About
Preventive Privacy is a small site about staying safe online, run by one person who actually uses the tools being written about. My goal is simple, explore different tools and products - antivirus, password managers, VPNs, identity protection, and breach response, and give you something honest you can act on. Next to this I will focus on exploring different topics related to security, privacy and AI and try to pass along the knowledge.
Why Preventive Privacy Exists?
I have loved tech for as long as I can remember. The kind of kid who took things apart, fell down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and got into computers way before anyone needed me to. I remember my mother giving me an old broken clock while I was a kid, I was amazed by the back mechanism and played with it for hours until I finally took it fully apart. That curiosity never really went away, it just shifted into a career and a long list of weekend projects.
Digital security caught my attention because of how much of it is solved badly. Most "best antivirus 2026" articles are written by people who installed nothing. Most password manager comparisons are summaries of marketing pages. Meanwhile, real people are getting phished, having their identities stolen, and losing money to scams that a five minute habit change would have prevented. That is the gap that I would like to help reduce and truly contribute to peoples digital life.
Who is behind this?
The site is written by one person under the Preventive Privacy name. Day job is software engineering. I have spent the last 6+ years as a Java backend engineer building production systems across online gaming, retail, and fintech, gravitating toward reactive systems, clean code, and turning fuzzy requirements into something dependable. That background is why this site leans technical when it needs to. I can read a privacy policy, a TLS handshake, or a vulnerability writeup, and I will tell you what they actually mean in plain language.
How I write here?
Every product I write about, I actually install and use. Not for ten minutes either, but long enough to hit the friction points, the weird defaults, the moments where the UI fights you. Screenshots in my posts are real screenshots from my own machine. Opinions are mine, even the ones that will annoy a vendor. If I have not tested something, I will say so plainly instead of pretending otherwise.
Not everything here is a product review though. A good chunk of what I want to write are deeper informational pieces, the kind where I pick a topic, spend a few weekends actually understanding it, then explain it in a way I wish someone had explained it to me. How VPNs actually route your traffic under the hood. What AI is changing about phishing, scams, and detection. Why a particular breach happened at the protocol level and not just the headline level. These pieces take longer to put together, but they are the ones I personally want to read, and writing them is how I learn the topic well enough to be useful on it.
Articles try to do one thing well. Answer the question you came in with, give you the context to understand the answer, then get out of the way - no matter if it's a product review or a tutorial explain how things work under the hood.
What you will find here, and what I am curious about
The main beat is digital security and identity protection. Breach response. Password managers. Two factor authentication. Antivirus. VPNs. Removing yourself from data brokers. Spotting phishing before it costs you.
Outside that, I am open to a wider conversation. The internet itself fascinates me, basically everything that runs on it. I also lift, I listen to a lot of music, and I am happy to talk about either. If you have a topic you want covered or a tool you want tested, send it over. Reader requests genuinely shape what goes up next.
Publisher Name
I publish under a pen name to keep professional and editorial work separate. The testing is real, the opinions are mine, and the work is firsthand. The byline being a brand instead of a person does not change any of that.