I use Debian Linux and Librewolf browser with Kagi search on my chrultrabook PCs. I use Nura on my Fairphone 5. I use the Fediverse social media. I chat using a self-hosted Nextcloud server. I use ProtonVPN on all my devices.
I read news articles and listen to podcasts via RSS. I watch youtube anonymously via Invidious. I listen to local, offline music ripped from CDs that I own or downloaded from Bandcamp. I use taxis without an app and pay cash. I read (paper) books.
The devices and systems I use are mostly open source, I use my own cloud servers and avoid big tech companies. When I tell people this the usual reaction is, “There is no point as there is no privacy any more.” Like most things in the real world it’s not so black and white – it’s not all or nothing. Whilst it’s true that perfect privacy for a modern person is not possible, pretty good privacy is perfectly possible.
So why bother with privacy anyway? I’m not a journalist, activist or lawyer so what does it matter if data like my detailed location history, associations by location data, telephone numbers, contact records, political or sexual or whatever interests are available for sale from data brokers? Apart from the general creep factor there are practical reasons to keep your private data private to avoid various types of hacks. The hack that worries me the most is getting access to a bank account via a SIM swap attack (OTP by SMS message is still the only MFA option offered by some banks today). If data brokers don’t know the telephone numbers I use for banking authentication then a bank account takeover is much harder. (If you live in the USA and you can afford it Cape is a better solution than security by obscurity.)
It’s not just about privacy, it’s also about owning my devices and having control. If you don’t control a device, e.g. it can be updated by some company remotely at any time, you don’t own it. Conversely it stinks if some company can decide to stop providing security updates for a device well before its end of life. When it comes to phones, I particularly want to avoid the Apple/Google duopoly. As iOS and Google Android slowly converge into an almost identical unmaintainable, closed, “AI” infested panopticon I think it’s important to keep other options alive such as GrapheneOS, Murena, iode, LineageOS, SailfishOS, FURILABS, Nura and Ubuntu Touch.Website generated using vim-classic and pandoc