About Us

Hi. It's been a while, huh?

In late 2022, we launched a revised edition of BJ Mendelson's book, "Privacy: And How We Get It Back" that was called “Stupid Sexy Privacy.”

The book was originally published in 2017 by Curious Reads and released as an audio book known as "The End of Privacy." It consisted of an entire section of BJ's first book, "Social Media Is Bullshit" (St. Martin's Press), that was cut prior to that book's publication in 2012.

Stupid Sexy Privacy's first run was sponsored by DuckDuckGo and Slate even interviewed BJ about it.

Now, given everything happening in the world, we've again partnered with our friends at DuckDuckGo to bring the show back.

The original mini-series will begin re-airing in August of 2025, and 25 new episodes will begin airing immediately after that, taking us through December of 2026.

Old, and then new, episodes will release once a week on Thursdays, no later than at 10am EST. (Don't let that old episode description fool you though. We took great pains to update all of the old episodes with new interviews and additional content for 2025.)

You can listen to Stupid Sexy Privacy on Apple Podcasts here.

And you can listen to Stupid Sexy Privacy on Spotify here.

One More Thing ...

Our podcast transcripts and additional material is going to be for members only.

There is NO cost to become a member. It's free.

We did this to stop AI from stealing, repurposing, and distributing our content. As it turns out, BJ's first book, "Social Media Is Bullshit" was stolen by Anthropic — alongside thousands of other books — and used to train its AI Model. (See: Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC and Bartz v Anthropic.)

So, we'd like to help put a stop to the free ride the Broligarchy is current enjoying by stealing other people's work.

If there was a way to completely prevent our content from being scraped by AI companies, we would do it.

So, we encourage you to sign-up for a membership while you're here reading all this. (And don't forget to use your @ Duck forwarding address to do so.)

Transparency: A Word About AI Use, Data Collection, and Affiliate Links

Our project is sponsored by DuckDuckGo.

But DuckDuckGo has no editorial oversight over the content of Stupid Sexy Privacy.

Thanks to DuckDuckGo we can give all of our information away for free, including a copy of our new e-book and audio book, "How to Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos."

More on that in February of 2026.

We're (Mostly) Anti-AI

With a few exceptions, we don't rely on generative AI or other AI tools to produce this project.

Our exception: We use Riverside.fm's transcription tool to produce transcripts. We also use Riverside.fm's AI production tools for editing the audio for Privacy Tips with BJ Mendelson. (Mostly, we use the "Enhance to Studio Quality" feature on our recordings, but that's about it on their AI features.)

Everything else you read and hear was written and produced by B.J. Mendelson. Typos, spelling errors, and borderline inappropriate jokes about Wonder Woman included.

Stupid Sexy Privacy is produced by Andrew VanVoorhis and hosted by Rosie Tran.

No generative AI is used to produce this website or the podcasts.

If you like what we're doing, there are additional ways you can support us:

-In addition to the FREE membership, we also offer a $2 a month paid option. Subscribers using this plan will be able to leave comments on our blog posts. Yes. It's a "Troll Toll." Yes. This is a reference to what you think it is. No. There is no obligation to subscribe. You can become a member of Stupid Sexy Privacy for free. We offer this option for those who like what we're doing and want to support our mission to make 5% of Americans 1% better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdos.

-We utilize affiliate links only for books. You should know none of these affiliate links costs you anything extra to use. We use them because they kick back a small amount of money toward us IF you do use them.

-At this time (December of 2025) there are no product or service recommended through an affiliate link. This may change in the future. Our commitment to you is that we do not recommend anything unless we personally use it ourselves.

For example, with DuckDuckGo, we've been using services such as their search engine, browser, and more recently, the @ duck forwarding service for years.

Our recommendation of their products would have happened regardless of their involvement in the show.

There is also no obligation to use these links. All affiliate links will be flagged or otherwise called out so you know where they are.

We Use Ghost & Plausible

This website is powered by Ghost. While Ghost does function as a newsletter platform first, we want to be clear: Nobody is accessing or seeing your data beyond the producers of this show.

This data will not be shared or provided to anyone, for any reason. Ghost is also pretty solid in terms of respecting your privacy compared to some of the other publishing platforms that exist today.

We also use Plausible Analytics to gather information on this project's performance in the least invasive way possible. As they explain:

Plausible is privacy-friendly analytics. All the site measurement is carried out absolutely anonymously. Cookies are not used and no personal data is collected. There are no persistent identifiers. No cross-site or cross-device tracking either. Your site data is not used for any other purposes. All visitor data is exclusively processed with servers owned and operated by European companies and it never leaves the EU.

No company is perfect. *Card Subject to Change" as they say in the professional wrestling business.

We will do our best to protect your data whenever possible.

Get In Touch

If you'd like to get in touch, here's how to do so.