Introducing the Actionable Privacy Newsletter, and why I swapped Substack for Buttondown

TL;DR: Launched the Actionable Privacy Newsletter to send one privacy tip each week that is applicable to most people and easy to implement. Used Buttondown over Substack because it's more privacy friendly and better to use (for me).

I have been "in to" privacy since before it was cool - well before GDPR, CCPA, Cambridge Analytica were commonly used words!

Over this time, enough of my friends have asked me to start a practical privacy tips newsletter to share some of the practices I used to keep myself safe. So I felt the time was right to start sharing one actionable privacy tip each week over email.

These tips should be less than obvious to the average tech-savvy guy or girl while being practical. That means I would rather help you minimise the adverse effects of social media and make privacy-convenience trade offs on your terms than tell you to stop using it altogether.

So with that here's the newsletter: https://buttondown.email/actionableprivacy - the first tip will stop you sharing your contacts list with Facebook when you're using Whatsapp.

I had a case of pre-launch jitters which delayed the process slightly but this gave me time to rethink using Substack - the de-facto choice for small newsletter communities it seems - and do some research on alternatives.

I found this article and immediately MailerLite and Buttondown stood out to me.

MailerLite had the most appealing pricing - you can use a custom domain for just $5/month vs. $29/month for Buttondown and $50 one off for Substack.

However, Buttondown won out in the end because:

😎 It appears to be designed with privacy in mind - the landing page itself mentions that you can turn off tracking pixels in the admin settings and promises not to store data about me or my subscribers.

✍️ It seemed uncluttered and clean with a focus on writing. I felt this would help me write and ship faster - which so far has been the case.

🔩 It has an API which I figured could be useful for automations later on. It has integrations too, although it only supports Zapier (rather than Integromat which is my preferred automation tool).

Buttondown also doesn't charge extra for paid newsletters. That does seem like a big plus, but in this case I don't intend to start charging for this newsletter.

I'm pretty fresh to the newsletter-ing but happy to answer any questions on starting a newsletter like mine, or on privacy generally!

And you - do you have any questions about privacy or any tips / research you would like me to look into for future newsletters? Any feedback on the newsletter?