Surveillance Self-Defense: 2024 Year in Review

This year, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of our Surveillance-Self Defense (SSD) guide. How’d we celebrate? We kept at it—continuing to work on, refine, and update one of the longest running security and privacy guides on the internet.

Technology changes quickly enough as it is, but so does the language we use to describe that technology. In order for SSD to thrive, it needs careful attention throughout the year. So, we like to think of SSD as a garden, always in need of a little watering, maybe some trimming, and the occasional mowing down of dead technologies. 

Brushing Up on the Basics

A large chunk of SSD exists to explain concepts around digital security in the hopes that you can take that knowledge to make your own decisions about your specific needs. As we often say, security is a mindset, not a purchase. But in order to foster that mindset, you need some basic knowledge. This year, we set out to refine some of this guidance in the hopes of making it easier to read and useful for a variety of skill levels. The guides we updated included:

• Choosing Your Tools
• Communicating with Others
• Keeping Your Data Safe
• Seven Steps to Digital Security
• Why Metadata Matters
• What Is Fingerprinting?
• How do I Protect Myself Against Malware?

Big Guides, Big (and Small) Changes

If you’re looking for something a bit longer, then some of our more complicated guides are practically novels. This year, we updated a few of these.

We went through our Privacy Breakdown of Mobile Phones and updated it with more recent examples when applicable, and included additional tips at the end of some sections for actionable steps you can take. Phones continue to be one of the most privacy-invasive devices we own, and getting a handle on what they’re capable of is the first step to figuring out what risks you may face.

Our Attending a Protest guide is something we revisit every year (sometimes a couple times a year) to ensure it’s as accurate as possible. This year was no different, and while there were no sweeping changes, we did update the included PDF guide and added screenshots where applicable.

We also reworked our How to: Understand and Circumvent Network Censorship slightly to frame it more as instructional guidance, and included new features and tools to get around censorship, like utilizing a proxy in messaging tools.

New Guides

We saw two additions to the SSD this year. First up was How to: Detect Bluetooth Trackers, our guide to locating unwanted Bluetooth trackers—like Apple AirTags or Tile—that someone may use to track your location. Both Android and iOS have made changes to detecting these sorts of trackers, but the wide array of different products on the market means it doesn’t always work as expected.

We also put together a guide for the iPhone’s Lockdown Mode. While not a feature that everyone needs to consider, it has proven helpful in some cases, and knowing what those circumstances are is an important step in deciding if it’s a feature you need to enable.  

But How do I?

As the name suggests, our Tool Guides are all about learning how to best protect what you do on your devices. This might be setting up two-factor authentication, turning on encryption on your laptop, or setting up something like Apple’s Advanced Data Protection. These guides tend to need a yearly look to ensure they’re up-to-date. For example, Signal saw the launch of usernames, so we went in and made sure that was added to the guide. Here’s what we updated this year:

• How to: Avoid Phishing Attacks
• How to: Enable Two-factor Authentication
• How to: Encrypt Your Computer
• How to: Encrypt Your iPhone
• How to: Use Signal

And Then There Were Blogs

Surveillance Self-Defense isn’t just a website, it’s also a general approach to privacy and security. To that end, we often use our blog to tackle more specific questions or respond to news.

This year, we talked about the risks you might face using your state’s digital driver’s license, and whether or not the promise of future convenience is worth the risks of today.

We dove into an attack method in VPNs called TunnelVision, which showed how it was possible for someone on a local network to intercept some VPN traffic. We’ve reiterated our advice here that VPNs—at least from providers who’ve worked to mitigate TunnelVision—remain useful for routing your network connection through a different network, but they should not be treated as a security multi-tool.

Location data privacy is still a major issue this year, with potential and horrific abuses of this data popping up in the news constantly. We showed how and why you should disable location sharing in apps that don’t need access to function.

As mentioned above, our SSD on protesting is a perennial always in need of pruning, but sometimes you need to plant a whole new flower, as was the case when we decided to write up tips for protesters on campuses around the United States.

Every year, we fight for more privacy and security, but until we get that, stronger controls of our data and a better understanding of how technology works is our best defense.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.