WYRM

You are the most watched generation that has ever lived.

Not by anyone who broke in. By the companies that sold you the phone, and by cameras nobody voted for. We write down how all of it works, in plain language, and give it away.

Read the field guideWhat Wyrm is

Nobody asked you.

Open a weather app and it may tell a dozen companies where you are standing. Your laptop checks in with its manufacturer overnight. The television makes a note of what you watched. None of this is a breach or a bug. It is how the money works, and it is quiet enough by design that you would never think to look.

It is sold as anonymised, which holds for exactly as long as nobody tries: knowing where a phone spends every night names its owner. It does not expire either, so a record of where you were six years ago is still sitting in a broker’s database, still for sale, still linkable to you. And the settings that look like consent mostly govern what you are shown rather than what is taken.

The second half is worse than the first. A handful of companies decide what your own devices are allowed to do, route what you say through servers that keep a copy, and can switch off something you paid for from a thousand miles away. There is nobody to appeal to.

What this page has done about you.

Measuring

Requests to anyone but this site
…
Cookies set
…
Things kept on your device
…
Time you have been here

Every one of those is read from your browser as you sit here, not printed into the page. Anything that is not a zero is named, so you can see what it is and where it came from. On almost any other site, that same span of seconds is spent being logged, profiled and sold. Don’t take it from a page that wants your trust: open your network panel and reload, then do the same on a news site.

We wrote down everything we know.

122 answers across 21 topics, and nothing to sign up for. Which browser to use and why. What to turn off on your phone tonight. What a VPN actually does, and the three things people wrongly believe it does.

Almost none of it is about us. We recommend Signal, Mullvad, Tor, Bitwarden and GrapheneOS because those are the right answers, and a guide that only ever recommended its own author would not be worth reading. Last read through end to end in August 2026.

Start here

What the watching actually looks like

It is rarely a person reading your messages. In 2012 a New York Times reporter documented Target working out that a teenager was pregnant from her shopping, and mailing her baby coupons before she had told her father. That is the shape of it: nothing was hacked, nothing was leaked, and the conclusion was drawn from perfectly ordinary purchases. Twelve years later the same trick runs on your location, your browsing and your car, at a scale no analyst reviews and no human ever sees. Each piece is boring on its own. Together they are a file on you that you never asked for and cannot read.

Read the rest of start here

Your browser

Which browser should I use?

There is a tier for everyone. For strong privacy with no fiddling, the Mullvad Browser. If you will maintain a config, a hardened Firefox goes furthest. For the easiest strong default, Brave. And when what you need is anonymity, not privacy, the Tor Browser, which is a different job entirely.

Read the rest of your browser

Your phone

Kill the advertising ID

Your phone hands every app the same identifier, and that is the leash that lets them stitch your behaviour together across apps and sell it as one profile. On Android, reset and then delete it in Settings under Privacy and Ads. On iPhone, turn off Allow Apps to Request to Track. Note what happened when Apple made that prompt mandatory in 2021: an industry that had described this tracking as something users accepted lost most of it overnight, because it turned out almost nobody accepts it when actually asked.

Read the rest of your phone

All 21 topics, and how many answers each one carries.

  1. 01Start here6
  2. 02Your browser8
  3. 03Your phone9
  4. 04Your computer10
  5. 05Messaging8
  6. 06Email6
  7. 07Social platforms6
  8. 08Passwords & 2FA6
  9. 09Backups4
  10. 10Your data & metadata6
  11. 11Your network6
  12. 12Your home5
  13. 13Your car4
  14. 14Out in the world5
  15. 15When you travel4
  16. 16At work and school5
  17. 17Your money5
  18. 18Anonymity7
  19. 19Your rights5
  20. 20Things that aren't true6
  21. 21Wyrm's own tools1
Open the field guide

People who do this better than us.

If you only ever read one thing from this site, make it one of these.

  • Surveillance Self-DefenseThe EFF's step-by-step guides, kept current. The best free place to go deeper.
  • Privacy GuidesCommunity-vetted, non-commercial tool recommendations, updated constantly.
  • Electronic Frontier FoundationOngoing news and the legal fights over surveillance and digital rights.
  • The MarkupInvestigative journalism on exactly how technology watches people.
  • Exodus PrivacyLook up any Android app and see the trackers baked into it before you install.
  • Privacy Not IncludedMozilla's reviews of how badly a given product, car or gadget behaves.
  • Have I Been PwnedCheck whether your accounts are in a known breach, and get told about the next one.
  • Atlas of SurveillanceWhich surveillance technologies a given US police department actually operates.
  • DeFlockA community-run map of automated licence plate readers. Strongest in the US and Canada; thin elsewhere.

There is no company here.

No investors, no advertising, nothing for sale and no account to make. Founded in Italy, and not as a company. That is not a pitch. It just means there is nobody who could sell you out later, because there is nobody here to sell you to.

If you want to help: tell us what broke, write code, fix our English, or hand the guide to somebody who needs it. Honestly, that last one is most of it.

Ways to helpBack the project