanted to leak information to the press from a government agency without ending up in jail?
This guide will hopefully help you out:
https://github.com/multilinear/privacy_and_freedom/blob/master/user_security.markdown

This project was started by a friend of mine. I thought it was a really good idea and started working on it.

The goal here is a complete guide for user-side computer security and privacy. The "Basic" section outlines security for most users. Ideally this should be exactly the thing that technical folks (readers of this blog) would want to hand to their friends and family. It outlines things like password databases, pins on cellphones, etc. If technical folks don't immediately feel the urge to share it with non-technical friends and family upon reading it please let me know. Just that would be very useful feedback. Ways to make the document more approachable, sharable, etc. would be even better.

The "Advanced Topics" section outlines concerns and solutions related to nation state actors. This isn't useful for most people, but the hope is that collecting it all in *one* document will make it a lot easier to pick and choose what any given user does need, and help disseminate this hard to find information more widely.

Note, this isn't a "howto". An intelligent computer user, even one who's not that technical, is entirely capable of Googling howto guides, and things like the settings menu on iphone change to fast to keep up with. Reading this should give a reader an understanding of *what* they need to do, and the technical terminology to look up how.

Any feedback is valuable, as it notes in the document, I would love corrections, improvements, etc.

Note: my work (the link at the top) is a fork of https://github.com/bluehat/privacy_and_freedom/blob/master/digital_freedom.markdown with some significant changes in direction. I filed a merge request today.