What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

After a year I’m starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life… I guess Big Brother wins

Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

It is. People do it because they enjoy the process or they drank too much of the cool aid.

Hot take: All you are doing by de googling yourself is denying you the conforts and conveniences Google spends time and money developing.

I use and older phone for banking, stock firmware as updated as it can be. VPN connection, no SIM, powered on just for transactions. Still, my bank requires a location for every transaction, supposedly by law. In the beginning I thought I should spoof the location to a fixed one, but I’m tired of this shit, too. It feels like it’s impossible to just be in peace, at the same time, apps are being used to rob clueless people their savings and to discriminate, alienate elder people.

On the topic of struggling to connect to self hosted services without a VPS or domain: check out mesh VPNs like ZeroTier or Tailscale. I access all my internal services over Tailscale these days and it’s super simple

Are there any banks that support FIDO2 or something like that already? I’m so sick of SMS or other shenanigans.

I don’t have a phone that supports any of the foss android versions but I have been making due without a google account and free app stores (f-droid + obtainium which is great). That will have to do. I’d love much better privacy but it is too much work. I also do relatively little with my smartphone.

Any amount is more than nothing. Privacy isn’t a zero sum game

The other commenters in this thread seems to be giving you good advice and moral support, so I’m just going to give my input which comes from a perspective that’s a bit different.

Sometimes especially when the options we have are contrary to our beliefs, we have to consider if we really need to be a part of it. Sometimes the burden is the smartphone itself. I don’t use smartphones and I couldn’t be happier, somehow my life didn’t end. The last one I had was the N900 and even though it was a pretty cool pocketcomputer, I guess it’s now been around 10 years since I last had a smartphone. I don’t miss it and especially not when I see other people who have one. It’s scary so addictive it seems to be. Pen and paper for data sharing and just calling people can accomplish many tasks.

Old people with bad eyesight also need banking, so I’d hope theres a bank out there who don’t require a smartphone. In my country banks use the national id for authentication and you can get a TOTP keychain for the 2FA instead of an app, perhabs similar options exist.

Anyway, I hope you find something that works for you. Life is a process.

I’m about 4-5 years from where I started to self host things. I went through a raspberry, minipc and now I built a small rack where I have a custom built PC where I self host things. Is it a pain in the ass to start without anyone teaching you? YES. I spent a lot of time trying, testing, failing and retrying, but it was a nice trip, I learnt a ton of things and a lot of things I’ll learn, I’m still definitively not an expert but I’m improving myself.

I tried (more than one time) nextcloud and I’ve definitively not liked it. I tried filebrowser which is more near to my use case, than I finished choosing a WebDAV instance using apache, it is perfect for my use-case, compatible with my windows job-pc and mounted perfectly from my LineageOS Android phone.

I’ve LineageOS without microG and any google thing at all; all I need is self hosted and available through a custom domain and/or through a VPN I self host. 90% of my apps are Foss.

My bank app works great without an official Android OS ( I didn’t root my phone).

It’s all about the amount of time you can invest through it:

• A lot of time: learn about self host, try the available solutions and choose which one fit your use-case
• Some time: find available solutions that don’t require you to do anything (like proton drive, private nextcloud instances etc…)
• No time: use Google.

If you need something, I have some free space on my server that you can use (don’t trust me or anyone else, use it by thinking).

Don’t give up!

I think we have to persist. Make our statement and presence. Let banks know. Let everybody know there are people who care. Each day we are more. One day we will be many.

Ultimately there are always going to be people who don’t have smartphones or computers, so society (including things which are currently almost mandatory to participate in society, like being able to bank) should be accessible to these people. If it’s accessible for them, it’s also accessible to people with smartphones or computers who have just removed the spyware from them.

I don’t do mobile banking; I just bank from my desktop browser. Not sure if this is an option for you or not, but I would have thought that online banking in the web browser should be even more common than having a mobile app for it.

Not sure what you mean by “home brokers” blocking you but if you mean their wifi blocks you, I’ve experienced that too on GrapheneOS but have found that VPNs allow me to use pretty much any public wifi.

Does your government app have a web alternative? If not that seems incredibly discriminatory against people who don’t have smartphones. If it has a web alternative but doesn’t work with any particular privacy settings, do you have a local library with computers you can use?

I just have 2 extra profiles besides my main one (which has absolutely nothing proprietary), 1 for financial apps and another profile for my work apps. This allows me to keep the financial profile off until I needed, and the work profile active during work hours. The rest of the time, I’m away from al that proprietary crap.

After a while you will find that you really don’t need most, if not all of it. But the disconnect does take time.

This is why I have a degoogled phone and a googled phone. I carry them both around with me but any bank app, or other data harvesting app or necessity goes through that phone,so I may keep the majority of my stuff clean and free (as much as I can within my capabilities)

For banking apps: my Bank only has them as 2fa, if you say you don’t have a Smartphone, and give you the same Programm as Windows App eventually, runs great in a win10 VM, the payments are made in there Webportal

For banking, can you use a browser instead of the app?

I do very little banking through my phone - what’s there to do?

There are some browsers that support sites-as-an-app, such as Cromite and Hermit, that may solve this issue.

I have a powerful homelab and a phone with zero proprietary software. There are some sacrifices but ever since I let go of dependence on proprietary software I am much happier.