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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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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deleting my instagram and twitter account. i still have my FB account but rarely open it.
For me, it was ditching Windows.
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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…
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.
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:
Sure no problem
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.
Running my home servers
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.
2 things:
A nickname: on every online account I set a nickname and not my real name. If you google name you get 2 results from same site about some competition. If you google my nickname you get 2 pages of my stuff.
Switch from Google (to GrapheneOS, ProtpnMail, etc.)
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.
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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.
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.
Http://fingerprint.com
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
I used WhatsApp more than any app om my phone this time last year. I still use Discord but at least I’m beginning to move towards Signal and Matrix.
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.
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.
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).