Not unpopular at all, or at least with me. First, I’ll answer my take on my journey and makes next steps, and then I’ll give discussion for your thoughts.
For me, I’ve heavily been focused on using tools and applications to mitigate privacy concerns. This lets me mostly continue may usual day-to-day but with some degree of protection. For my initial work, a huge chunk of privacy I believe comes from the following:
- Network wide DNS adblocker on my home network, blocking a degree of tracking (and some ads
) from devices I have less control over like smart tvs. This is probably the most maintance I do as I need to allowlist certain DNS entries to get some sites to work. - Using privacy frontends for certain services
- Using a privacy respecting email provider where a huge amount of personal data comes inbound
- Using a VPN when not logged into accounts
My current next step is replacing all of my email logins with SimpleLogins so that my domain based e-mail is no longer tied to online accounts. Even then, thats simply a mitigation of still being registered to online accounts.
But what I was not focusing on was reducing online presence. In reality, the next step for me is to give the middle finger to many services that broker my data; I should refuse to use their service. Social networks, and etc. However, without a thoughtful plan, I risk running into burnout and isolation.
I haven’t discussed these next steps, as most of these are personal. This part of the journey isn’t technical (aside from deleting accounts), its re-evaluating how I interact with the world itself, and re-evaluating my hobbies, relationships, and life goals.
We don’t win the privacy game, we just simply get to a level where we feel comfortable. For myself, I am enjoying the journey itself still, and I have no hard end-goal. The only goal is to keep this journey interesting and not burn myself out, as I know its a general net-gain for myself because of the principles I believe it.
If you’ve found that you are happy where you at, the journey can continue in a new ways. With the experience and insight you’ve gathered in your journey, you can help lead others as they try to figure out what works for them. Could be this forum, could be offline. As a developer, I’ve also found another way to continue the journey: I help contribute to some of the tools you see in the recommended section. You can also choose to take the journey political, and see if you can support local politicians who will aid in lawful protections of privacy.