If you are a member, go here to Sign In.

Membership Kits are currently only available for purchase directly (in person) from either our Reno offices or at a tradeshow that we are attending. We are evaluating alternatives for an online store presence that will safeguard your privacy and hope to announce that soon. If you would like to stay updated, please provide us your email below.


Privacy Suite

Providing you privacy online requires doing more than one thing. It's like making your house safe—locking your front door won't help much if your windows are open. We are working on putting together a complete suite of building blocks that, when used together, should provide you significant privacy protection across the board.

We are a non-profit, our goal is not to build a business out of this. We don't have shareholders or investors. Our goal is to assemble and operate these products and services on your behalf, at cost. In most cases they are open source, and we build and distribute them ourselves. In some cases, they are commercial services, that we license and provide for you. As a member, you get access to all the products and services described below, including support.


Member Kit

Browser

Smart VPN

2TB Storage

Chat

Password Manager

20 Email Inboxes

  Member Kit

When you buy a Magnusson Institute membership, you will receive a tamper-resistant box that will contain all you need to take back your privacy online, including software on a USB drive and hardware security key with PIN code—any "privacy" service that requires you to go online to sign up with them, does not care that much about your privacy. This is our Privacy in a Box™

  1. Instruction guide to get you up and running
  2. Membership card with your account number
  3. Yubico key with NFC for authentication and single sign on (see below for more information)
  4. Tamper resistant pin card for signing in with your Yubico key
  5. A Kingston USB storage drive, that contains the basic software (Browser and VPN) that you need to get securely and privately online—any "privacy" service that requires you to go online to sign up with them, does not care that much about your privacy.
  6. Membership-specific business cards that contain privatized contact information for friends and family
  7. Other product related and documentation cards

  Browser

You need a secure and private internet browser. There are many options for you out there, but they all have various issues. We have taken the Firefox browser and locked it down strongly to protect your privacy from the prying eyes of corporations when you surf the web. We have pre-configured the browser just the way we would want it ourselves, striving for a reasonable balance between privacy and practicality.

We call our browser "MiFF". The biggest challenge for us was to modify Firefox in hundreds of places to not "phone home" to either Mozilla or their main partner Google. That means that when you start up MiFF, you can log in (here) to "privacy.app", and have all your convenient "synchronization" services, including things like passwords (see more below).

  1. Hard code recommended privacy settings into the Browser
  2. Sync your membership account across your devices with our Single Sign On portal (Added benefit of not connecting back to Mozilla servers for account syncing)
  3. Change the default search engine list to Duckduckgo and Startpage
  4. We route Google malware checks through our servers so you are not fingerprinted by Google every time you download files
  5. We route Firefox’s extension version checks through our servers so your fingerprint isn’t logged by Mozilla servers
  6. Pre-package a number of privacy-protecting extensions, including
    1. Privacy Badger (feel free to test our own sites to verify zero trackers)
    2. HTTPS Everywhere
    3. Email relay service (see below)

  Smart VPN

Included in your membership is our custom VPN service, protecting your connection to the internet, and helping obscure your "IP" address and location. Our VPN is of the "smart" variety, meaning that we block hundreds of thousands of unsafe web and internet sites. This VPN will work for all your devices—computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

  1. We have both "cloud" VPN servers and our own out of Reno/Tahoe area datacenter. These include peering agreements with major internet services, providing speed while still securing privacy.
  2. We have our own Autonomous System number (PRIVACY-01), exclusive to our members. What that means is, any internet service can verify you as a Privacy.app member (and thus verify that you are a US resident, for example), without revealing any additional details (like your home IP address).
  3. The default mode is "strict" (or "smart") and runs strict pi-hole servers as DNS caches to block extensive ranges of known-to-be-bad sites and IP addresses. You can also run it in "standard" VPN mode, which runs regular Cloudflare DNS and thus filters less (but may be needed for some online services).

  Secure Hardware Token

Stop account takeovers—do not use inherently unsafe 'username/password'. Included in the membership kit is a personalized Yubikey security device. The YubiKey is a hardware authentication device manufactured by Yubico to protect access to computers, networks, and online services that supports one-time passwords, public-key cryptography, and authentication, and the Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) and FIDO2 protocols developed by the FIDO Alliance.

  1. Secure your membership account with your own physical authentication key
  2. Reduce cognitive load with a single sign on hardware key for logging in to ALL of your services
  3. Manufactured in Sweden and California
  4. Works for Smart Phones as well as personal computers

  2TB Storage

The main companies providing cloud storage today don’t respect your privacy, and in some cases can benefit from the lack of it. They scan your private files, pictures, videos, etc., under the guise of improving and personalizing their services to you. We are offering a storage service that doesn’t read your private information to “improve the service”. Your files deserve to be seen by you only, and we will fight to ensure that it stays that way. Your basic membership includes up to 2 Terrabytes of encrypted storage.

  1. Your files are stored on our cloud servers, and we enterprise-grade NextCloud software locally on these servers to provide you with the service
  2. We generate a random string that functions as your NextCloud ID, and we obscure the relationship between your NextCloud ID and your membership ID. That means you can only be "found" if you provide this ID, you can't be found through your name, email, phone number.

  Chat

Who you talk to, how long you talk to them, and how often you talk to them is fundamentally your private information, and it deserves to be kept from the prying eyes of advertising companies and data miners. Our chat and video services are hosted by our servers, which not only protects your privacy, but also improves the speed and quality of the service.

  1. We use NextCloud Talk hosted on our servers in azure cloud
  2. Like our storage service, your randomly generated NextCloud ID will not be tied to your membership ID

  Password Manager

Save and sync your passwords across devices without having them be stored on shady company servers that want to monetize you. Just works as part of our MIFF browser.

  1. Similar functionality to Firefox Lockwise, except the data is stored on a database that we manage
  2. Works through the same mechanism as our browser account syncing, through our single sign on service, and thus access is protected by your Yubikey hardware token (see above)

  Email and Email Relay

Membership includes up to 10 email inboxes, from a variety of email domain names. This email service is paid for by you as part of membership—meaning, there is no hidden agenda, we're not reading your emails to provide privacy nor are we using the email addresses for any other purpose.

In addition, you can have up to 100 (one hundred) randomly generated "relay emails". This service allows you to generate emails on the fly for whichever service you choose, and have those emails redirected to the primary email of your choice (including one of the email inboxes included in membership). Ideally, you use a different (unique) email address for every service online that you sign up for, making it harder for those services to connect that information with anything else about you. Use different login emails everywhere you go, but only keep track of one inbox. You can also "block" any of these relays, meaning, any emails sent to it is instantly sent into a black hole.

  1. We use the Firefox browser extension Firefox Relay as the base of our product, which includes recognizing email fields and automatically generating an email and filling the field
  2. On our accounts page, we allow you to set which base email you want to act as the endpoint for the redirect
  3. We have an accessible dashboard on privacy.app where you can see all your aliases and where they go
  4. The mail will get sent to servers run by forwardmx, located out of Switzerland, which is hosting any aliases that are generated in a database, and they will redirect the email to your “real” email
  5. relay.privacy.app is run by us

Mobile Privacy

Protecting your privacy requires keeping track of a multitide of technologies across a multitude of different devices. To that end, we are working on mobile versions of our Privacy Browser, Smart VPN, Secure Storage, Chat and Video, and Password Manager. Coming soon.

    • Products

      Privacy Browser

      1. Privacy settings enabled by default
      2. Account syncing through our membership service
      3. Pre-configured with well-known and trusted privacy addons
    • Products

      Smart VPN

      1. Blocks ads and trackers
      2. Routes your internet traffic through our servers
      3. Not blocked/blacklisted by most popular internet services
    • Products

      Secure Storage

      1. Lightning fast upload and download
      2. Hosted on servers we own
      3. Encrypted
    • Products

      Chat and Video

      1. Anonymized messaging
      2. Fast, high quality video calls
      3. Tied in to storage service so you can share files easily
    • Products

      Password Manager

      1. Access your passwords from your mobile device
      2. Works seamlessly with MIFF browser
      3. Just sign in with your membership login, and it works