About
It has always bothered me that privacy has no unified symbol. Every community has their own take on how privacy should be visualized. I want to unify the privacy community across the internet. It is my belief that, with a universal symbol for privacy, we will grow stronger. We will have a symbol to represent us. We will have a flag to fly.
Icon
The icon is a clipart created by librarian Gordon Dylan Johnson which can be found here. The size of the icon is large enough to still fit if the flag is cropped to a square/circular aspect ratio.
Dimensions
The size of the flag is 140 by 90 centimeters. These dimensions are chosen because of the dimensions of a Tor Browser window (1400x900 pixels).
Colors
The color blue (Azure) was chosen because it symbolizes security, stability, and reliability. The exact shade of blue used is the same azure color used by the flag of Europe, because of GDPR.
Design
This flag follows the “Principals of design” for vexillography.
Use it!
Use this flag for group chats, communities, profiles, stickers, patches, articles, wallpapers, real flags, anything you want to! Spread it around so it becomes a global icon for privacy. Even put it on the Wikipedia page for privacy if you can!
A flag should be easy to draw: I’d replace the hand with a stylized fingerprint.
Definitely not a fingerprint imo: that denotes traceability.
Fingerprints are harder to draw as a hand, maybe a hand with raised middlefinger.
Those are some fucked up palm lines. Heart line is okay ish, strong. Head and life lines are… I don’t event know if those have a boilerplate reading they are so unnatural. This pirate might be headed for the love of their life or an early, traumatic death. Godspeed.
On a more serious note, I would suggest you consider simplifying the hand to a solid hand. The hand as-is would be very difficult to reproduce and draws attention from the overall flag design.
Looks amazing :) here’s how it is when flying
Looks amazing :)
Thank you!
here’s how it is when flying
Is there a version that doesn’t use WebGL?
No sadly, though I could record the flag if you want, to see without having to use webgl
That would be great, thank you! I have a hunch I’m not the only one with WebGL disabled.
I get your point and idea. And I agree, there should be a symbol. But in a world full of symbols, where there is lot of symbols that overlap or mean the same thing, it’s not a great thing to ad more symbols.
I would suggest, that people instead use the symbol for human rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Logo
This logo stand for rights and freedom, which is not in opposition to anything, but for something. Article 8 in the Human Rights, are about the right to privacy:
This should be enough. I’d suggest people use this, and support human rights in general.
I really like the idea of a flag to unify the privacy community but I’m going to go with the consensus with the hand: it’s probably a bit too complex. I think a flag should be easily made into a vector format that is easy to draw and replicate.
Say if someone wanted to draw a protest board with this on it. It would be really difficult to accurately draw the hand without good drawing skills.
You are a dreamer, and this is exactly what we need. Two hands up for that.
But before designing a flag, we first need to agree on the symbolism.
There are two types of symbols. Anti symbols and pro symbols.
Anti symbols are easier to make, because they comes from reaction. Its easy to see whats wrong. “anarchism is order” and “stop war” stickers are anti symbols.
But pro symbols are harder because they require us to understand what we are fighting for. The rainbow flag and the aboriginal flag are pro flags, because they show what they are fighting for. The rainbow flag fights for diversity, while the aboriginal flag establishes a connection between people, land and the sun.
In short, I believe that a pro symbol would be better for gleedening people into the struggle.
With this in mind, I think we should fundamenrally understand why privacy matters, and make symbols out of that.
While i like the idea, this flag gives instant super-creepy vibes, i would NOT like to use it unless it’s for a bad guys faction in a game or story or something like that
Idea is good, execution needs some work imho. As many have pointed out this is not a good combination of symbols. I showed this to 5 different people too and none of them were able to guess its meaning. I’m all for a symbol to show engagement towards the privacy movement, such as the privacy manifesto. Just not quite like this.
Cringe
