Episode 6: Building Your Threat Model
Duration: ~10 minutes | Format: Practical
Episode Summary
“Privacy” isn’t one thing. Protecting yourself from advertisers is different from protecting yourself from hackers. Protecting yourself from an abusive ex is different from protecting yourself from a government. The tools are different, the tradeoffs are different—and if you don’t know what you’re defending against, you’ll either do too little or exhaust yourself doing too much.
This is the practical turn after the first five episodes. Before any specific tool, you build a threat model.
- The four questions: What to protect, who from, the consequences, and what you’ll trade
- The common adversaries: Advertisers, hackers, employers, governments, and personal threats—and what each actually wants
- Why most advice is wrong: It’s written for worst-case scenarios, not real people
- Three worked examples: The Casual User, the Security-Conscious Professional, the At-Risk Individual
- A pen-and-paper exercise to build your own threat model right now
Key Quotes
“If you don’t know what you’re defending against, you’ll either do too little—or exhaust yourself doing too much.”
“For these adversaries, you don’t need to be perfect. You need to be better than default—harder to track, harder to hack, less exposed.”
“Privacy is about raising the cost of surveillance to the point where you’re not worth the effort. For most adversaries, that bar is surprisingly low.”
The Takeaway
Build your threat model right now—on paper. List three to five things you want to protect. For each, list who might realistically want access (it’s probably not the CIA). Rate the consequences if they succeeded: low, medium, or high. Then, for your highest-risk combinations, note just one action you could take. We’re not solving everything today—we’re starting. Keep it somewhere you can reference as you add tools episode by episode.
Learn More
Start here: Privacy 101 Week 11: Operational Security
Go deeper: Privacy 101 Week 1: Why Privacy Matters
Transcript
Coming soon