Becoming a Consumer Again: My Data Privacy Journey
My previous post is about the importance of privacy, and especially digital privacy, and why everyone should care about it, regardless of what they do online. This post is a continuation of the previous one, and I'll be focusing on practical considerations and other nuances surrounding digital privacy.
A few questions to ask yourself.
How much privacy do you want? Privacy is on a spectrum. One one side, you have the average consumer who doesn't really care about data privacy, and on the other side, you have someone who maintains completely anonymity on the internet and tries to leave no digital trail whatsoever. In the middle, you might have someone who doesn't want to share personal data with big corporations as much as possible, but is fine with not being anonymous on the web. If you're reading this after the previous post and got to this sentence, I'm assuming you're looking into being a part of this middle group.
How much convenience are you willing to sacrifice? The amount of privacy you want is inversely related to how convenient you want your digital experience to be, and this also relates to how much technical knowledge you want to acquire for the sake of your privacy goals. Learning sysadmin skills and setting up your own email server isn't really something that's accessible to everyone, and doing simple things like moving away from Google as a search engine can cause poorer results and latency. Everyone has a different appetite for how much convenience they want to sacrifice for privacy, and this is something that you need to decide for yourself.
Now, I'll be looking at a few small things I have done in different domains in order to better ensure my online privacy.
Browsers
Google uses your Chrome web history to sell you targeted ads. I used Chrome from the month it was released in 2008 to around 2019. Excluding years where I was a minor, that's still a good few years of data collected. Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search history are a part of this. Chrome, to me, seems like one of the biggest culprit, especially since there is no need to use Chrome at all.
So what can replace Chrome? I don't trust Edge. Opera and Opera GX have their own controversies (remember kids, just because it's marketed towards gamers doesn't mean it's good). Normal FireFox is okay but has a bunch of additional stuff I'll never bother using. Vivaldi is something I tried to make work (despite it not having an open-source user interface), but the number of additional features ended up being completely overwhelming. I didn't really see any benefit in reading my email directly from my browser application.
More Privacy-Focused Alternatives
Chromium is free and open-source and basically the same as Chrome. Brave was my daily driver from 2019 to mid-2023 and, excluding the "crypto stuff", it's basically the same. For the more technical, Hardened FireFox is a great option. In a nutshell, this is basically FireFox except with privacy-focused settings and a lot of the extra unnecessary features removed from base FireFox.
Personally, instead of hardening FireFox myself, I use LibreWolf as my daily driver now. The barrier to entry is much lower here since there isn't anything additionally technical to do, and all you need to do is tweak some settings to make the web-browsing experience roughly similar to what you would get on an ordinary browser.
Search Engines
Google has the best search results out there, and I don't think many people will argue with that. If you don't appreciate how good Google is, you can try using literally anything else and see how often you end up not getting what you want and just proceeding to go back and Google your original search. This was my experience with the most famous privacy-focused search engine: DuckDuckGo. It makes more sense when you realize that DuckDuckGo sources results from their own crawler and, uh, Bing. I'm not sure how much data I gave Google just because DuckDuckGo couldn't really give me what I had wanted on my first search.
A few months ago, I discovered Startpage, which gets their results from Google instead, minus whatever tailoring of the results Google does for you based on your personal data. Personally, Startpage seems a bit slower than Google, but I'm relatively much happier with the results I'm getting than I was with DuckDuckGo.
Yup, Google reads your emails. In fact, they used to use Gmail to personalize ads until 2017. While they've stopped doing that, you might have noticed a lot of surprising conveniences, like automatic additions to your Google calendar, or the automatic categorizations of email, for example. Google still has access to your emails and will still read them to make your life "better", and using Gmail means paying this price.
Unfortunately, moving away from Gmail isn't a very smooth process, and it's something I've only recently started to look into. There are other alternatives out there such as ProtonMail and, more recently, Skiff. With many of them, you need to pay to get the same user experience and limits as you would get with Gmail, and this is a major disincentive when, well, Gmail is free. Perhaps, in the future, I'll share my conclusion on the matter.
Instant Messaging
Hey, this time I'm starting off with Meta instead! While WhatsApp doesn't read your messages, it does collect a lot of other data about you. More privacy-focused messaging applications such as Signal have gotten a lot more attention over the past few years and people get more and more concerned over Meta's control over WhatsApp. Many people I know have also made the switch to Telegram, which, while arguably being less secure than WhatsApp (due to its complicated situation with end-to-end encryption), at least doesn't have a connection to the one of the biggest data-oriented tech companies on the planet.
While changing your primary email isn't a smooth process, changing your instant messaging tool is a ridiculously difficult endeavor, because you need to convince your friends and family to make the switch as well. Either that, or you need to juggle multiple messaging apps based on who you are talking to, which I find almost impossible to do. Ideally, I would like to just use Signal if I can. If you're reading this and know me personally, let me know if you'd like to make the switch.
This is a bit meta, but I've realized that some of posts really walk the fine line between being about tech and being about life. This is probably because the intersection of those two aspects of my life is something I deeply care about. We live in a digital age, and basic digital literacy is just as important as basic financial literacy. Digital privacy is one aspect of this that I feel isn't talked about as much on the dinner table, and these two posts have been an attempt to correct that. More strictly technical and strictly life-oriented posts will be coming soon, so subscribe if you haven't done so, if you care about those kinds of things.