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Welcome to the Techlore SPA Wiki

Welcome to the wiki, it's a work of love and I hope it helps you on your journey 💙🚀

📖 The Basics

What It Is

My name is Henry Fisher, and I've been covering digital rights for over 10 years. I believe everyone deserves a safe digital life, and that the path there should be practical and accessible to anybody. The SPA Wiki is a living, breathing written reference for security, privacy, and anonymity under Techlore.

Henry Fisher of Techlore

SPA stands for Security, Privacy, and Anonymity. These are three distinct but related goals that the SPA ecosystem (the Quiz, Tools, VPN Finder, and this Wiki) revolve around. I also believe digital rights extend beyond SPA, so this wiki will also cover concepts like encryption legislation, government surveillance, age verification laws, platform censorship, data broker regulation, and the ongoing fight for open technology.

The wiki is a reference, not a course. Just follow what's relevant to you, go deeper on what catches your attention, and return when you need to look something up. At the time of writing, it has 21 articles (nearly 4 hours of reading), but on a consistent basis I'll be creating new articles and updating them with new information, context, and recommendations. You can follow the changelog to track updates.

How to Use The Wiki

Articles are organized into categories. If you're new, start with Fundamentals as they cover the concepts everything else builds on. Most articles use a similar structure:

  • 📖 The Basics: What something is & how it works
  • 🎯 Why It Matters: The broader importance of a topic and why people should care
  • 💡 Common Misconceptions: Debunking the most common myths online
  • 🗣️ Henry's Take: My raw, honest, practical advice. This is meant to be opinionated. My experience with millions of people over 10+ years has taught me a lot about what does (and more importantly doesn't!) tend to work. I want to share those stories and my takeaways to make the advice actionable.
  • ✅ Henry's Picks: A quick summary of tools that I'm personally a big fan of and why.
  • 🔗 Go Deeper: For linking to similar articles, and to external sites. I am not all-knowing, and there are countless other voices in the space that you should also learn from.

One thing worth saying upfront: no one does everything at once. The goal isn't to implement every recommendation in this wiki before the week is done. It's to understand your situation, what you're protecting, from whom, at what level of effort, then make changes that are proportionate and sustainable. The Threat Modeling article explains exactly how to get started with this. If you'd rather start with a quick situational assessment, the SPA Quiz translates your situation into a personalized starting point in a few minutes.

🎯 Why It Matters

What I hear from many people is they realize that they don't understand nor have control over what's happening with their data, and that the default settings they've been living with weren't chosen with their best interests in mind.

If you feel this way, you're not alone. Most software does very little to protect your data. This reflects the interests of the companies that are incentivized to exploit you and your personal information. This comes at the cost of not just your digital safety, but also your friends and family!

The goal of this wiki (and Techlore as a whole) isn't to make you afraid of technology. It's to make the landscape legible, so you can understand what a VPN actually does and doesn't protect you from, so you can evaluate a messaging app's encryption claims, so you can make an informed decision about your browser instead of just using what came installed. Understanding these things takes the power away from the defaults and puts it where it belongs: with you and others in your life.

Many meaningful changes in this wiki take minutes, not months. Switching a search engine, installing an ad-blocker, and enabling two-factor authentication on your most important accounts all have concrete, immediate effects. The full scope of privacy and security can feel overwhelming, but a handful of the right changes goes a long way. Wherever you are in that process, I hope the wiki can help you on your journey.

🔗 Go Deeper

Read these first, the Fundamentals:

The rest of the SPA ecosystem:

High-impact tools to understand next:

Techlore content:

External starting points:

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