Why Switching Browsers Is Now a 'Radical Act'

You can listen to this week's episode by pressing on that play button, or read all about it below.

Full Transcript For This Week's Show:

BJ Mendelson: Hello everyone and 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 enjoyed what we do, check out the DuckDuckGo subscription.

It comes with a simple and easy to use VPN, identity theft protection, data removal service, and more. Additional information can be found at DuckDuckGo.com/subscribe.

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

Now my friends, as you know, the Stupid Sexy Privacy Podcast has completed its run.

You can check out all the episodes over at stupidsexyprivacy.com and click on episodes.

And just an FYI, we're going to go back and we're still adding some things to those episodes. So if you've already listened to them, you're going to hear some new stuff over the coming weeks and months.

And if you haven't heard them, you're going to listen to the completed episodes as they were intended to run. This week, I'm going to give you another excerpt from "How to Protect Yourself From Fascists and Weirdos." The book comes out in October. We don't yet have a release date, but we hope to have one soon. As soon as I have the release date, I will be able to release the PDFs and MP3s. So if you wrote in, or if you've requested a PDF or an MP3—I will get it to you as soon as I am able to release them.

Right now I can't do so, but as soon as everything is locked and ready to come out, I can start sending those things out. So anyone listening to this can get a free PDF copy and a free MP3 copy of the new book as soon as we're about to release it. So feel free to get in touch if you'd like one of those.

Avoid American Tech When You Can

This week, the book's excerpt is gonna deal with why you should avoid American tech and American tech companies whenever possible.

Doing so will also save you a lot of money. So if you need a reason or excuse, that's a good one. For example, if you're still paying Microsoft to access their office products, which are creepy, invasive, and getting worse because of the AI slop and the AI propaganda, you could switch to LibreOffice, which is free.

And we have plenty more examples like that.

Okay. All that said, we're still over a month away from the book's launch. I have a lot of work to do on the website, so please hang with me. It's out of date and a lot of things need to be updated on there.

So we're gonna do our best to get those things ready for the book launch. Next week we're also gonna have interviews to share with you.

I have two recorded that I'm excited to share. I might release both next week. So if you are a podcast subscriber, you might find not one but two episodes next week, depending on my schedule. So either way, those interviews are coming.

We're gonna have more interviews coming. And all that said, after a word from our sponsors, we're gonna go right to the next book excerpt.

(Reminder: The whole book is right here, right now, for free.)

Return from Commercial:

BJ: Okay, so let's continue our reading from "How To Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos."

Again, the book will be out at some point in October. We don't yet have a date for it, but it is coming. It is coming in October. We know that much. We just don't have an on-sale date that we can share with you. And just as I mentioned in the other two reading episodes, my version of the manuscript is slightly different from the finished manuscript that's coming out in October. So think of this as more like the director's cut. Okay. Here we go:

"For another example, I have some minor dyslexia. This causes trouble when it comes to reversing words and missing grammatical errors. For that reason, a combination of Duck.ai and Claude 4.5 Haiku was used to proofread the first version of this book. I couldn't afford an editor, and only a fool edits their own work. I also used Claude to ensure compliance with the Chicago Manual of Style, which is what I use for all my nonfiction books. I honestly don't know why. It also doesn't really matter. What matters is that Claude was not permitted to change or alter any wording during this process. It was prompted to only identify errors. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. If I could do things differently and if I had the money, I wouldn't have bothered with Claude at all. Bottom line: hire a human every single time that you can. But since I did use Claude to review this manuscript, I need you to know a couple of things. The first is—

First, I use Duck.ai as mentioned to prevent Claude from stealing this manuscript. Duck.ai is the safest way to access any of the popular large language models. My first book, "Social Media Is Bullshit," was stolen by Anthropic, the makers of Claude, so my concern is not unfounded. At the time of this writing, I'm waiting to receive a $3,000 settlement check from Anthropic as part of the Barratt v. Anthropic court case. I was paid, by way of comparison, $24,000 to write "Social Media Is Bullshit" back in 2011.

So this Anthropic check won't be anywhere close to what St. Martin's Press paid me to write that book back then. Meanwhile, the Anthropic IPO could value the company at a trillion dollars—around the entire proposed 2027 budget for the Pentagon. For that reason, and many, many others, we don't trust a lot of American tech companies. Most give out our information to the federal government willy-nilly. Often these companies do this without notifying us. Something a former executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn, documents in her book, "Privacy's Defender," and with us on Stupid Sexy Privacy Season 1, Episode 35. Government requests occur in the European Union as well, but EU privacy laws are stricter. For that reason, we recommend whenever possible choosing non-U.S. based tech products. For those who prefer a non-U.S. browser instead of DuckDuckGo or Firefox, for example, you can try Vivaldi, which is based in Norway.

LibreOffice is a solid substitute for Microsoft Office and Google Docs. It's based in Germany. Element is safer, better, and more secure than Slack and Microsoft Teams. It's based in the United Kingdom. Proton's VPN and Proton Mail are based in Switzerland. We recommend everyone get themselves a free Proton account. And we'll talk more about that later. We also prefer Deezer over Apple Music and PeerTube over YouTube. Both Deezer and Framasoft, which develops PeerTube, are based in France. The less you use American tech, the more money you're gonna save. But here's the other reason why you want to do this. Most software mentioned in this book is available for free. Of course, save yourself money whenever you can. But.

The less you use American tech, the more money you save. Most of the software mentioned in this book is available for free. Not to mention, the less we use these products, the less American tech companies have a grip on the world. So using these products instead of their American counterparts, or switching to a secure Linux operating system like System76 Pop OS, is a radical act. And it's a million small radical acts many people will never ever see or even know about that add up to defeat for fascists, weirdos, and the people who fund them."

Show Outro

Well, that's all for this week. Like I said, we've got a couple of interviews coming your way next week. I hope you enjoy them. I hope you stick around. It's a little rough going right now as we try to figure out what Privacy Tips is and kind of the gap that's filling. That's something we'll discover together.

Until then, 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 Van Voorhis, Rosie Tran, and Amanda King. And even though we try to avoid Amazon whenever possible, Rosie does have a great program that's available on Amazon Prime called "Rosie Tran Presents." So if you like Rosie's work, if you like what she did with Stupid Sexy Privacy, please go check that out. And of course, we want to thank our friends at DuckDuckGo. So 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 5 percent of Americans to be 1 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 week on Thursday with another edition of Privacy Tips.