Privacy

For a long time I had been using Google Drive to store all my important documents. It worked extremely well - always accessible no matter where I was, synced across all my devices, and never had to worry about my files being unavailable or deleted. Ultimately though, it didn’t feel like it was mine, and I didn’t like the idea of depending on Google. When searching for an alternative, I considered full-blown cloud solutions like Nextcloud/ownCloud, but they seemed overly complex to me. Also, I didn’t like the idea of being locked to their product, despite it being open-source. I wanted something simpler. So I thought: how about plain old S3? It’s simple, easy to integrate, works everywhere, and I don’t even need to host anything - so it won’t consume any resources. My main concern about this plan was that the files wouldn’t be encrypted - if someone gained access to my S3 drive they’d get access to my files, and that would be bad. ...

I decided to try switching over to an iPhone, as I mentioned in a previous post. The main reason is that it’s the final step in de-Googling myself, which is an achievement that I’ve been wanting to unlock for a while. I don’t really know if it’s any better for privacy than Android, but it should at least not be worse when configured properly. My phone of choice is an iPhone 7, which I got a good deal on from Carousell a while back, for the sole purpose of setting up an Apple Watch. Although it’s a few years old now (2016), it’s still a very decent phone - good screen, responsive, and the form factor is just right for me. Sadly it’s been dropped from the latest version of iOS, which kind of limits its long-term usefulness, but I figured it would be long enough to decide whether I want to stick with iOS long enough to get an upgrade. ...

I recently discovered alternative frontends - websites that let you use the ‘real’ version of Twitter, Reddit etc. through an alternate website. The advantage of this is that it stops those big sites like Twitter from tracking you, because they don’t see the connection from your web browser. Anyway, one of the most convenient ways to take advantage of this is through a browser extension like LibRedirect, which will automatically filter links and redirect you to the alternate versions of popular sites. You can even set it as your default search engine, so it can redirect to an instance of SearXNG, a privacy-respecting search engine. ...

A few months ago I talked about online privacy, and how I’d been trying to give up Big Tech software like Facebook and Google products. Here’s a quick update on how that’s going. On Google: I still use one gmail account, though it’s no longer my primary email address. I use Google Drive only for a few files (spreadsheets) that I like to edit from my phone, but that’s it. I still use Android, although I’m considering getting an iPhone later this year. I read that since Apple makes their money from selling (expensive) hardware, they don’t need to exploit your privacy for advertising as much as Google, but I’ll look into that more before making a final decision. I don’t use Google search or Chrome at all. So I don’t think Google is getting much of my online data anymore, which I think is a win! ...

Introduction I’ve been trying to reduce my reliance on Big Tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.) for some time now. There’s many reasons, but I can summarise it like this: I don’t think they make a positive impact on the world. Part of it is about privacy. Most big tech companies rely on advertising, and advertising means tracking you so they can target you with ‘better’ ads and make more money. All these companies track you as much as they can. For example, take a look at Facebook’s Off Facebook Activity page. If you haven’t already seen it or turned it off, you might be in for a shock. ...