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.
You are correct. Privacy communities like to be idealistic instead of realistic. You can go either Stallman (which almost none of these Orwell-spamming idealists ever do) or go for a Marxist-Leninist realism approach, doing what is necessary to find the balance.
I call this the paradox of freedom with anti-privacy tools.
To make it brief, the freedom you get from accessing to Discord or Telegram communities is immense. By cutting yourself off on the basis of phone number requirement, you end up also restricting your freedom of knowledge by increasing your freedom of privacy. This also makes it clear they are either incapable of compartmentalisation, or lack the hardware resources to do so.
I practice my OPSEC while feeding data anywhere and have advocated for threat modelling to people with my easy guide, and assist many people via DMs and chats. I have advocated for compartmentalisation a lot. Some fake reddit privacy communities have started copying my approach, but they are as good as a copycat is compared to someone with experience and real world understanding.
Feel free to talk to me, and honestly, crosspost this over to c/privacy and on r/privatelife if you have reddit account. This might be worth a discussion.
I do appreciate you chiming in on this. When using mainstream products like my phone or WIN10/MacOS, I do practice as much compartmentalization as I can. For all my online shopping, I have an email address setup to specifically handle that sort of thing (because of the high incidence of tracking and email subscriptions you get in their ToS for buying something). I also have a single and very private email that I don’t give out to anyone other than my bank and utilities. The list goes on but I do try my best.
I really like your point on how restricting yourself to a more private life can restrict your freedom when it comes to accessing information. This is all too true.
Compartmentalisation and threat modelling will lead the charge in the future. And I will be here to help out people and we need to have this culture, where less paranoia and Orwell spamming happens.
Appreciate that. Let me know if I can help in any way.
You are already helping. Crosspost and get this discussion over at c/privacy.
Will do. I also find it interesting that you advocate for a locked down version of Android X as opposed to alternative OS’s like /e/ or LineageOS. What’s your reasoning? Is it simply because of security?
I am not advocating it over LOS, but the security factor is indeed an issue, and the requirement for no root these days is really high. Also, the guide serves as a way for just about any Android user to get top grade benefits on par with custom ROMs, which breaks a massive gatekeeping and elitism barrier.