After recently paying off my student loans, I have been giving some thought to making regular monthly donations to various organizations. Specifically to non-profit organizations, services, and tools that advocate privacy, security, and open source.
Also, I'm privileged to have a job that has only been minimally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the recent stimulus check from the US government, I decided to donate a portion of it to two organizations: the Signal Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Signal Foundation
I use the encrypted messaging service Signal everyday. Using an end-to-end encrypted messaging service that doesn't collect my data, read my message, or serve me advertisements based on my messages/usage is a breath of fresh air in the current technological climate we're living in. I've managed to convince getting my girlfriend, my family, and my group of friends to exclusively communicate on it, which I consider a huge win – it's actually fairly difficult to convince all of your friends and family to install an app on their phone. Signal has an interesting background with the co-founders having strong moral code. Signal is, of course, free and open source software.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
I've been a long time supporter of the EFF so my college days. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's core mission is to focus on digital rights and provides funds for legal defense, defends individuals and new technology from abusive legal threats, works to expose government misconduct (ex: government mass surveillance), supports new technologies which preserves personal freedoms and online civil liberties (ex: TOR), challenges potential legislation that could infringe on personal liberties and fair use (ex: net neutrality), among other things.
Some organizations I plan to donate to in the future the Free Software Foundation, the Linux Mint team, Mozilla, Privacytools.io, the TOR Project, and LibreOffice.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to hey@chuck.is.