I’ve listened to every single episode of his podcast for years, bought his books, and honestly his material was kinda life changing for me. Went from using Facebook and Apple ID everything to using Graphene OS, Linux, got friends and family using Signal, masked cards, VOIP numbers, etc. I’m sad to see it go but I understand sometimes it’s time for new chapters in life and wish him well. Maybe one day someone else on staff can create some new episodes.
I don’t do anything special, as far as they know. I give them my phone number - but it is a VOIP number I use for family and friends only. I don’t use it with any accounts or sign-ups anywhere so I don’t care that the number gets out. I also mostly just text to plan a meet up in person. I don’t text juicy conversations. For closer friends, I got lucky and we’ve migrated to Signal.
There is an ebook which walks through this setup with specific steps: Extreme Privacy: Mobile Devices by Michael Bazzell (not affiliated)
This is just a ploy to build a huge database of civilian facial scans for further monitoring. Yes, we already have driver’s licenses and photo IDs but real-time scans will train systems to be more accurate to identify and get the population used to and comfortable with being tracked on a daily basis.
The article states:
Chrome already had its reading mode on ChromeOS, and now Google shares that the feature is expanding to the browser on all computers
The author of the article only speculates:
Maybe we’ll one day see a version of it PDFs?
Setting aside the question of privacy, this is a very nice feature. I do worry how Firefox will compete with many of these small comforts and if it may eventually fall out of favor as a viable mainstream alternative and there goes our chance at having a privacy respecting browser. I guess (hope?) there will always be a niche alternative for privacy-minded folks?
But as far as privacy I’m not sure how the scanning of PDFs will affect it. I mean everything on the internet is basically already scanned and cataloged and sharing information over public internet through PDF rather that HTML shouldn’t make a difference? Unless the article means Chrome browser would be scanning private files opened through the user’s computer.
If you have any friends or family in a nearby town, ask if you can leave an external hard drive at their house. You could make a full disk encrypted backup of your machine every week or so and then when you visit them leave a copy of your backups. It may give you more peace of mind if the data is valuable like journals or family photos.
I’ve used both and have had good experiences with both. One benefit of Proton is that emails sent to other Proton users are encrypted, but if you mostly just email people who have @gmail.com addresses, then Gmail’s going to store a copy of your emails to that person on their servers anyway.
Both Proton and Fastmail allow you to have a custom domain with a wildcard catch-all address, but the process for replying from that random wildcard address is much more seamless on Fastmail. Proton requires some extra setup and workarounds. But then again Proton is more secure.
It really depends how you use email and what’s important to you (security, convenience, features). I mainly just get junk mail and newsletters. For more private communication I use Signal.