About our Mission
Globalization, fake news, foreign interference, racial injustice, economic divides, freedom of speech, environmental threats—across the board of challenges facing us today, at their core, you will find the erosion of digital privacy. From that erosion gushes the fuel that pits us against each other: the monetization of discord and the large-scale digital manipulation of hearts and minds. The Magnusson Institute was founded in an effort to fight back.
There is no silver bullet for privacy. There is no single product, service, or even short list of advice we can provide you. There are literally hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year to make sure that you are not easily able to safeguard your personal digital privacy.
This is why we are creating https://privacy.app with a suite of products and services that together can start providing some wide-reaching protections.
Digital Privacy.
It's important.
Without privacy, the rights afforded to us are not just eroded, they become meaningless.
Without privacy, our lives become cages built from one-way mirrors. Others can look in, but we can’t see them. This is not about everybody knowing everything about everybody. It is about some entities – corporations, political organizations, foreign governments, any group with a budget and a purpose – gaining perfect information about us.
We won’t even know who “they” are, let alone what they are up to.
Without privacy, we lose our free will.
We become an asset for somebody’s algorithm.
We lose our agency, you think you are in control, but you're really not, and in the cruelest way – within an illusion that we retain control.
Without privacy, we become pawns in a game we cannot see, contributing to an outcome of which we are unaware. The course of our lives will be to serve some unknown purpose.
Without privacy, we lose not just individual agency, but collective agency. We become powerless.
Without privacy, we lose more than freedom and liberty.
We lose our humanity.
We become blind mice in a maze; puppets on invisible strings.
This declaration may seem abstract, obtuse. But make no mistake. The consequences are very real.
With your support, we can help you, and you can help us help others.