privacy
Digital privacy is often overlooked and misunderstood. It is something that every person should take very seriously, and it should be the legal and technical default. Just like the default position of a door is closed.
Here are some of the ways that I manage my privacy:
VPN
This is probably the most misunderstood privacy tool today, but it is useful as long as you know its limitations. Many VPNs will collect all your data and sell to advertisers and data miners, just like your ISP does. So it doesn’t necessarily protect you from these practices.
The difference is that with a VPN, all your traffic will go through the VPN, even when you’re on a different network. So in some ways, it is actually worse.
VPNs do, however, add SSL protection to your traffic. Which is especially important if you use public wifi. A VPN will also, typically, give you access to region locked content. Like piracy sites, or streaming services. Using a VPN means you’ll get a new IP address frequently and anytime you want. This can make it much harder for websites and trackers to fingerprint your device.
I use Mullvad, since they offer privacy by default, by not asking for any personal information and allowing anonymous payment options like Monero and cash.
I use Proton as my email provider. Avoiding free email is important to anyones privacy. If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.
To avoid spam I use DuckDuckGo Email Protection. This lets me generate new email addresses that’ll forward mail to my inbox. These email addresses will look something like: s8acrkji@duck.com
The forwared emails are stripped of all trackers. Whenever I sign up for something like a newsletter, I’ll generate a new duck address. Or when I register to something that is really unimportant, but which requires a user to view the content.
If they end up selling my email to advertisers/spammers, I’ll know who did it and can easily block it by deleting the email address. I’ll also make note to stay clear of that site.
DuckDuckGo could read the emails sent through this service. Which is why I wont use it for anything important.
Browser
Since Google launched Chrome, they have slowly taken over the Chromium project, injecting more and more google specific features into core and making it harder to use it as a privacy browser.
Because of this, I only use Firefox derivatives, like Librewolf. This isn’t really anything special, you can get the same privacy by hardening Firefox and installing some plugins - that is esentially what Librewolf is. This simply saves me the trouble.