Good job on guide. I've seen many such privacy/security guides over the years, but the information gets out of date after a few years, so it's nice to have a well-written fresh guide explaining recent issues and contemporary tools.<p>> <i>If the fact that TrueCrypt is not truly FOSS, or the implications of ‘plausible deniability’ worry you, there are a couple of other highly regarded encryption programs available</i><p>The phrase "the implications of plausible deniability worry you" sounds ominous to beginners in security/privacy issues, and might even discourage them from using TrueCrypt (which is the best such tool as you correctly mention).<p>It is possible to use TrueCrypt in a non-deniable way if that concerns someone: You would always create a hidden volume and then be prepared to reveal both the hidden volume and outer volume passphrases when required. Since TrueCrypt permits only 1 hidden container, your oppressor will be convinced that you're not hiding additional data when you reveal the two passphrases. Such discussion however is way too much for the intended audience of your guide, so I suggest to leave this out as well.<p>> <i>even the most modest cell phone can be easily tracked by the satellites it uses to work</i><p>A "modest cell phone" doesn't have GPS and is therefore not trackable by satellites. What you probably want to say is that even the most modest cell phone is easily tracked by proximity to a known cell tower. Its location can be further refined by triangular due to signal strength from neighboring cell towers.<p>> <i>A better tactic however, is to use the CCleaner utility (available for Windows and OSX), which not only cleans out pesky Flash cookies, but also a host other rubbish</i><p>You should mention BitBleach[1] instead of CCleaner or in addition to it. BitBleach is open source and even Bruce Schneier swears by it. I used both simultaneously for a while on my Windows systems and I found that BitBleach found <i>many</i> more files and junk to erase than CCleaner.<p>[1] <a href="http://bleachbit.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://bleachbit.sourceforge.net/</a>
There is a great tool for scrubbing metadata from files from the tor/tails project that is not in the guide:<p>mat: <a href="https://mat.boum.org/" rel="nofollow">https://mat.boum.org/</a><p>It also has a list metadata option which is handy enough to warrant the apt-get invocation.
Proposing Comodo free firewall made me laugh a bit. I'd rather have no antivirus. Comodo is installing its geek buddy crapware, and god knows what are they scooping from my pc with it. I installed it once to see how it works.<p>Proposing Ubuntu as distro that would be protecting my privacy. Canonical was grabbing user data from Ubuntu as well.<p>Some parts of this guide are ok, but those are points that stood out as not researched well.