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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Secure browsers, using VPNs and private DNS, GrapheneOS. I’d love to say Signal, but since they spit in the face of all it’s users, they’re being phased out.
Care to explain what signal did exactly to spit in all its users face?
Really? They dropped SMS support which forced all users onto two apps for their non signal users, which is why so many have moved to Google Messenger as it’s easier to get people on RCS accidently than it is to convert/keep people on Signal, that’s not new news man.
That, and completely ignoring their own community for years when it comes to forcing phone number registration, group messages without predefined groups that must be created in advance, spending all their time adding shit like stickers that 9/10 of their target audience doesn’t care about, while ignoring requests that they do.
I’ve used it since it it was still Text Secure, ignoring feature requests/changes while always asking for money isn’t new for them, it’s always been that way. Do the opposite of whats asked, and wonder why people donate to other projects.
There a reason why alternatives like Session happened, and why theirs direct forks like Molly. Signal has security, but they have Apples mindset with design and features. They’ll listen to what you want, and then give you what they want.
Using signal for SMS was never a good idea. It may give users a false sense of security. And as far as I remember signal dropped SMS before google rolled out RCS. If apple agrees to implement RCS then I could see Signal adding this feature back.
Using Signal for SMS was one of the only good ways to convince the masses to switch in the first place. It was blatantly obvious which messages were secure or not since they were labeled as such.
Then: “Hey, you should use Signal for SMS. Our conversations will be encrypted and you can still text Grandma.”
Now: Grandma uses FB Messenger, tied to her SMS also.
