How This Section Works
Anti-surveillance gear is a market with very little published testing behind it. A product can be sincerely designed, widely recommended, and still have no measured effect on the system it claims to counter. These guides separate three things that marketing copy tends to blend together: what a vendor claims, what has actually been measured, and against which specific system it was measured. Where the evidence is thin, that is stated rather than filled in.
Nothing in this section is a purchase recommendation, and no link here is paid.
Wearables and Apparel
Anti-Facial-Recognition Accessories
Camouflage makeup, infrared eyewear, adversarial-pattern clothing and masks, checked against the published record. The headline finding is that most of this category does not work against current systems, and the designer of the best-known example says so himself.
Read GuidePhones and Laptops
Privacy Phone Hardware
How handset hardware differs on baseband isolation, hardware kill switches, firmware openness and update life.
Read GuideOpen Source Phones
Handsets running open operating systems, and what each of them genuinely opens up versus what stays closed.
Read GuideOpen Source Laptops
Machines that can run open firmware, and where proprietary blobs remain in the boot chain regardless.
Read GuideOpen Firmware: Coreboot and Libreboot
Replacing vendor firmware, what it removes from the trust chain, and the hardware that supports it.
Read GuideSecurity Keys and Wallets
Hardware Security Keys
Physical authentication keys compared on protocol support, firmware openness and attestation behaviour.
Read GuideOpen Source Security Keys
Keys whose firmware can be inspected and rebuilt, and what auditability actually buys you here.
Read GuideHardware Wallets
Key-storage devices compared on secure elements, firmware openness and recovery design.
Read GuideNetwork Hardware
Privacy Routers
Router hardware and firmware options for network-level filtering, segmentation and tunnelling.
Read GuideOpen Source Hardware
The wider open-hardware landscape and how far openness reaches into a finished device.
Read GuideIdentifying the Cameras Themselves
Two related guides cover the hardware pointed at you rather than the hardware you carry: identifying automatic license plate readers by vendor and mounting, and finding and avoiding Flock cameras in your own area.