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We're back with another edition of Privacy Tips.

This week, I read you more from How to Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos.

As a reminder, you can read the full text of the book, right here, for free.

In this week's episode, I also explain, briefly, what you can use instead of Google's increasingly inferior search results—using this—and why the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Privacy Badger is something to share with your friends and family. 

Listen here:

Show Intro

BJ Mendelson: Hello everyone, welcome to another edition of Privacy Tips, the sister podcast for Stupid Sexy Privacy. I'm your host, BJ Mendelson. Today's show is made possible by our friends at DuckDuckGo. So if you enjoy what we do, check out their DuckDuckGo subscription. It comes with a simple and easy-to-use VPN, identity theft protection, data removal services, and more.

Additional information can be found at duckduckgo.com/subscribe.

(Some features and offerings will vary based on your location.)

Now my friends, Stupid Sexy Privacy has wrapped, and you can now find all the episodes online at stupidsexyprivacy.com.

All you have to do is click on the episodes page. The purpose of Privacy Tips is to give me an opportunity to read from my version of How to Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos, which is going to be slightly different from the final version that comes out in stores this October.

I was honestly uncomfortable with reading my own book. So I really like the guy that's reading it, Kiff VandenHeuvel. He did William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, which is one of my favorite books. Even if you're not interested in writing or being a screenwriter, William Goldman's book is very good because it has all those great stories about his time writing some movies that were very formative for a lot of people. The Princess Bride is one of them, and All the President's Men is another that he talks about in the book.

Kiff does the reading for the old book, Adventures in the Screen Trade ... I think it came out the same year I was born, if I'm not mistaken. But when you listen to the audio edition that just came out, read by Kiff VandenHeuvel, it [the Goldman book]csounds like it's brand new.

And he did such a fantastic job that when I heard [the Goldman book], I was like, "Okay, I want a professional like Kiff to read the version that people would actually pay for of my book."

And then, you know, if people want to hear the author reading it, they can go and listen to this podcast.

There are commercials here, so we get paid, which is really important because it's very difficult these days to make a living as an independent content creator, even when you do have good advertisers such as DuckDuckGo. And so that's why I'm doing this.

As we go through the book, I'm going to take some time to explain how to do certain things. For example, this week's excerpt mentions the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Privacy Badger, which you can download and install in your browser by visiting privacybadger.org. Privacy Badger may not be as sophisticated as some of the other anti-tracking software that's out there, but we like this one because it's simple to use. It comes from a trusted source, which is also important: the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And you can easily install it. You can install Privacy Badger in under a minute. You just need to click three times or tap three times and you're all set.

I personally use uBlock Origin instead of Privacy Badger. I have a tricked-out Firefox setup that we'll talk more about as we get to it in the book. But for now, for those of you who want Privacy Badger, you're going to visit privacybadger.org. You're going to click on the browser you're using and off you go. And like I said, it takes less than two minutes.

If you have questions or need a little extra help, don't hesitate to contact me on Signal at bjmendelson.32.

At the moment, I don't recommend sending me an email because I have about a thousand unread emails. It's getting quite bad, and I really need to do something about that. So if you want to reach me, Signal's the way to do it.

So now let's get to our ad from my friends at DuckDuckGo, and then we'll come back and I'll continue with my reading. It's exactly where we left off in episode one. So if you're just joining us midstream, you go back and you listen to episode one on Privacy Tips. You can catch the beginning of the book, and then you come to this one, you'll get the next part.

And now I shall read to you:

Book Excerpt #2

To reach my goal, I search for products that are secure enough and simple enough for most. That doesn't mean they're the most secure. Nor does it mean they have beautiful and intuitive user interfaces. It just means that for most people, in most cases, these are the best options available at this time.

Soulseek, for example, is a free file-sharing network that you can use to share music with your friends as an alternative to Spotify. It's free of spyware and advertising, but the user interface is poor. The same is true with Syncthing, which we recommend later to move files between your laptop, phone, and external hard drives. If I mention something that is too expensive for you to purchase, don't worry about it. If you don't have time to do an exercise, don't worry about that either. Do the best you can with what you have and worry about the rest later.

Forgive yourself for the things that you can't do. In the future, better options may become available. If so, the following organizations will let you know: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Consumer Reports, the AARP, and the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. Each is worthy of your time, attention, and contributions. Your support makes projects like the EFF's Privacy Badger possible. If you want to help anyone who isn't tech-savvy, you can install Privacy Badger for them. This browser extension will block tracking attempts while they're using the internet.

The first edition of this book was funded by DuckDuckGo. However, they did not exercise any editorial control over that book or this one. The opinions expressed in both books are mine. When I suggest anything that's not related to DuckDuckGo, I have no relationship to it or its products. Maybe this will change in the future. If it does, I'll let you know. That's my obligation to you: full transparency. And in the interest of full transparency, you should know we would have recommended DuckDuckGo's products without their participation. That's because we don't recommend anything that we don't use ourselves. For example, we use, and we recommend you use, no-ai.duckduckgo.com whenever you want to search for something. As Google continues to ruin the search experience with AI slop, no-ai.duckduckgo.com is a nice throwback to the golden era of search. It's a simple, clean interface that turns off all the AI results and features. If you don't want to do this and you continue to use search engines with AI features, we want to stress: never, ever rely on AI summaries. They're too easy to game by bad actors and savvy marketing professionals. Always go right to the source, and verify that the source is legitimate using the suggestions found in this book.

Show Outro

Today's episode of Privacy Tips was recorded in Hollywood, California, and is sponsored by DuckDuckGo. It was written, produced, and hosted by me, BJ Mendelson. Before we go, I want to give a shout-out to the production team at Stupid Sexy Privacy, which includes Andrew VanVoorhis, Rosie Tran, and Amanda King. And of course, our friends at DuckDuckGo. If you enjoyed today's show, we hope you'll take a moment to leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening.

This won't take more than two minutes of your time. You see, we have this crazy goal, and we need your help to achieve it. We want five percent of Americans to be one percent better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdos. Leaving us a review can help make that happen. That's because your reviews will help other people find the show. So please take a moment to leave us a review, and we'll see you next time on Privacy Tips.

If you're getting this message in your inbox, this is just a reminder that we'll see you next Thursday at 9am with the next edition of Privacy Tips.

This mini-podcast, delivered in under ten minutes, will expand on what's talked about in our new book, How to Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos, which you can read right here for free.

If you're reading this post on the Web, and would like to get this email delivered to you each week, all you gotta do is subscribe. It's also free.

But if you like what we do, you can make a one time tip here, or you can upgrade your subscription and throw us a couple of bucks each month. Either way, thank you all for your continued support.

-BJ