tldr
I struggle to find balance between wanting privacy in my day-to-day, and wanting to use the newest and greatest services and products.
Pretext
This post is meant to drum up some discussion that I feel is often lost on privacy focused communities. It’s about the nexus between privacy and modern technology. I hope I don’t sound like an idiot, I still consider myself a novice at technological privacy.
I’m a fairly privacy concerned individual, not for any particular reason other than that I feel it’s my right, my data, and I should have the say over who gets to see/use it. Especially when I’m paying for a service. I find that at times, I am more privacy oriented than others. I have a Google Pixel 4 that I’ve used Lineage OS on for a while. I’ve bought an old thinkpad and have a a linux distro running on that as well. I also have, an iPhone, a Macbook, and a desktop PC used primarily for work/gaming that is running Windows 10. EDIT: I also want to recognize my privilege to be able to choose between all these devices. Not everyone can switch around so freely.
Every few weeks I tend to flip coins on the matter. Some weeks I really just want the ease of everything working, quick google searches, iMessage, polished operating systems, etc. Other weeks I want to be a total privacy nut and clamp down on all of my traffic, pop my SIM into my Lineage Pixel, and do my work on my laptop for a while.
Conversation
I want to know if anyone else goes through these types of moodswings like I do? I also want to hear your stories on how you went all the way and never looked back, or tried to and ended up somewhere in the middle. All of this back and forth for me has made me a much more privacy minded person, and the non-privacy focused products I used are about as clamped down as possible - but that’s not saying much.
As a fellow novice, I certainly empathize with the sentiments here. It’s somewhat of pain that I can no longer see what some friends are up to on social media (the fear of missing out is strong at times…) and the smaller communities of the federation often lack activity for non-tech topics. On the positive side however, I can keep up with the entirety of Lemmy pretty easily.
As far as a journey is concerned, my strategy has been to move incrementally. And fairly slowly. It also helps that I don’t have any specific needs and can comfortably sacrifice some functionality in certain areas. Having extra hardware is a good idea; I do that as well. I spent most of a year using Linux Mint on a spare laptop from a sibling before even considering improving my mobile phone privacy. Then first by test runs with F-Droid apps on my bootloader-locked phone, which took a few months, before finally purchasing a used Pixel 3a to load GrapheneOS. I still have to keep my locked phone around for my family group chat though, since that app cannot run on a de-Googled phone. So I’m not entirely out of Google’s grip. I still use Youtube (might try Invidious out soon), Discord, and play games through Steam on Windows 10. Make the compromises that seem appropriate for now, and circle back to them later. One of the most frustrating things about this is the amount of information and effort required to achieve even moderate privacy, so I view it as a marathon. I do what I can, in small steps.
And should I ever feel as though I just want to begin to use new, easy, convenient service or product X, I sober up by actually reading the TOS (Terms of Service) and Privacy Policy, or EULA (End User License Agreement). One of the most horrific ones I’ve read is for the AT&T USA (i.e., bootloader-locked) version of the Samsung Galaxy S5, which explicitly only leases the operating system to the user.