Welcome to Signal Jam!

I know, I know, I can already hear you: another privacy podcast? Yes! We admit there are already some fantastic content channels in the privacy space, so what makes us different?

As we were getting to know each other, we realized how different some of our privacy practices were, mostly because of our locations (Jay currently resides in Australia 🇦🇺, and Michael in the United States 🇺🇸). This led to interesting conversations about the nuances in privacy, and how varied it is for people across the world. When we talked about our favorite privacy content channels, we also realized that most of these had a natural bent toward American privacy. And that's okay! But we were hooked on the idea of hearing how people around the globe do things differently.

So, we started Signal Jam. One goal is to explore privacy in a broad sense— tools to regain it, techniques to maintain it, analysis of news and trends, and discussions with other privacy-focused people. The other goal is to explore privacy through the lens of the international community— what works in other countries, best practices, challenges to overcome, changing policy, and more.

Naturally, this will require the participation of folks worldwide, and therefore makes Signal Jam a fundamentally community-focused, community-driven, and community-sourced podcast. No elitism, no gatekeeping— just curiosity, learning, and a commitment to sharing and enriching the community.

Signal Jam aims to be more than just a podcast, too. Another component of this project is our blog. We'll post things from time to time that we feel are useful information, important updates, fun stuff, and more. We're also hoping to stock it full of submissions from other people who have their own perspective and tricks to share.

We have some bigger, tentative plans down the road, too. Most of those don't make sense to talk about right now, but we can mention a few:

• Privacy-respecting front ends
• Guides
• Services

That's all for now. We don't want to tease, but we also don't want to promise anything, either. Ultimately, Signal Jam is our hobby. We think it has the potential to go some cool places, but we'd rather focus on making quality content and having fun doing it.

So what's in the near term future? We're hoping to get a new episode out once every few weeks or so. With that said, we don't view ourselves as content creators, rather just two people that create content. The distinction, for us, is that we do this on our own schedule. We have personal lives to manage, and we only want to make an episode when we feel there's something worth discussing. Sometimes, you might hear from us a little more often. Other times, a little less.

Our current roadmap is to first cover the basics— the Privacy 101's, as we call them. This is content designed to be friendly to newcomers and a good refresher for more experienced folks alike. These episodes will help us find a groove and begin building an audience.

Once those primary 101's are done, we'll move into other, wider-ranging topics, including conversations and interviews, privacy tool reviews, and discussion of privacy-related news. Some of those will take the form of full episodes, others will be blog posts.

Want to follow along? The podcast is available for streaming on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and most other platforms. If you can't find it on your platform of choice, let us know (PGP key here).

You can subscribe to our blog using our RSS feed.

We'll also have various channels to communicate with us directly, and when those come online, you can find them listed on our Contact page.

Lastly, we'd be remiss if we didn't say that we welcome and encourage your feedback on the show. What do you like, dislike? What do you want to hear more or less about? Anything (productive) that comes to mind, please send our way.

Thanks for stopping by, and we hope you enjoy the show. 🙂