My hope with this family blog is that there may be some nuggets of gold buried in our collective brains that some of you out there find useful. My current favorite subject: data privacy. This has been a hot topic ever since the GDPR became big news (at least in my world). Now there’s CCPA and no doubt more to come in 2020.

It seems appropriate to have my first blog post be a starting point of technology recommendations. These will shift and change over time as I do more research and individual company circumstances change, but the theme will remain the same: limiting and protecting your personal digital footprint as much as is possible while still taking advantage of the technology that exists in today’s world.

• 2FA: Authy
• Browser: Firefox
• Cloud Storage: Sync
• Email: ProtonMail
• Password Manager: Bitwarden
• Search Engine: DuckDuckGo
• Text Messaging: Signal
• VPN: Firefox Private Network

I’ll highlight each of these products in the coming months and explain my rationale. It ultimately comes down to a balance of safety, convenience, and reliability.