Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. Weβre 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.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
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 We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.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
view the rest of the comments
no they are not, just another stupid article from proton. nothing stops you from saying that bwE0F^pHb5iPzMZiismyeiTIWh^oB*#V8SaD0F3R*SeH was your first pets name.
proton however stops you from disabling otp after setting up multiple security keys, they stop you from putting a pin on your drive app and they stop you from using an +4 digit pin on your mail app.
but yea, the potentially insecure thing they dont even offer is the biggest concernn here π€¦ββοΈ
Nothing stops us enthusiasts from doing that, this article is for a more casual user who might not realise how easy the real answers are for a hacker to discover
i mentionied the flaws i saw and are are being adresssed by the community since years without ever anything happening. so i just dont get the focus on a problem that does not even exist.
what will the next article be about? to dont write your password on a post it and stick it onto the screen?
Yes and that is a good advice. They don't write these articles to teach you something new, you're clearly not the target audience. Don't blame them for educating people.
Believe or not, these kind of articles unfortunately are necessary for the regular Joe.
I mean, I've seen a password on a post-it in our office, so yeah, maybe a good idea? We also have a company mandated Bitwarden and you wouldn't believe how many times I've seen people type a password by hand instead of using Bitwarden when I help them set up VPN or something. It's definitely upwards of 80%.
I really don't think anyone on the planet could figure out the name of my first pet. Even everyone in my family who would have known the answer to that question, they have all died. My first pet's name is a secret safe with me.
okay but first I want to tell you my mother's maiden name and the name of the first school I went to.
Well that's good for you, but the point is that info is the kind of thing that someone might have casually posted online over the years
How will you remember that though? A lot of password managers don't make it easy to store security question responses alongside account credentials, and if you're using a security question, it might be because you lost access to those credentials anyway
I put these answers in the "notes" section of Bitwarden. It's a little inconvenient, but it works.
It depends on if the purpose of the questions is for 2FA or account recovery. If the latter, you haven't really solved anything since if you lose one then you lose the other
My personal view is that the extra security that these so-called security questions bring is worth less than the risks they bring. I'd rather the (low) risk of Bitwarden being compromised and losing the account than the (high) risk of someone searching or discovering information about me I can't change and losing the account.
And how many regular people do that? Or does security apply only to advanced users?
Security is always porous. The article really had no suggestions. They say 2FA but account recovery is often a combination of access to your email account or questions. None of this stuff is particularly secure.
So yes security is an advanced feature usually not provided and normal users do not even try at being secure nor do most systems insist on it.
Edit: Some sites are doing away with passwords and just sending and email with a link to login. Totally not secure but account recovery has long used the same method so it may not be actually reducing security much since there never was much security.
I'm probably not a regular user but my first pet's name, the city I was born in, my first school and my childhood nicknames are also very long strings of characters π