Our mission is to slow down and reverse the erosion of personal digital privacy.

  • Privacy — Why?

    Corporations, political parties, foreign governments—any group with a budget and a purpose—are gaining increasingly perfect information about us. We don’t even know who “they” are, let alone what they are up to.

    Without privacy, the rights afforded to us are not just eroded, they become meaningless. Our lives become cages built of one-way mirrors.

    Others can look in, but we can’t see them.

  • Free Will

    Without privacy we become just another resource in somebody else's algorithm. We become pawns in a game we cannot see.

    The course of our lives will be to serve some unknown purpose. We lose our agency in the cruelest way – within an illusion that we retain control.

    Without privacy, there is no free will.

  • Liberty

    Without privacy, we lose not just individual agency, but collective agency. Our society becomes powerless.

    Without privacy, we lose more than freedom and liberty. We become blind mice in a maze; puppets on invisible strings.

    We lose our humanity.

  • Our Projects

    Our first project was to launch Digital Privacy News, an independent, non-tracking, advertising-free news source on all things Privacy.

    Our second project currently under development is a set of products and services that will help you live a modern life, online and off, without being monitored and recorded at every turn.

They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Benjamin Franklin

Our Mission

As our society grows more dependent on data about you—your health metrics, your movements, your actions, what you read and what you say—it is critical that we defend your rights to be aware of, to access, and to control all of this information.

Magnusson Institute is a Nevada Nonprofit Corporation, whose mission is to inform and empower you to defend your privacy and protect your information.

We are pursuing a number of projects in order to—hopefully—start moving the proverbial needle back in your direction. We will keep updating this page with information about our main efforts.

Independent Journalism

As we developed ideas for how to make a difference in favor of online privacy, it was striking how difficult it was to get informed—without being subject to surveillance while doing so! Without apparent self-irony, online articles documenting how to configure privacy settings on your browser might have over 50 active trackers.

Reliable news sources would have not just a paywall, but on top of that, provide information about what you are reading to major social media corporations. There are definitely sources of information that stay true to their mission—the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) in particular comes to mind—but we felt that there was a gap: a dedicated news site devoted to digital privacy. A news service that did not try to directly monetize visitors.

That led us to our tagline, and that will be what we strive to do: “Informing you without watching you.”

We launched the service in April 2020, you can visit that site at DP.News, and follow us on Twitter at @digitalprivacy to stay up-to-date.

Aside from our core belief that privacy is a fundamental right, we will strive to provide you with the best reporting without bias or advocacy. Below, we 'stream' the latest 4 stories from DP.News—the 'redacted' animation is a tongue-in-cheek comment on how we often find ourselves covering stories that 'they' don't really want you to read.

Visit digitalprivacy.news

Privacy News Aggregator

We can't cover everything, and with people starting to care about digital privacy, we found that there is a great deal of news and information happening across the media—old and new.

To stay on top of it, again you are faced with having to accept being surveilled while learning about surveillance.

We therefore launched a sister site to DP.News over at Privacy.News, again hosting it with no tracking and as little logging as we can. You can read summaries of stories on that page, but note that as soon as you click to go to their respective sites, you're being watched again.

There's only so much that we can do with helping inform you, so a bigger project is to host and provide the software and services you need - our Privacy.App suite, read more below.

Visit privacy.news

 

 

Privacy.App - Privacy Suite

"If it's free, then you're not the customer. You're the product."

Visit Privacy.App

There is no silver bullet for privacy. There is no single product, service, or even short list of advice we can provide you. There are literally hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year to make sure that you are not easily able to safeguard your personal digital privacy.

We have therefore decided to put together a set of products and services that together can start providing some wide-reaching protections. Please visit https://privacy.app for more information, to stay informed, and to sign up for membership.

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