3 Things You Need To Fix This Year
It’s a new year, and a perfect time for fresh starts. Especially when it comes to privacy.
You’re probably reading this newsletter because you care about privacy. But caring about privacy doesn’t always mean knowing where to begin. In fact, many people feel overwhelmed when they first start thinking about how to protect themselves.
This newsletter is for you. And for anyone in your life who knows privacy matters, but has been putting off that first step.
We will go over three small things you can change right now that will have a huge impact on your privacy in 2026.
Let’s start with email, because it’s an essential tool in most people’s lives, and is a really easy one to make more private.
Switching email might sound like a massive and intimidating step. But stick with me. The first step to better email privacy is smaller than you think. It is just about getting started.
Statistically speaking, almost everyone reading this probably uses a non-private email provider, like Gmail.
You probably got set up a long time ago, and now you’re just using it out of habit.
What’s wrong with using a non-private provider? Well, let’s look at Gmail in particular. It is absolutely horrible for privacy.
Gmail is scanning and analyzing the contents of every private message. That includes personal conversations, work correspondence, health-related messages, financial information, and everything else that passes through your inbox.
Advertising is, after all, Google’s core business model. In fact, advertising makes up roughly 78 percent of Google’s revenue.
So email is one of the first things I recommend changing, because the impact it has on your privacy is huge.
There are many private email services you could use instead, like Tuta, Startmail, and Proton.
I personally use Proton. One of the reasons Proton is such an easy place to start is that they have a button that allows you to automatically import your entire history of emails into Proton from your existing Gmail account or other major provider.
If you’ve had your old email for decades, you don’t need to immediately abandon it. Just take the first small step: Create a new email address on Proton, at first for free if you’d like, and just get it set up for now.
Your new email account will be waiting for you whenever you’re ready to start using it. And when that time comes, you can slowly transition people over to it. Start responding to emails from your new address and let people know you have a new one.
But the important part is this: take that first step and get the account set up, ready to go.
Messaging
The next thing that is easy to tackle right away this new year is messaging.
Most people still rely heavily on SMS or social media DMs to talk to family, friends, and coworkers. And it’s largely because it’s what everyone else is using.
The problem is that SMS wasn’t designed to be private. In fact, it was specifically designed to be non-private. It runs through telecom infrastructure that’s built for monitoring and interception. Basically every country in the world has lawful intercept regulations. And most social media messaging platforms are tied to advertising business models. They log and analyze every communication to serve better ads, and potentially to sell that data to others.
It’s much better to use a messaging platform that is end-to-end encrypted, which means that the messaging platform itself can’t even read your messages, and that collects as little metadata about users as possible. One option is Signal.
It takes about 30 seconds to set up. Seriously. You download the app, confirm the number you want attached, and you’re good to go.
What surprises most people when they install Signal is how many of their contacts are already there. Estimates put Signal at around 70 to 100 million users, so it’s much more likely than people expect that they’ll already know people on the platform.
Everyone I’ve helped sign up already had a long list of people using it.
To find these people, click “compose,” and Signal will show you all your contacts who are already on the platform.
Once again, you don’t need to entirely switch to Signal overnight, or even convince all your friends to move there. But you can immediately start talking with all your contacts who are already there. If you simply choose Signal whenever it’s an option, you’re already taking a huge step to improve your privacy.
But your impact goes even further than just protecting your own privacy. Think about it: those contacts of yours who are already on Signal are probably there because they care about privacy too. So every time you opt to talk with them via Signal instead of another platform, you’re also helping them protect their own privacy.
You’re protecting both of you.
And each message you send or receive is data that you’re not feeding to telecom companies, advertising systems, and governments.
Browser
The third easy place to start this new year is your browser.
And this might be the easiest step of all.
Your browser is the main gateway between you and the internet. It sees where you go, what you search for, and how you interact with websites. It reveals your innermost preferences, interests, and opinions. So the choice of browser matters a lot more than people realize.
About 70 percent of the world uses Google Chrome, which is horrendous for privacy.
Chrome gives Google deep visibility into your online activity. Chrome also still allows third-party cookies by default, while every other mainstream option has blocked them for years. Google spent years promising the world they’d eventually block third-party cookies in Chrome. Then they kept delaying, and eventually reversed the decision completely, because third-party cookies are central to their advertising business.
Switching browsers is a really simple shift. You just download a new browser and start using it.
I personally like to use Brave, because out of the box it has really strong privacy defaults.
If you want to compare privacy on some of the most popular browser options to choose one you’d prefer, privacytests.org provides a great comparison.
It’s also super easy to import your bookmarks, if you’re worried about leaving those behind. In Chrome, you click “export bookmarks” in your bookmark manager, and in Brave you click “import bookmarks” in your bookmark manager.
You can even import your saved passwords if you want, by going to password settings and selecting the password file to import. Although I recommend you use a dedicated password manager instead of saving passwords in your browser anyway.
Brave blocks trackers by default, protects against bounce tracking, reduces fingerprinting, and warns you before you load a lot of known malicious sites, without you having to install a bunch of extensions.
It’s a really solid choice that will immediately beef your privacy this new year.
2026 Is the Year of Privacy
There are many reasons why you might have decided to improve your privacy this new year.
Maybe it was because of a data breach. Or a headline about governments buying all your data, including location data. Or perhaps it was just the slow realization that almost everything digital now comes with constant monitoring baked in, and you have no control over who will eventually get access to that data.
When people start thinking about privacy, they often assume the solution is extreme. But luckily, this isn’t true.
The three steps we’ve talked about are really easy ways to get started in the new year. And even if these are the only things you change for the whole year, the impact on your day-to-day privacy will be huge.
If you’re just starting your privacy journey, there’s no need to feel overwhelmed or think that you have to do everything at once. Just choose something from this list, email, messaging, or browser, and make a change today.
It’s only with your participation, supporting tools that protect people instead of fueling surveillance ecosystems, that we have the hope of writing a better future.
Happy New Year everyone!
This is the year we get serious about the fight for privacy.
Naomi
Reminder: we don’t do show sponsors or have article sponsors. These are simply examples of privacy tools that I personally use. If you have suggestions for tools you love, please let everyone know in the comments!
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