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 DuckDuckGo to bring the show back.

The original mini-series will begin re-airing in August of 2025, and 25 (or so) 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 Thursday evening / Friday morning at 12am EST.

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

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

The show can also be found where all good podcasts can be.

One More Thing ...

A lot of our content is going to be for members only.

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

We do this to stop AI from stealing, repurposing, and distributing our content.

If there was a way to completely prevent our content from being scraped by AI companies, we would do it. We will take every measure we can to keep our stuff from training these models. That is why we make a lot of our content for Members only.

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

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 — like the temporary logo pictured above — which will be replaced with a human created one soon — we don't rely on generative AI tools to produce this project.

Our exceptions:

-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.

-We use Duck.AI (utilizing GPT-4o mini) to create Spanish language translations for all the Privacy Tips. Our hope is to eventually hire someone to provide these translations.

Everything 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 AI is used to produce Stupid Sexy Privacy.

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.

If you pay $24 for the whole year, you'll also get a mystery prize in December of 2025. After December, anyone who pays $24, instead of $2 a month, will also get the mystery prize.

-We utilize affiliate links 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.

-There is no product or service recommended through an affiliate link that we do not personally use ourselves. There is also no obligation to use these links.

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

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

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.