If you only listen to one privacy podcast, make it this one — and we mean that sincerely.
Carey Parker is the kind of guy you’d want explaining the internet to your parents, your boss, and honestly yourself. He’s Gen X, which means he remembers a world before surveillance capitalism swallowed everything whole, and he brings that perspective to every episode with a warmth and clarity that’s genuinely rare in tech spaces. He’s deeply knowledgeable — we’re talking real, under-the-hood technical knowledge — but he never once makes you feel like you need a computer science degree to keep up. He just… talks to you. Like a human.
The show covers everything from password managers and VPNs to data brokers, smart home security, and government surveillance, and he makes all of it feel approachable without dumbing it down. Every episode is packed with practical steps you can actually take, not just abstract doom-scrolling about how your privacy is already gone.
Carey also wrote the book Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons — a privacy guide for everyday people that’s every bit as readable and no-nonsense as the podcast. If you love the show, grab the book.
Basically, Carey Parker is the dreamy, techy privacy hero we didn’t know we needed — and Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons is proof that protecting your digital life can be something you actually look forward to learning about.
One thing we especially love about Carey is that he’s a proud Apple supporter — and he doesn’t shy away from saying so. He regularly points out how Apple has built privacy directly into its software in ways most other tech companies simply haven’t bothered to do. iMessage uses end-to-end encryption by default, so only you and the person you’re texting can read what you send.1 iCloud Private Relay masks your browsing activity by routing it through two separate relays — so even Apple itself can’t see where you’re going. (More on privacy-first browsers here.)2 And App Tracking Transparency finally forced apps to ask for your permission before following you around the internet like a creep.3
Carey’s whole point is that Apple treats privacy as a feature, not an afterthought — and on that, we are completely with him.
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Sources
- iMessage security overview — Apple Support ↩
- iCloud Private Relay – Apple’s Privacy Tool — ComputerCity ↩
- 5 Privacy Features Only Apple Has — BGR ↩
