Original Privacy Research
Long-form, primary-source research on the questions that matter most to consumer privacy: what works, what costs, and what the underlying standards actually guarantee.
Why We Publish Research
Most consumer privacy guidance comes from vendor marketing pages, affiliate-driven comparison sites, or recycled press releases. None of those are durable signals. We invest in original research so readers have a record of evidence, verifiable numbers, named methodology, dated conclusions, that holds up across product cycles, ownership changes, and breach events.
Every research page on PrivacyFix is built from primary sources: vendor disclosures, government filings, court settlements, audit reports, breach notification letters, peer-reviewed papers, and independent benchmarks. We cite every source. We publish the date of last revision. Material published changes are listed on our data changelog so readers can audit our work over time.
How We Pick Topics
We prioritize topics where the public conversation is dominated by marketing claims and the underlying evidence is hard to find. The first wave includes tool effectiveness (does this VPN actually do what it claims?), breach economics (what does an incident actually cost a household?), and encryption standards (which protocols are credible and which are theatre?). Future research will cover identity-document marketplaces, broker takedown success rates, and the privacy economics of ad-supported software. According to our breach-cost analysis below, the average data breach reached $4.88 million in total organizational cost in 2024, a 10% year-over-year increase, underscoring why the underlying economics deserve more scrutiny than marketing pages typically give them.
Browse Research
Consumer Privacy Tool Effectiveness
Original analysis of how consumer-grade privacy tools, VPNs, password managers, data removal services, actually perform under measurable benchmarks rather than vendor marketing claims.
Data Breach Cost Analysis 2024
Quantitative review of the financial, reputational, and recovery costs that real households incur after data breaches, drawn from public disclosures and government settlement records.
Encryption Standards Comparison
Side-by-side comparison of the encryption protocols that protect consumer data, AES, ChaCha20, RSA, ECC, post-quantum candidates, with practical recommendations.
Download the listed-broker catalog extract cited on this page: privacyfix-broker-catalog.csv (CC0). Method notes live on /statistics and /methodology.
This page is compiled by PrivacyFix's editorial process from published industry studies and official breach-reporting data, no number is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of July 2026. Primary sources: IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report and Verizon DBIR.