Be prepared.
Not scared.
One breakdown about something you probably don't know about creator privacy, security, or safety — what's happening, why the tactic works, and the move that makes you safer.
What lands
in your inbox.
Every issue follows pretty much the same shape.
One incident, myth or system, the pattern or root cause, one action, two or three things to keep an eye on. 5-ish minutes.
We break it down
The Story
An incident, a myth, or a system that's failing creators — broken down in three beats. What's happening. Why it works. The move that actually fixes it. 400 to 800 words. Sometimes less.
Root Cause
The Pattern
A one- or two-sentence zoom-out that connects the specific story to the bigger pattern or root cause underneath.
Your Move
The Action
Concrete enough to act on in under ten minutes. Not a full tutorial, a nudge towards action with just enough detail. The kind of thing you can knock out before your coffee's cold.
What We're Watching
On the Radar
Two or three items, one sentence each. Platform changes, scam patterns, the news that matters to creators that the rest of the internet won't surface until they have to.
Know more.
Worry Less.
Every creator gets the same recycled safety advice — get a PO box, use a VPN, don't show the outside of your house. It's not bad advice. It's just not enough... and the people sharing it don't have the background to know what really works and what doesn't.
The problem is what's missing: the stuff you'd only know from actually doing this work. So that's what we do here. One real story a week about how creators actually get found, why it works, and what to do about it.
The Unpublic Newsletter
How a $12 burrito leaked one creator's home address — and the 90-second fix that would've stopped it.
A creator we work with — call her M. — orders dinner. The driver, an aspiring fan, snaps a photo of her doorstep with the porch light on, address number partially visible, and posts it to TikTok with the caption "guess who I just delivered to." By the next afternoon, the address is in a Discord, then a subreddit, then in her DMs.
The pattern we keep seeing
The leak almost never comes from where you'd expect. It comes from a person who thought they were being friendly.
Her delivery profile had her real first name, real photo, real address — because of course it did, it's a delivery app. Three pieces of context, one platform that wasn't built to keep them apart, and one stranger with a phone. That's the whole attack.
It's not a VPN. It's not a burner phone. It's not even a different address. It's one toggle and two field edits on the profile she already has, and they take less time than reading this paragraph…
This started with a phone call to someone's mom.
A creator I know hit 20,000 subscribers on YouTube. And then someone called her mom pretending to be a friend. They knew details about her life, and had her mom's number. The creator had done everything right by internet standards — a PO box, private family accounts, careful on camera. And none of it mattered.
Hey there, I'm Susan. My background is in law enforcement and I have degrees in security, antiterrorism, and business. I've spent years doing the kind of work where understanding how people find and reach people is the entire job.
I'm also a creator. I have my own audience, my own posting schedule, my own platform to manage. I live in both worlds, which means I understand the tension most security people don't — you can't just go dark and go private. Your visibility is your business.
That's why I built Unpublic — a privacy company specifically for creators and public figures. We run investigations, do cleanups, and build safety infrastructure for people whose work requires them to be visible. The stories in this newsletter come directly from that work: real patterns, real research, real incidents we've responded to, real fixes we've tested. Details get changed to protect clients. The patterns are the point.
The standard privacy advice tells creators to hide. To go private.
We know that's not an option — so we built something for people who need to stay visible and still be safe.
— Susan & the Unpublic team
The FAQ
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One breakdown.
One root cause.
And one action to make you safer.
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Be Prepared, Not Scared
Your platform should grow your reach - not your risk.
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