The Privacy Cookbook
A practical field guide to digital privacy and operational security.
Recipes, not sermons. Every guide here starts from a threat model, explains the tradeoffs, and tells you what to actually do. Written and reviewed in the open; no ads, no analytics, no affiliate links.
Browse the cookbook
- Start Here What privacy is, why it matters, and how to decide what is worth protecting before you change a single setting.
- Accounts Passwords, password managers, multi-factor authentication, passkeys, and the recovery paths attackers actually use.
- Devices Practical hardening for the hardware you already own. Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iPhone.
- Browsing The browser is where most tracking happens. Choosing one, hardening it, and understanding fingerprinting.
- Communications Messaging, email, and the metadata problem, what end-to-end encryption protects and what it structurally cannot.
- Network Privacy Who can see your traffic in transit. VPNs, Tor, encrypted DNS, and what public Wi-Fi does and doesn't threaten.
- Data Encryption at rest, backups that survive ransomware, the metadata hiding inside your files, and keeping less in the first place.
- OPSEC Operational security as a discipline, identifying what leaks, separating identities, and resisting the attacks aimed at humans instead of machines.
- Recommendations Specific tools we recommend, with the criteria, tradeoffs, and reasoning stated in full, no affiliate links, no sponsorships.
- Darwin Awards Publicly documented OPSEC failures by threat actors, what happened, the mistake, and the defensive lesson for the rest of us.
How to use this site
If you are new, read Threat Modeling first. Privacy advice without a threat model is just a shopping list. Once you know what you are protecting and from whom, the rest of the cookbook tells you which measures are worth your time and which are not.
The Darwin Awards section documents real, publicly reported operational security failures, not to celebrate arrests, but because a mistake that unmasked someone with everything to lose is a mistake worth understanding.
What this site is not
This is not a product catalog and not a promise of anonymity. No tool makes you anonymous; some tools reduce specific exposures under specific conditions, and every recommendation here says which. Where we are unsure, we say so.