30
votes
On an internet run by personal information, what do you do to manage yours?
Almost every content provider online tries to access some of your personal info, whether it's to keep itself afloat, improve functionality, or create profits. In 2014, Google made [89.4%] (https://revenuesandprofits.com/how-google-makes-money/) of its profits from advertising, all of which attempts to target users with their interests (though Google does allow this to be disabled).
What do you do to try and protect yourself from data collection? What software, programs, or browser extensions do you trust to protect you, and not just also monitor your activities?
If you don't do any of this, why not? To what extent do you think companies should be allowed to use your data?
I'll be the odd one out. I don't do a lot to mitigate privacy concerns.
I do some things, but they're more about security:
While I understand that information is being collected about me, I've come to the conclusion that information will be collected about me on various levels, so I might as well reap the rewards of the convenience that information collection offers me.
Your thoughts about reaping what rewards you can makes a lot of sense to me. I find that when I compromise on letting information go, it's usually with that reasoning in mind. It's always been a question about whether the information I'm giving up is valuable enough to bother protecting.
I am in the same boat. My tolerance for convenience vs privacy is really low. I have a google smarthouse, use google and microsoft products, etc. And when google recommends something that they think I'll like and they're right, I actually get happy. A useful product was made known to me that I wouldn't have discovered before.
I draw the line at having additional devices apart from my phone being able to hear/see me. I'm willing to accept that my phone is basically one big superbug, but I don't like the idea of bugging my entire life with devices.
That said, I am also willing to accept a fairly large amount of data collection, as long as it isn't intrusive. Fb recently started acting more instrusive on my phone than I was willing to deal with, so I finally uninstalled it. The intrusiveness came in the form of overtly allowing itself access to my sms and calls. And before anyone jumps in with "they've been doing that all along!", yes I know. The difference is, it wasn't in my face. It started popping up notifications about calls I missed and texts I received. I already get notifications for that. I don't need multiple notifications per instance, and I certainly don't want to use fb's interface for making a dang phone call. There was no way to disable it. So even for my high tolerance level, that was the line to cross. I haven't heard of this happening to other people yet, so maybe I was in a beta group or something.
Honestly, I'm a little bummed about it. There are a lot of folks I only ever hear from because of fb. Fb could totally make plenty of money without being the incarnation of everything that's wrong with data harvesting. But normalizing extreme practices seems to increasingly be the norm.
I think most people are willing to tolerate a fairly high amount of it, but everyone is going to find their limits at some point because the boundaries are just going to keep closing in.
Thanks for pointing this out!
I try to use google the less i can,
Search i use duckduckgo,
Map i use openstreetmap,
Android i use LineageOS (i have no idea why i installed minimum GAPPS),
Advertisement i use ublock origin,
Tracking i use Privacy badger and Descentraleyes,
Fingerprinting i use CanvasBlocker.
But i still use Gmail, any other free mail provider that respects privacy?
Oh and youtube, but that is kinda hard to escape :(
I use Proton Mail. They have free accounts I think, but I pay $66 a year for my plan.
That's a very cool site, thanks for sharing.
I remember someone sugesting tutanota and proton on a privacy talk, proton seems to need it's own client, or can i use for example thunderbird (with enigmail and torbirdie)?
EDIT: I also got a kinda static IP (it's dynamic with a really long lease time), might it be a good idea to create my own email server or would that only bring me trouble?
Zero Knowledge means that the emails are encrypted in the client?
But in that case the receiver would have to use the same service, no? If not how can the receiver read the encrypted message?
well there is kind of sort of way around that, and both Tutanota and Protonmail support it - sending an email encrypted with a passphrase that the recepient needs to know in order to be able to read the email.
[Disclaimer: I didn't read the source code]
From what I can gather, the emails are stored encrypted on their servers but they use GPG to send email. If you go to settings in the protonmail account you can see your public key. You copy that and share it with who wants to send you an encrypted message and doesn't use the same service.
Sending encrypted email might be a bit more complicated because you need to get your private key and encrypt the message manually and pasting the encrypted text on the email body.
Actually you can pay in the currency of your choice. You don't need to use euro just because you live in Europe.
What makes the Plus tier worse than the Professional tier? All I see is the lack of "catch-all" emails which I'm not really sure how useful that really is.
I guess. I just can't imagine getting that many a day even at my work were I receive server notifications.
The limit only applies to sending, not receiving.
https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/sending-limit/
Limiting the emails you can receive would make it a useless service. The biggest pain point for me is that I can't switch accounts on the mobile app, so I'm kinda stuck with the one inbox unless I upgrade. 3 folders is enough but a little more would be nice.
I find that uBlock and Privacy Badger are popular tools for most people that think about privacy. As for the rest other than DDG, this is the first time I've heard of them and will have to do some looking.
When it comes to stuff like YouTube, that's where it gets tricky. You can remove yourself from certain networks, but only as long as they don't contain content you can't find elsewhere. This isn't really something you can avoid, so how do you deal with it as someone who goes to such lengths to make yourself anonymous?
Well, i don't want to make myself really anonymous, i just take some precautions so that internet companies can't catch my browsing patterns so easily.
Privacy badger replaces those "like" facebook buttons (which are trackers) with a dummy button that you can still click, but will not track you if you don't click it.
Ublock Origin blocks stuff that privacy badger misses and vice versa
About youtube it's a little bit more complicated because of the content, there was vid.me, which was quite a good alternative, but they closed :( I always beg in youtube comments for youtube creators to go for other video hosting websites, but only one, n-o-d-e, has a website where he hosts his videos, also he hosts on archive.org (here's an example https://n-o-d-e.net/node_mini_server.html)
I remember seeing something about a kind of proxy for youtube(so that you wouldn't run any google code), but i don't recall the name
You're talking about hooktube.com, which was forced by Google to remove all the bits that made it privacy friendly. Nowadays I use indvidio.us.
Dtube, peertube, and bitchute are decentralized alternatives to youtube.
yep it was indvidio.us :)
EDIT:Maybe not, it seems offline
because you've made a typo.
invidio.us
/u/starchturrets did the typo ;) i just copied, but thanks
That's an interesting thought! I think that kind of attitude is what we all should be pursuing when it comes to privacy. An overall awareness of how your information is being used, coupled with the ability and incentive to decide whether or not you want that to happen should be in the rule book of all internet users.
I practice some degree of identity segmentation - multiple accounts oriented around different activities, with varying degrees of privacy focus.
It's hard to maintain opsec. Each account may have traceable contact with others, so I've basically wound up with clusters of related accounts. The practice is intended to foil profile builders (and don't imagine for a moment that ad profiles are innocuous, as Cambridge Analytica and some health privacy scandals have demonstrated), not governments or determined doxxers. Unfortunately, Google still knows me down to the skin - there's no substitute for Maps, and hardly any point in separating identities for the phone app.
I run enough ad blocking and privacy tools that it's a moment of culture shock when I have to use an unprotected browser. The spouse can't be bothered, so he and I have totally different experiences of the Internet. (And he won't let me route the whole house through Pihole, since it breaks things for his work.)
From what I hear, Pihole is immensely beneficial for personal privacy, but I do see how it can interfere with more secure browsing, like on a company server. I don't know a ton about it, but is it not possible to just run a select few devices through it by making it the preferred DNS?
I run select devices and one wireless network through Pihole DNS. It's not just the privacy aspects, but also malware prevention.
Everything else goes through OpenDNS, since they've also got a well-managed malware block list and don't monetize the lookups... oh, damn. I just went to re-check their privacy policy... which now redirects to Cisco, and they do collect information, with third-party sharing. Time to have another chat with the spouse about Pihole.
I used to run Gapps-less Android, have Ghostery, NoScript, and AdBlockPlus installed in Firefox, use Tor a lot (even though I never did anything illegal with it), and did some esoteric Windows customizations (that usually resulted in me having to spend time reapplying "fixes" after Windows updates undid them). I also used ProtonMail and used multiple Google accounts to "stick it to the man" by using the Drive storage of all of them (I thought I was being devious by using multiple free accounts so I could store my stuff online back then).
Then I started college and got a job. It's easier just to pay Google for my music streaming, and GSuite for email on my own domain + extra Drive space. I also use Android without even rooting or custom ROMs, run Windows 10 without any anti-telemetry programs (since you have to redo that after basically every Windows update), use MS Office instead of LibreOffice (OneNote has no good FOSS alternative), and run Linux in a VM. I do use uBlock in Chrome, but that's the extent of my privacy protections.
Once I graduate I intend to go back to Linux as my primary OS (I won't need Office, Xpedition, etc at that point), but I doubt I'll be any more privacy conscientious than I am now. I don't really trust companies with my data, but I'm sorta apathetic at this point, and I think Google is competent enough to protect it from most outside attackers, so I'll keep using them for the foreseeable future. They can datamine the fuck out of what I put on my Gmail account (I don't use GSuite for my primary account for various reasons), I understand why it's free and I'm fine with it.
It's always been one of the more tempting things for me to decide whether I want to put the effort in, or just give it up for simplicity. Every time I get a new device, it makes a lot of sense to just use all the nice, well integrated apps and software, while giving it what it wants to keep everything running smoothly.
That said, as a former chrome user, Ill take a moment to recommend the Firefox. They recently (not really but still) had a pretty significant update that improved browser speed, and I soon found myself switching after giving it a try. If you like chrome, stick with what you love, but it's worth telling you that if you have any issues, you can feel free to try it out. Chrome isn't the lone king of the hill like it used to be.
Indeed. While ADB backup has failed most of the time in the past for me, when I tried out Google's application backup, it worked without any hiccups, aside from Google Authenticator not having my TOTP tokens transferred over. (A sample size of 1, but still a much better experience than ADB backup and restore, and it doesn't require root like Titanium Backup.)
Firefox crashes for me a lot, even after creating a blank profile. I also have a problem with being unable to disable CTRL+Q, which has been a bug for the past 18 years. I've hit CTRL+Q way too many times when I was going for CTRL+W, and there are too many sites whose application state is lost on reload that my college uses (including Canvas quizzes that will auto-submit with no second attempts, and by the time the professor erases your attempt you don't have much time to do it before the quiz closes). I'd love to use Firefox again, but it just doesn't work for me. Maybe when I switch back to Linux I'll go back.
To start things off, I personally try and stick to companies that are mostly based around the concept of privacy. I use Mozilla Firefox as a browser, and DuckDuck Go to search, and have in the past used various adblockers, but right now I am without one.
I've found it easy to shrug off a lot of the tracking that's apparent with advertisements and the like, but still have concerns about what data is being collected about me, and what information can be extrapolated from this.
I think that economically it makes sense for content providers to be able to support themselves, but at the same time there is a lot of room for smarter regulation of this market. Is the data we give worth more or less than the content we receive in exchange? Simple economics tell us that this price/product balance should sort itself out, but how much can that apply when it's so easy to forget that there's a price at all?
With DuckDuckGo, do you ever get a feeling akin to "Fear of missing out"? Google search, for all their nasty data collection habits, is just such an insanely good tool. With DuckDuckGo, every time I've tried it, I worry I'm not getting the results I'd get with Google.
I've managed to rid myself of the Google ecosystem by using a combination of iOS+macOS and self-hosting other aspects of my digital life, but I seemingly can't divorce myself from Google search.
I actually do use Google services for a lot of things other than searching. It's easy to use DDG for search, but I have a deeply entrenched dependence on stuff like Gmail and Docs.
From what I understand, paying gets you more space, right? That said, I would love to see a paid option that eliminates tracking. Though knowing the company, I find that to be an unlikely step.
Thanks for the insight. The reason I think that a "no tracking" purchase wouldn't be something Google would implement is that if they were to do it on Drive, it would become expected that they might offer that paid option alongside their other services.
Though it might be economically viable, I can see how there might be some push-back against such an idea, as it undermines their business model, as well as their ability to offer a comprehensive collection of personal data to those who buy it from them.
I am somewhat privacy conscious, recently being bit more. I use firefox + duckduckgo with the privacy extension to avoid google but am stuck with gmail for now, looking for something else, maybe not totally privacy oriented email, but a non-google option.
Also use uBlock origin and only check facebook once every 2 weeks or so in a container tab and have it disabled on my phone.
I've heard people use privacy badger, but some features i see overlap with duckduckgo, anyone able to tell me benefits of one over the other?
I don't put personal information on the internet.
I don't use the same public handle across different social media platforms.
I lie about things on reddit to make building a fingerprint difficult.
Just my two cents, but when I think of personal information and the internet I always come back to google. Sure there are others like Facebook and all of the other social media sites. But none of them (although Facebook is getting there) have the type of mass surveillance of everything you touch or look at the way google does. If any of you have ever used google analystics, done anything with SEO, or used a google adwords campaign. You would be astonished at how incredibly well they work to target your audience. When you control most of the advertising, and every website you visit/every app you use has analytics you essentially can be anywhere at anytime, on sites/apps/OS that people would never associate with google.
Any of you that run pihole can see just how blatant they are with transferring information back to themselves. In the end, it’s great that they can offer these services for free, but they didn’t become one of the biggest companies in the world by playing fair, your data is worth far more than most of you here are giving yourselves credit for. And those of you on Android, think about how much you paid for that device. You subsidized their effort to sell your info. While it might not seem pressing or important for you to share that you walked your dog with them, who knows what types of uses there will be for the information we freely gave them in the future. Just so we could have email and a place to save our pictures.
For those of you who have been playing with linux for a while and have a beefy computer, it might be worth considering using QubesOS. It uses VMs to enforce the Compartmentalization privacy strategy. It's the most secure you can get without actually using various computers.
Also, the VMs have a non-persistent root partition such that when you close the machine whatever stuff got installed is going to revert back to it's original state, thus making it virus resistant given that you know what you are doing.
Whonix comes pre-installed, So you can torify any software you want without fear of it ever leaking your IP address. Whenever possible I use tor with whonix on a disposable VM that gets discarded as soon as I close it.
I've been using it for the last 2 years and It's been great. Some problems once in a while, but nothing that can't be fixed.
Firefox with containers. The Facebook Container extension makes this particularly easy for FB properties.