About

Somewhere along the way, being watched became the price of admission. Open an app, load a page, buy a coffee — and something, somewhere, writes it down. Not because it had to, but because the software was built that way, and almost nobody was building it the other way.

Private by Choice is my attempt to build it the other way.

The idea#

Privacy has quietly been turned into a chore. It's the opt-out you have to find, the toggle buried three menus deep, the "manage preferences" link designed to make you give up. The result is a world where you can have privacy, technically, if you're vigilant and technical and tireless — which is another way of saying most people can't.

I think that's backwards. Privacy should be the default the software ships with, and anything less should be the deliberate, informed choice — yours to make, not a company's to make for you. That's the whole point of the name: private by choice, not private by accident and exposed by design.

So the things I build here start from a few stubborn principles:

• Private by default. The out-of-the-box behavior protects you. You shouldn't have to earn your privacy back.
• Consent is the point. Nothing that touches a third party should load until you decide it can. Your click is the switch.
• No spying to serve you. No analytics arms race, no trackers, no data collected "just in case." What isn't collected can't leak, be sold, or be subpoenaed.
• Yours to run. Self-hostable and inspectable, so you don't have to take my word for any of it — you can read the code and host it yourself.
• Honest about the trade-offs. Privacy has costs and limits. I'd rather name them plainly than sell you a false sense of safety.

The projects#

Everything here is small, sharp, and single-minded about the principles above. A few of the current pieces:

• pbcssg — a privacy-first static site generator. It serves everything from your own origin (no CDNs, no third-party fonts, no analytics), gates embeds like YouTube behind an explicit click-to-load so nothing contacts a third party until you say so, strips hidden location data and metadata from every upload, and honors Global Privacy Control out of the box. It's the engine behind my own sites — including The Untracked Life.
• pbc-classification — an opinionated, research-backed rating of how domains treat your privacy, shipped as data you can drop into your own projects. It's the thing that quietly labels the outbound links on my sites so a reader knows what a link will cost them before they click.
• and more on the way. New projects land on GitHub first and get written up here.

The foundations are open source — I'd rather you be able to check my work than trust my marketing. Some things I'll eventually offer as hosted services, for people who'd rather not run their own; that's what keeps this independent and unbeholden to advertisers. But the open pieces stay open.

Who's behind it#

Just me — and deliberately not by name or face. I'm a private person building privacy tools, and it would be a strange look to do that from behind a wall of my own personal details. What matters here is the code and the reasoning, both of which you can examine for yourself. The rest is beside the point.

The code lives on GitHub:

Get in touch#

Found a bug, spotted a flaw in my reasoning, or want to use one of these projects? I'd like to hear it. I read everything, even when a reply takes a while.