About Privacy Rightfully

Privacy Rightfully is an education centre with the goal of helping you understand and learn how to take precautions to protect your privacy and security, online and offline. 

“..people do in fact care about privacy, but they are bewildered by the difficulty of protecting their personal information in a time of rapid technological change and limited options.” – Austin Sarat in ‘A World Without Privacy‘

Issues in the current landscape

The quote above perfectly address the problem we’re trying to solve for you if you’ve ever found looking to address your cybersecurity and been completely overwhelmed by it. The issues preventing or making it difficult for people to make real change are:

• Technological change: Going online has been thrust on everyone with more and more of our lives being pushed online. It’s almost impossible to choose to be offline if you wanted to and the threats are growing. People have suffered identity theft, lost money, lost their job, had their reputation destroyed, become unemployable, suffered public embarrassment or notoriety from ‘going viral’ about something, marriages and families have broken down, etc. It can all go wrong online
• Not a taught life skill: The change has been rapid but the education hasn’t kept up, it’s like we’ve been using a new piece of machinery without the necessary training. It’s up to everyone to fend for themselves and self-educate or suffer cybersecurity risks
• Inauthentic resources: Self-education is mostly informal for a lot of people which means searching the internet. The trouble is a lot of content is sponsored by or belonging to a company with a vested interest in the product or service being sold. Even independent bloggers will write content promoting a product or service because of an affiliate relationship and not because that product or service is the best one to solve a certain issue.

What are we trying to do?

So, the situation is that constantly increasing parts of our lives are being pushed online (and rapidly too), we’re not taught how to protect and manage this, and when we look around for help the go-to places may have hidden agendas.

This is the main problem we’re looking to solve or at least help you with as much as we can and it’s not simply showing you how to change settings on your apps and devices for example.  We’re also thinking about the offline world – your personal safety and security, what you disclose to various people or companies, preventative measures against identity theft and perhaps how to change small parts of your everyday behaviour which you may not even realise is risky. 

At Privacy Rightfully you will be learning new information and skills to help you action real change to help improve all things security. But we firmly believe that privacy is more of a lifestyle choice than a skill and will therefore be more difficult to develop for a lot of people. Not from a technical standpoint but from a change, development, and formation of new habits and behaviours perspective. It’s a longer term proposition very similar to changing food habits when going on a diet to improve your health for example. Good on you for doing it proactively now, rather than reactively later after negative event like having your identity stolen (or having a heart attack per the health example).

What we’re not doing

We’re not telling you how to live

We do not subscribe to fearmongering for clicks or traffic and we don’t judge how open you do or don’t want to be online.  We do not tell you what to do as everyone has differing ideas about privacy, differing levels of openness, and differing adversity to risk.  We want to empower you to know about and control how much of your data is out there based on your personal views and comfort levels on privacy; not ours.

We are not ‘anti data’ or the enemy of digital marketers

We are not trying to build an anonymous or recluse internet using society whereby no one shares their data.  We recognise mass data collection has made our lives immensely easier, more convenient, time saving and allowed for us to have access to things we didn’t even know existed for little or no cost.  We simply feel a line is being crossed by modern data driven business models and we want to help members of the public to evaluate the risks and threats associated with that (as well as other areas of privacy and security outside of data).

Indeed, marketers and advertisers have a vested interest in increasing consumers’ confidence and trust regarding how and how much of their data is generated, stored, and used. 

We can’t promise the world

We cannot and do not give legal or financial advice of course, nor can we guarantee that following what we have written about is 100% foolproof or will give the desired change you’re looking for (see our Disclaimer and Terms & Conditions for more about this).  As we said earlier, one of the biggest issues is the speed of technological change and a tool, service, or action we suggest may not be enough against future threats.

Phase one

As our website grows so too will our library of varying types of content, each piece will be categorised based on its format, structure, and goals. Like a typical library we have different ‘rooms’ for you to visit depending on the category of most interest to you. With phase one we are launching with:

The Reading Room

A space for essay style articles digging deeper into privacy related issues.  We aim to draw upon real world examples, academic research, statistics, and psychology as much as is relevant to the topic at hand. This room also includes our ‘101 series’ content where we explain various privacy and security related concepts using as much plain English as possible. 

The News Room

A bit of a blast based on new information as it comes to hand regarding things like data hacks, alerts, their potential impacts etc.

Our Newsletter

Our email newsletter of the content we’ve covered across the two rooms above, so you don’t need to keep checking back to the website.  We will currently send this ad hoc moving to fortnightly and eventually weekly when we launch phase two.

Phase two

Phase two doesn’t currently have an launch date because without giving too much away, we’re really hoping to speak to the quote by Austin Sarat above and give you the practical tools you need to make the changes you want. 

Phase One: Providing you with information and education

Phase Two: Providing you with the practical tools and actions to take

Stay tuned and thank you for your patience as we get up and running.

For enquiries email us at: info@privacyrightfully.com

Below you will find our latest articles or search by area of interest using the Library Rooms navigation in the top menu.