🕵️ Spreading privacy & security to the masses
Techlore was built to prove privacy & security are not just achievable - but simple and accessible. We manage several projects, communities, and content to spread privacy & security to the masses.
Henry - Runner, coach, artist, musician, book nerd, & privacy advocate. Owner of Techlore.
Tori - Coffee addict, bookworm, writer, productivity nerd, privacy advocate, and perpetually contemplating existence.
Jonah - Technology educator, writer, community expert, gamer (of the tabletop variety), and resident self-hosting shill.
Suzie - Gamer, wannabe tech nerd, anime enthusiast, manga and book lover, partner that Nate Bartram always talks about.
- YouTube YouTube is the platform we started on and will continue to publish to. We are firm believers in targeting the masses who are using non-private platforms like YouTube.
- Odysee Odysee is a federated YouTube alternative for users who don't want to engage with our content through YouTube. Full disclosure: we do not manage or check comments on this platform.
- PeerTube Similar to Odysee, PeerTube is another method of watching our content in a freedom-respecting way.
We've been previously opposed to sponsors, but after asking our community for their thoughts and protocols for us to put in place to maintain transparency, we've developed the following protocols:
- First, we will only accept sponsors that either:
- we rely on for our production workflow
- one or more of our team-members rely on that they can vouch for
- Or are simply services we feel confident recommending to you, after using them ourselves.
- In other words, we need to actually use the service or product!
- Second, services are unable to sponsor a video where a conflict of interest may arise. For example, a VPN cannot sponsor a VPN review, for obvious reasons.
- VPN sponsors are not allowed in any context. We host open source VPN tools, and accepting any kind of sponsorship would work against that. We will be resuming the same opt-in affiliate protocol we've been using.
- Fourth, we hold every right and will cancel sponsorships for companies we feel no longer align with our values. Things change in the world, and we want to change with it.
- Finally, sponsors are unable to influence the content we make, our recommendations, or our criticisms towards the sponsor itself or its competitors.
For more information, we encourage users to watch our original video covering how we handle sponsors
Affiliate marketing has a bad rep and for good reason--they're frequently abused with little transparancy behind their usage. However, affiliate marketing offers the utmost creative freedom to individuals without relying on a traditional sponsorship relationship where conflicts of interest may arise.
We created this document explaining how we prevent conflicts of interest and maintain transparancy behind what we recommend to our audience. We will not allow our content or recommendations to be influenced by an affiliate plan. All our affiliate plans are opt-in, clearly labeled, and generally include non-affiliate standard links alongside them.
You'll find some of our assets in this repo. You are not allowed to steal our assets, but if you're covering our work and would like to reference us go for it.
You'll find some of our pre-production scripts in this repo. For larger projects we want to make sure we are as accurate as possible, and publishing some of our scripts to be verified by the community may catch obvious mistakes we may otherwise miss.
Great question! We're not just a YouTube channel. We are aiming to expand into other methods to advocate for privacy.
- Go Incognito is our free course teaching users everything they need to know from start to finish about privacy and security.
- We host two major communities to offer a place for people to chat about privacy and learn from other community members. We are aware of varying threat models and are happy to accomodate community memebrs of all levels.
- Surveillance Report is a video podcast in collaboration with The New Oil to keep viewers updated on recent events in the privacy & security world.
- Plexus is an open source project crowd-sourcing what apps do/don't work without Google Play Services for users looking to switch to a de-googled ROM.
- Our VPN Toolkit is designed to educate users on the advantages & disadvantages of VPN providers.
- We have many more projects we'd love to work on, but our small team already has enough on its plate. As we expand, we hope to continue to find new ways of advocating for user privacy. Stay tuned!