What are some privacy mistakes you’ve made?
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What are some privacy mistakes you’ve made?
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All of us have made privacy mistakes at some point in our privacy journeys. In an effort to help those earlier on in that journey, please share some of the mistakes you’ve made, and how you could have prevented it.

Hellfire103
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  • I used to have an Xperia SP. One day, I decided to swap out all of the AOSP apps that came preinstalled for Google’s own offerings.
  • I also used to use Yandex as my main search engine. I thought it was better than DuckDuckGo…
  • I also used to use Yandex.Browser, Yandex.Mail, and Yandex.Disk. I’m also not sure I deleted my account…
  • Just three years ago, I was using Opera. I had no idea it had become a Chinese Chromium fork. I also used to use Maxthon, on occasion.
  • I used to use Opera VPN.
  • When I was about 7, I ended up with a bunch of malware on my laptop (turns out McAfee is shit). I recently discovered that my IP range briefly ended up on some blacklist around that time, so I assume I had become part of a botnet.
  • Around this time, I used Hola VPN.
  • Until fairly recently, I had multiple ad and tracker blockers installed at the same time. This is obviously overkill, and increases your fingerprintability.
  • I also used to manually change my user agent to Chrome on Windows 10, despite the fact I was using Firefox on Linux. The mismatch also made me more fingerprintable.
  • I used to have Do Not Track enabled, which can be used to fingerprint users.
  • I used to use my browser fullscreen, meaning my screen resolution could be calculated and used for fingerprinting.
  • I used to use Outlook.com as a client for my email, which was privately self-hosted by my dad.

Yeah, I used to be pretty insecure, huh. My privacy journey was quite fast, and began around 2020. My uncle had given me a ThinkPad and a DVD of Linux Mint. I was stuck at home for most of the year, I started watching a lot of sociopolitical comedy videos, and eventually one thing led to another and before you knew it I was wearing the metaphorical tinfoil hat.

Nowadays, I’m doing much better.

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