Pr1vy

Welp, I released an app! Pr1vy was originally just going to be a password generator, with in-depth explanations on what makes a password secure or insecure. But then it came to me that this could be the perfect opportunity to explain countless other privacy-related technologies.

Essentially, the goal of this app is to raise data privacy awareness. We live in a digital world where all of our most private and sensitive information is leaked for all the world to see, then processed for corporations to make bets on what we’ll do next. This doesn’t have to be the case if you simply adopted a few hygienic digital habits.

In its current state, Pr1vy is simply a cool and informative password generator. But over these next few weeks/months, I’d like to greatly expand its feature set:

1) Add an interactive experiment that drives home why reusing passwords is terrible, since it's the most common way for people to get "hacked." I'll propose the solution of using a password manager, and subscribing to Have I Been Pwned.

  1. Go step-by-step through the process of creating an RSA key-pair, and show how you can use it to communicate with a friend without any worry of eavesdropping.

  2. After creating your key-pair, you can optionally go through a tutorial for generating a session key. It will explain the limitations of RSA keys, and the necessity for a completely different type of key for practical communication purposes.

  3. Show how you can make sure that the file a friend sent you wasn’t modified in-transit.

  4. General internet hygiene detailing the tactics of nefarious ads, trackers, and public WiFi.

So check out Pr1vy if any of this interests you! It's currently on the Play Store, and soon the App Store, for just a dollar. It'll also be free on F-Droid once I figure out how to deploy to that platform. Every app on there is free, open-source, with reproducible builds. My hope with Pr1vy is that it can teach you why that makes F-Droid so awesome.