BJ Mendelson: Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Privacy Tips podcast. I'm your host, BJ You know something, I honestly did not know if Stupid Sexy Privacy was ever gonna come back. Thanks to our friends at DuckDuckGo, it is. So starting August 28th, we're gonna re-air the original mini series.

Mostly how it aired from 2022 to 2023. There's gonna be some changes, but we thought it'd be worth resharing the episodes because even if some of the stuff did get a little dated, we can always tell you that in the show notes. And I think, let's say like 95 % of the information in the original series still holds true So we kind of struggled with this. We were kind of like, okay, do we do a full year of new episodes? Or do we re-air the original episodes and just put in the show notes where there were changes and then air new ones? And so we decided to re-air it because I think a lot of the stuff is good.

But anyway, August 28th, which is next Thursday, starting at midnight Thursday, there will be a new episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy. That's going to continue all through 2026. So really again, thank you to DuckDuckGo for making that happen.

And like I said, after all the old episodes air, the new episodes will air same bat time, same bat channel, taking us through 2026. So I hope you'll join us. This podcast is a little different.

This is like me doing an audio edition of what's available at stupidsexyprivacy.com. So it's not going to have like a consistent release schedule the way stupid sexy privacy would. I think of it like this where like stupid sexy privacy is like the flagship and it's kind of like the highlight. We're going to share with you the best privacy tip and then we're going to share with you and then a really interesting guest will join us, who's gonna talk to you about either something related to the privacy tip or something related to just these larger questions that we have in the privacy space and the tech space. We also get a little into artificial intelligence. So that's what stupid sexy privacy is. This is more just, I'm gonna record these as I go. There's probably gonna be like a few hundred of them by the time I'm done. So there won't be like a consistent release schedule. So if you're subscribed to Privacy Tips you will at least get like an episode once

But you might get a couple of weeks where there's a ton of them and you might get a couple of weeks where there's like one or two, or maybe just one. So I can't promise this will have a regular release schedule, but Stupid Sexy Privacy will starting August 28th, Thursday at midnight. So one of the changes, just as an example, in the first episode that's gonna air Thursday, August 28th, as you can hear us talking about 1Password. 1Password is totally fine.

But since we recorded the original series, which is back in 2022, we've decided to go more towards Bitwarden over 1Password, and we'll talk a little bit about why later. And for those of you who want...

more privacy or for those of you who want to save money, because look we're gonna share with you a lot of different tools, equipmen,t hardware this stuff adds up, and it's not fair and it's not right, unfortunately

It's an end product of the world that we live in, right? We're kind of forced to take care of our own privacy as opposed to the large companies taking on the onus of managing our privacy. So we will also make open-source recommendations. And so when we talk about 1Password, when we talk about Bitwarden, for those of you who want more security, or those who want who...

I might want a free solution. You have KeePassXC So we'll try to make those open source recommendations as much as possible. The only drawback, you'll hear me mention this a lot, the only drawback is going to be when I mention something like KeePassXC or I mention something like FreeFilesync. Yes, it's free, but what you're saving in terms of the cost, you're going to lose in terms of time spent. So like, KeePassXC has more of a learning curve. You're going to need to spend more time with it to get it optimized just the way that you would like. And so there is a trade off. And so I thought that was really important. And you know, if you're listening to the show and you're like, BJ, I think I know a more secure password manager than the ones you mentioned. That's cool. That's totally fine.

This project is more ... We're just happy if you use a password manager as opposed to like not using one at all, right? Like if I can get you to change your behavior in some small way to just think about managing your passwords better, we've succeeded. Like we've already done our job. So we're not gonna lecture you. We're not gonna hector to you. We're not gonna try to sell you products. You know, we're sponsored by DuckDuckGo, but they are our only sponsors. So like if you hear us talk about something like Bitwarden or hear us talk about something like Blockparty, we're not telling you about these things because we're being paid to do so. We're telling you about these things because we actually use them ourselves.

Let's go to our first privacy tip. This is going to be part one of two.

Today I'm just going to introduce the concept to you and then in the next part we're going to talk a little bit more about why you want to do this. So you can email us at StupidSexyPrivacy@Duck.com. We're going to ask you to take two steps, though before you do so. First is going to be to sign up for a free ProtonMail email account. And second is once you've signed up for that account to head on over to DuckDuckGo.com and get yourself a free email privacy protection address.

duck.com is an example of this ... I don't want to call it a condom for your email, but I've heard that used a lot. However you want to describe it, it is an extra layer of protection. So you go and you get your free ProtonMail account. Then once you've got your account, you're to go to DuckDuckGo and you're to get a free email protection add-on that's going to add an additional layer of security. In the next episode, we're to go into more detail. If you go to the contact page on StupidSexyPrivacy.com you'll see this explained in a bit more detail as well. After completing these steps, you will have an encrypted email address and a way to disguise that address when you sign up for things like our newsletter. Now, when you email us, what's gonna be really cool is your conversation with us is gonna be completely encrypted and it's inaccessible to the fascists and weirdos since we use ProtonMail too.

No service is perfect.

I personally use ProtonMail, so that's the one that I recommend again throughout the series. I'm not gonna suggest you use something that I don't personally use myself. And so in this specific case, I use ProtonMail. They are not an affiliate, they are not an advertiser. It's just a service that I happen to use. But that said, no service is perfect. But what you have is if you complete these two steps ... You're gonna have something that's 100 % better than what you did before. So, okay, tomorrow we will, well, not tomorrow, well, tomorrow for me, like I'm gonna record this tomorrow, but for you in the next episode, we'll go into a bit more detail about this. So if you're like, wait, what, what do I do? Hold on, we're gonna get to it. Again, I'm just introducing the concept. We're gonna give you things in very small bite-sized pieces. So we don't want you to feel overwhelmed. There's a lot to do, but. ⁓

You know, look, if you're a fellow millennial or younger, you are definitely burnt out. And even if you don't describe yourself as burnt out, then you have felt a generational burnout from a lot of the conditions that we exist in. So we structured Stupid Sexy Privacy in such a way that it's not overwhelming. These episodes are short. The emails are short. The posts are short. Sometimes you'll get an episode like this on Privacy Tips where I'm just talking about like what to do with the concept of it. And then you'll get another episode where I'm going to get into more detail.

We just wanna keep everything concise. That's our episode for today. Today's episode of Privacy Tips was recorded at the DuckDuckGo podcast studio in Los Angeles, California. I'm one of the producers here at Stupid Sexy Privacy and I'm also the guy who writes all of the email content. My name is BJ Mendelson. We hope you'll join us next time on Privacy Tips. And again, Stupid Sexy Privacy is going to re-premiere on August 28th. We're gonna have a new episode every week all through 2026.

I will see you real soon.