For me its probably deleting all my social medias, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc
My migration to Firefox and starting to use uBlock, definitely the best decisions I’ve made.
Dropping GMail and FB Messenger. Switched to Protonmail and Signal/TG. To hell with Big Tech.
Major for me as well. I’ve been with proton for a while now. Recently switched to signal and going through the painful process of trying to convert Whatsappers and people I moved from whatsapp to telegram, but then realized how bad telegram is as well, allegedly ofcourse.
I think that would have to be a toss-up between deleting all proprietary corporate social media, such as Twitter and Spybook, or finally kicking Google to the curb, and using Lineage OS.
Ditto
I installed Linux on our family PC when I was in high school since it was sluggish running Windows. That’s what got me into the world of tech in general. I got interested in FOSS, and privacy awareness was of course part of the ethos.
Phasing out my Google usage.
I didn’t really use Facebook, Twitter other “big tech” shite, so those would have been on the list to phase out too.
I used to use Google for everything (documents, notes, email, photos, videos, passwords, browser, phone) but the only remaining hard dependency I have on Google is YouTube.
I do everything I can to avoid giving Google useful data here but it’s sadly still a lot and I’m still at the whims of the tech giant on whether that remains a possibility. The only reason youtube-dl, Piped, Newpipe, SmartTubeNext etc. still exist is that Google hasn’t thrown significant money towards blocking them yet.If I want to see something interesting, Nebula has me like 40% covered nowadays, so that has been pretty decent but I don’t see YouTube going away as the prime entertainment and learning platform any time soon as there aren’t any real competitors in the indie video publishing business. :/
Yes, for me this has probably been the biggest and also the easiest one. So much data, in my case, willingly given to one of the worst companies from a privacy stand point. Every photo, email, etc, etc. Email was a very easy transition over a few months, I’m shocked but how quickly I’ve got the point of only logging into gmail once every 6 months or so just to check if anything still going there. I realized I didn’t really need all of my photos going to their servers, now running no backup for photos although my plan is to start using iTunes for periodic encrypted local backups to my PC, mainly for photos and contacts.
Ad-blocking DNS. Blocks the nuisance and saves bandwidth. Couldn’t live without it now.
Which DNS do you use for this?
I host my own DNS service with AdguardHome. But there are some public DNS providers with ad-blocking filters here. Some like NextDNS will allow you to create an account and further configure your blocklists.
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This is an excellent one and one I’ve been dreading getting to. I have a system that works great among several credit cards all setup to optimize cash back and track certain spending my having specific purposes for the various cards. These are all mainstream providers, although I haven’t looked I can assume the privacy policies are not great.
I’d love a service that could offer both an internally good privacy policy as well as allowing for many virtual cards that don’t require a real name to validate. I could envision a service that works like this…
- Still a credit card.
- Unlimited or near unlimited virtual cards, no real name required with merchant to validate.
- Similar protections as other credit cards regarding fraud etc, generally accepted as much safer than using debit.
- Binning to allow categories for the various virtual cards (only really helpful for tracking purposes, guess this could always be done by hand).
- Decrease cash back amount - say 0.5 % with the difference between the more typical 1-3% based on category being extra profit to offset what is lost by not sharing any customer data with other parties.
I realize Privacy.com probably comes close on some of these but works more like a debit card from what I understand. Of course cash is the best but I’m not sure that convenience tradeoff is one I’m ready to make yet, but more power to you. That is a LOT of personal data not bouncing around various parties.
Using grapheneos, it was a good gateway to other privacy & security enhancing habits
Selfhosting, including pihole.
Replacing Google services with selfhosted or privacy preserving cloud solutions. The biggest one of those was probably switching to Firefox with selfhosted sync server.
An interesting one! A few questions, if you don’t mind:
- Is it worth it (compared to not syncing)?
- Is the account server self-hosted as well?
Sure no problem
- Definitely. I have a bunch of devices with FF installed, so syncing them makes things much easier, and because it’s selfhosted my data stays with me. Although just using Mozilla servers is pretty safe as well, because sync is e2e encrypted. That’s not the case for Google sync, so switching from Chrome is the important part.
- You can do that, but afaik it’s quite a bit more involved and not really worth it for me. I have a Mozilla account anyway, and the account server doesn’t store any more personal data if you use it for syncing. But if you don’t want a Mozilla account then it might be a good option.
For the last 20 years I’ve used unique (optionally) disposable email addresses for every site and service I’ve signed up for. Avoided facebook completely & don’t reuse usernames across sites.
Confession: I did use the same username on AIM & Twitter, but both those sites are dead now.
Switching to linux which lead directpy to switching to graphene os and when i updates all the technology u had i killed all the fuckin sociql media. Well except facebook messenger cos some people refuse to use anything else pisses me the fuck off i wish i coult tell wm to fuck off over it but unfortunarly i cant.
Getting a functional nextcloud server. I self-hosted mine, but there’s lots of VPS options that are pretty easy to set up.
It’s basically a drop in replacement for the majority of proprietary productivity suites (i.e. Google drive, onedrive and icloud). One service covers a lot of bases.
Getting off social media and replacing Chrome with Firefox. Also uBlock Origin, NextDNS, and moving my IoT devices onto their own network so they can’t spy on my trusted devices (and NextDNS blocks their telemetry).
uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
Can’t fingerprint my machine if your fingerprinting script never loads.
They could fingerprint you by IP address, header files that don’t require JavaScript, your network traffic fingerprint, traffic flows, cookies, being logged into different sites at the same time content cached locally.
I’m not saying this to argue with you, I’m just trying to caution you against thinking you’re untrackable with just with ublockorigin and privacy badger.
Oh, I absolutely understand that a lot of tracking is stil possible. But in practice, it’s usually handled by third parties via a script loaded from a third party domain, because doing any of the smarter stuff would require a) a competent IT team b) the marketing team talking to them constantly.
Much easier to just slap another tracker into Google Tag Manager.
Of course this doesn’t help against tech companies. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit etc. will most likely track your views based on the requests, which you can’t avoid. But this takes care of 90% of the tracking, and most importantly, it removes the “everyone tracking you across every site you visit” aspect of the ad surveillance industry.
It’s a commercial service, but if you go to their webpage, they track you. And they give you a tracking ID, and they tell you about your view history of their page. So if you visit their page, then close your browser and visit it again, they will have successfully tracked you. They’re very good. It’s fun to play with. Try visiting them with out JavaScript, and then visit again with JavaScript. In my experiments they still track the no JavaScript visits, the widget just doesn’t display the tracking without the JavaScript
