Skip to content

Scenarios

Tools are neither good nor bad in the abstract. Their value depends on whether they map to a specific situation, threat model, and set of people the writer cares about. The scenarios in this section are written for readers whose situations sit across, between, or in the shadow of Sinophone Asia-Pacific jurisdictions — diaspora, cross-border travelers, people with family in less open environments, and people moving across the region for work, study, or refuge.

Scenarios connect the conceptual frame and the regional observatory to specific lived practice.

Hong Kong and Macau readers: expect a higher risk tier

Most of the scenarios below default to Taiwan or general Sinophone Asia-Pacific examples. Read that framing as a floor, not a ceiling, for Hong Kong. Since the 2020 National Security Law and the 2024 Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, national-security offenses carry sentences measured in years rather than fines, national-security police can seize and forensically examine a device under warrant, and the local civil-society organizations that once absorbed this kind of risk have largely dissolved since 2021. Where a scenario below assumes a functioning local NGO safety net, that assumption often no longer holds; the activists and journalists pages route Hong Kong readers to international organizations instead. Macau's environment differs again and is comparatively under-documented here.

Available now

  • LGBTQ+ and sexual minorities — anonymous social life across the Sinophone region — account separation, dating-app risk, cross-platform correlation, family-controlled device traces, cross-border travel preparation, and a full regional context section covering Mainland China, Hong Kong & Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the diaspora.
  • Domestic violence and tech-enabled abuse — how abusers use shared accounts, location tracking, and stalkerware, how to check and respond without escalating, and why leaving is the highest-risk moment; written for survivors and the people helping them, with regional helplines.
  • Journalists and source protection — the source-protection lifecycle and why communication metadata can burn a source even when content is encrypted; concise, routing depth to Freedom of the Press Foundation and EFF, with the regional angle of sources inside less open jurisdictions.
  • Activists and protest digital safety — a brief regional companion to EFF's protest guide: real-name SIM, border device searches, network-level observation, and coordination metadata.
  • Election observer self-protection — the individual operational-security layer that org-level guidance from GNDEM, NDI, and ANFREL leaves open: device prep, secure reporting, seized-device exposure, harassment, and cross-border accreditation.
  • Cross-border travel and device searches in Asia — general device-minimization OPSEC plus Asia-specific border-search context, because the canonical English guide describes only US law and misleads travelers in Asia.
  • Pre-departure digital safety — brief yourself with AI prompts — copy-paste prompts you feed to your own AI to get a destination's censorship, legal, SIM, and emergency-contact picture before you travel; works for any country, and no query reaches us.

In Tier 2 drafting

The following scenario exists in detail in our Chinese editions and is queued for English re-framing in a later round:

  • Anonymous donations to advocacy organizations — for both organizers and donors, with regional banking and crypto context

How to suggest a scenario

If you work with a population whose situation isn't well covered by existing English-language privacy sites, especially groups with significant cross-border or Sinophone-region context, let us know via the channels on the Community page. We are particularly interested in scenarios where the regional framing is load-bearing: the same situation in a different jurisdiction would call for materially different practice.

Other paths