Build your personal threat model (decide what you are actually protecting)
Before you buy a VPN, delete your accounts or encrypt your hard drive, answer three questions: who are you hiding from, what are you protecting, and how much effort is it worth? That short exercise is called a threat model, and it is the difference between privacy that fits your life and a pile of half-used tools that lock you out of your own accounts. This is the foundation course of the Going Ghost track. You finish it with a one-page written plan, specific to you, that tells you which of the later courses to do first and which to skip. Perfect privacy is a myth, and chasing it has real costs. This mission helps you spend your effort where it actually counts.
- Somewhere to write. Paper and a pen is fine. A notes app or a plain-text file is fine. The thinking matters, not the tool
- About an hour, undisturbed. You can come back and change it later: a threat model is a living document, not a one-off form
- An honest half-hour with yourself. The hard part is not the tools, it is being truthful about what you are actually worried about
Why a threat model comes first (and the cost of overdoing it)
Understand what a threat model is, why it saves you time and money, and why more privacy is not always better.
Most people do privacy backwards. They read a scary article, install a VPN, a new browser and three extensions in an afternoon, feel safer for a week, then quietly give up because everything is slower and something stopped working. Nothing on that list was wrong. The mistake was starting with tools instead of starting with a plan.
A threat model is that plan. It is a short, honest answer to five questions: what am I protecting, who am I protecting it from, what can those people realistically do, how much would it hurt if they succeeded, and how much effort is it worth to stop them? Security professionals build one before they defend anything, because you cannot sensibly protect everything against everyone. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's free Surveillance Self-Defense ↗ guide is built around these same questions, and it is the plain-English source this mission follows.
This is for lawful personal privacyOrdinary people who want less spam and less exposure. Journalists protecting a source. Activists and campaigners. People leaving an abusive relationship. Public figures, and anyone who wants a smaller footprint. Here is the line, and we will not cross it anywhere in this track: this is about protecting yourself from people who should not have your information. It is not about evading the police, dodging debts, hiding a crime, or defeating a lawful investigation or court order. If that is what you are looking for, this is the wrong guide, and a solicitor is the right one.
Why bother writing it down?Because a model in your head drifts and exaggerates. Written down, it does three things: it stops you buying tools you do not need, it stops you ignoring the one real risk because you were busy with five imaginary ones, and it gives you a checklist you can actually finish and then review.
The part nobody says out loud: more privacy is not free, and more is not always betterEvery defence has a cost, and some costs are severe:
- Getting locked out of your own life. Lose the only key to an encrypted drive or a password manager and the data is gone for good. No support line can recover it. That is the point of encryption, and it is also its danger.
- Losing access and contact. Delete the wrong account and you can lose years of photos, your logins to other services, or the only way an old friend can reach you.
- Standing out. On a normal home network, a lone person routing everything through an anonymity network at odd hours can look more unusual, not less. Blending in is often better privacy than looking like you have something to hide.
- Burnout and daily friction. A setup that makes every login a chore is a setup you will abandon in a month, which leaves you with the worst of both worlds: the hassle and none of the protection.
- False confidence. A VPN does not make you anonymous. A privacy browser does not stop you logging into an account that then identifies you. Believing a tool does more than it does is its own risk.
So the goal is not maximum privacy. The goal is enough privacy for your actual situation, bought at a cost you can live with. The rest of this mission is how you work out what enough means for you.
TipKeep the finished model somewhere you will not lose it but others will not stumble on it. A note in your password manager is ideal. If your worry is a person with access to your devices, see the safety warning in step 3 before you write anything down on a shared or monitored device.