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.