It's been a big year for Surveillance Self-Defense, our repository of self-help resources for helping better protect you and your friends from online spying.
We've done a number of updates and tackled a few new emerging topics with blog posts.
Fighting for digital security and privacy rights is important, but sometimes we all just need to know what steps we can take to minimize spying, and when steps aren't possible, explaining how things work to help keep you safe.
Basics: A starter resource that includes overviews of how digital surveillance works.
Tool Guides: Step-by-step tutorials on using privacy and security tools.
Further Learning: Explainers about protecting your digital privacy.
Security Scenarios: Playlists of our resources for specific use cases, such as LGBTQ+ youth, journalists, activists, and more.
Not everything makes sense in SSD, so sometimes we also tackle security education issues with blogs, which tend to focus more on news events or new technology that may not have rolled out widely yet.
Each has its place, and each saw a variety of new guidance this year.
Surveillance Self-Defense has provided expert guidance for security and privacy for 14 years.
This year we tackled a number of updates, and took the time to take a new approach with two of our most popular guides: Signal and WhatsApp.
The first was a new guide for choosing a password manager, one of the most important security tools, and one that can be overwhelming to research and start using.
Part of security education is explaining new and old technologies, responding to news events, and laying out details of any technological quirks we find.
For this, we tend to turn to our blog instead of SSD. But the core idea is the same: provide self-help guidance for navigating various security and privacy concerns.
We came up with guidance for passkeys, a new type of login that eliminates the need for passwords altogether.
Passkeys can be confusing, both from a security perspective and from a basic usability perspective.
After a hard fought battle pushing Apple to encrypt iCloud backups, the company actually took it a step further, allowing you to encrypt nearly everything in iCloud, including those backups, with a new feature they call Advanced Data Protection.
Meta finally rolled out end-to-end encryption for Messenger, which is thankfully enabled by default, though there are some quirks with how backups work that we explain in this blog post.
EFF worked hard in 2023 to explain new consumer security technologies, provide guidance for tools, and help everyone communicate securely.
There's plenty more work to be done next year, and we'll be here to explain what you can, how to do it, and how it works in 2024.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Tue, 26 Dec 2023 15:43:06 +0000