Privacy Guru Michael Bazzell retires, what can we learn?

We liked his content a lot, and it’s a shame he stopped doing his podcast. One of our readers on Nostr asked us how our content differs.  We respect him greatly and this is not a critique, but simply we are targeting a different audience.

His content targets a more novice user and our content is a little more anti-authority, more global, and less trusting of low-end consumer privacy products.  For example Bazzell advocates for the use of Protonmail, while as we promote self-hosted email on a VPS. This is more decentralized and private, but requires more effort.

Bazzell suggests the use of Privacy.com cards, which mask your info to the vendor and your bank. This is convenient but ultimately not anonymous, which never was Bazzell’s goal or intent. On the other hand, at Simplified Privacy, we reject fiat money as legitimate, and only use cryptocurrency. We recommend crypto gift card vendors such as CakePay, CoinCards, and Bitrefill to avoid KYC. Some of these even have debit cards. Ultimately, we follow the philosophy of Agorism, and our goal is to create a parallel society outside the control of big tech and banks.

Bazzell is more focused on Signal using a Google Voice or Twillio number. This is practical for many users and his target audience. While as our philosophy is more focused on the broader picture, and we dislike Signal’s centralization and reliance on Amazon’s servers. Instead, we recommend Session for censorship and socialization with strangers, while as SimpleX or XMPP are preferred for pure security. We thought Bazzell’s statement in his book of “I like Session, but it’s not popular” to be reflective of his attitude of purely pragmatic low-level evasion. While as our philosophy is to actively influence society for individuals to self-realize their technological freedom.

Bazzell recommends NextDNS, because of their ability to block or evaluate your traffic. While we see the benefits of this, it’s not right for our particular audience, because then you’re trusting just one company to oversee all traffic. For example if you were to use Tor Browser, you’d be getting a new identity each time. While as NextDNS on one VPN would correlate all traffic as you.

When it comes to phones, Bazzell’s recommendations are a reflection of his focus on convenience to the end user and practicality for the most amount of people in their daily application. For example, he recommends SIM cards INSIDE GrapheneOS phones, and on a podcast he replied to a listener question about external hotspots and routers that it wasn’t that important.

While we acknowledge the practicality and appeal of this to the majority of users, our philosophy is very different and focuses more on those with a higher threat model. We completely dislike SIM cards inside phones because of malware and baseband modem vulnerabilities. Instead, we promote solely EXTERNAL hotspot/router WiFi with VoIP and keeping the hotspot in a faraday bag when you are home. Additionally, we view Google as so hostile, that they can’t even be trusted to manufacture the hardware required for GrapheneOS, so we’re open to non-Google phones with CalyxOS and VM phones on desktop to completely isolate spyware.

Bazzell on his podcast said he only uses OpenVPN, and never WireGuard because of WireGuard’s 2-minute logging of IPs in memory. We respect his decision to recommend this, but we believe it’s not really appropriate for his target audience of novice users. This type of recommendation be more appropriate for Tor users, anti-government journalists, or hackers under extreme or oppressive countries with VPN restrictions. In our subjective opinion, for the vast majority of average Americans (his target audience), the faster speed of WireGuard outweighs the 2-minute IP log.

Bazzell has done numerous podcast episodes discussing System76 Linux computers with PopOS. We think this is great, and would like to add on that System76 is our main recommendation for those coming from Mac/Apple. Not only is this specific audience used to getting both the hardware and operating system bundled together from the same vendor, but Apples can’t dual boot with Linux (easily) like Windows can. Additionally, Chris Titus has a guide on making PopOS aesthetically look like a Mac.

Regarding Bazzell’s pfSense recommendation, this was a good idea up until pfSense switched licenses and is shifting away from FOSS. Now we recommend OPNsense. But this happened AFTER Bazzell’s podcasts/books, so he gets no blame.

Wherever you are Bazzell, you will be missed. I listened to nearly every episode.