I think we all draw a line between privacy and convenience and I think I found mine and settled into a comfort zone of sorts. I use Fedora 38. My browser is Mozilla Firefox with it’s “strict” setting. uBlock origin and uMatrix. When I need/want to use a site that doesn’t work due to blocked connections I relax the restrictions in uMatrix or temporarily disable it entirely if I get frustrated or I’m in a hurry. I watch videos on YouTube. Don’t use social media, but I do use Facebook messenger (although I prefer to use Signal with the handful of people I can). I use a Xiaomi phone with custom ad blocking DNS (I’d like to get a Pixel with GrapheneOS someday). I look for an app on F-Droid first, but install it through Google Play if I can’t find what I need there. I use Qwant and DuckDuckGo. I use ReVanced. I do not use a VPN. I think that’s all the relevant information. My question is: how easy do you think it still is for big tech to track me? Are there any suggestions you would have for a person like me that wouldn’t sacrifice too much convenience?
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Piped for desktop would be a better option for youtube imo, but really depends on which “Big tech company” you’re trying to hide from and what information do you want to share with them. For example, Google probably has your ip tied to your gmail account, which has whatever information you used, since you didn’t use a vpn when first creating it. Also unless you disabled the bloatware via adb that came with your xiaomi device some other third party company may also have your ip and whatever info you inputted into those apps, if at all. Again just depends on what you want so your setup might be fine.
Edit: if wanting to protect from google then your mobile device is the biggest issue. Getting an always on vpn is a must (look at proton or mullvad), remove your personal account and create a burner with fake info and use something like aurora store with that burner account should help a lot. Would be really inconvenient if you still use your personal gmail account so maybe before doing anything start migrating to a different email provider
Edit 2: if protecting from meta then facebook messenger is the biggest issue. Getting an always on vpn that comes bundled with protection from trackers/ads (mullvad and proton i think does this) maybe your best choice unless you want to recreate your account and lose all of your contacts/messages which would be really inconvenient. So just treat facebook messenger like a public forum and dont give up too much info. If its possible maybe use a hardened browser, like mull +ublock, instead to use facebook messenger again if thats possible
My goal is to reduce the information collected about me (increase my privacy) as much as possible and at the same time keep as much of my convenience as possible. I’m not sure how much of an effect this has, but I never used any of the Xiaomi bloatware apps, because when you first open any of them you have to agree to their terms & conditions and when I tap disagree the apps just close (even the calculator, for example). Piped sounds like an interesting thing I should look into, I keep seeing it being mentioned everywhere. But I would assume that if there is a way to login to my account to get all my subscriptions and recommendations the privacy aspect will still be heavily compromised.
Havent personally created an account with piped since I like to limit accounts where ever possible but I believe you create an account with the piped instance that you choose so you dont login to your google account at all. You’ll have to do a google takeout iirc inorder to get a copy of your youtube subscription which you can then import.