A hacker friend sent me a number of resources that introduce and clearly but simply explain digital privacy. I am sharing these here without much comment.

General Resource

A good general resource: https://www.privacyguides.org/en

Why Privacy Is Important

Very short description of why privacy is important (I get SO MANY questions about why it’s important!) https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters

This is a blurb on why privacy is important by Mullvad VPN: https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters

NB: the pdf version is available here: https://mullvad.net/pdfs/Total_surveillance.pdf

Threat Modelling

These 3 articles explain the concept of threat modelling, to understand your own situation in order to know what to do/not do.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/threat-modeling
https://privsec.dev/posts/knowledge/threat-modeling
https://opsec101.org

Common Threats

A little bit more detail on what kinds of threats most people think about when threat modelling: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/common-threats

And then, once the person has thought about their threat model and has a rough idea about it, then comes the part about choosing and deploying countermeasures.

Tools

This is a question people often ask me: what tools can I use? Here are some references for tools that can be used, depending on the threat model one has identified: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools

it is important to remember that it’s difficult to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, because each person’s threat model will be different.

Someone who is only concerned with surveillance capitalism will need to approach things differently vs. a high net worth individual or celebrity concerned about their physical and digital security vs. a political dissident or whistleblower.

Hope this helps!