Here’s the link to that.
Additionally, here’s another one about tracking users in an “incognito” window.
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I agree a lot of people may not spend time disabling features but that is hardly Google’s fault. The relevant items are not that hard to find and surely it is the user’s responsibility to seek out and set privacy options ?
While that is true, the average working person will have little to no time for doing that.
In my humble opinion, most people are ignorant of these issues or these toggles nowadays. Additionally, Google Chrome is at the top of the browser market share, based on these statistics. (Please correct me if this is an unreliable source.)
Now, I will bring it back to the main topic: That is why a balance is needed. You could at the minimum adopt privacy-respecting browsers, a VPN or DNS resolver, and other software.
However, it should not be like this: “Adopt FOSS software x, de-google everything, install GrapheneOS, use Linux distro y, and get away from Big Tech!!!” - It’s not supposed to be this way, and leads to “privacy fatigue”.
The journey to privacy doesn’t have to be tedious, but an intriguing, ongoing process, which must be aligned with a threat model lest it collapses.
If I understand the case correctly, Google didn’t obtain consent to track people’s locations and deceived users into believing their location is not being tracked. Google has culpability in that case.
People should not have to comb through every option and then disable privacy-violating options. It should be the reverse. Until people give consent, each and every option should be set to the most privacy-respecting defaults.
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left isolated cuz Facebook and no one joined signal (they did but it wasn’t great experience)
valid. this is considered a big and on-going issue in the privacysphere, the struggle to get friends, family, peers to adopt privacy-oriented mindsets.
left google products and faced a lot of inconvenience
valid for you personally, but for me it was pretty smooth.
used ugly looking foss apps & used bs operating systems like linux . . .
i also had a similar issue, but i eventually chose to minimize what i supposedly “needed”. i agree that it feels unfair to not have the best-looking, best-working, best-integrated, best-whatever privacy apps available to you, but the game of replacing privacy-invasive apps with privacy-respecting ones is IMO best won by not having so many things to replace in the first place (or if you do, taking on the choice of minimizing it). i feel freer than when i believed i had all the best privacy-respecting replacements.
which wasted thousands of my hours of precious time, arguing with people with elitist mentality
valid point, but different topic. maybe don’t choose to partake in arguing with egotistical elitists. this is a criticism of the privacy community, not your own privacy journey. although the privacy community and individuals’ privacy journeys are intertwined (especially for many people here who evidentally did not have one without the other, even though it’s very possible), one is about the culture and the other should be about the technical aspects of the transition period from privacy-invasive X to privacy-respecting X. the earlier points i quoted from you are about your transition period, but not this fourth one.
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I feel rather grateful to have moved away from Google at the time I did (before people fully thought of it as a ‘suite’, and before using Android or iOS). I think it was probably a little easier back then. I didn’t find the transition that difficult apart from a few limited exceptions.
I think it would be more difficult now, just because most people have a lot more reliance on Google/Apple suites today than they did 10-15 years ago. People have had a long time grow comfortable with and dependent on a “suite”/“ecosystem” and feel a lot more mental discomfort leaving the perceived and real convenience and safety and the familiar UX.
Many young-ish people today grew up almost fully within one or the other ecoystem, and haven’t really known anything else. I don’t know if any of this applies to you, not trying to imply that it does, its just what came to mind when reading your frustrations and it’s a possible explanation for the difference in our perceived inconvenience.
Not sure what you are talking about. It sounds like an unrelated situation to the one I was referring to (or a substantial misunderstanding of the facts).
Others (1, 2) have already responded with sources, but here is the story I was referring to, this is the original AP article, and a followup article from 4 years later where Google paid a settlement of almost ~400 million usd after being taken to court by 40 State’s attorneys general for the violation.
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Hi, I understand your frustrations, I think we as a community have a lot of work (on ourselves).
Just please know, that it doesn’t have to be black and white - its not necessary to be full blown privacy enthusiast - and its not necessary to “stop” as if it was one state.
If all you take from this is doing more conscious choices (even if they are not the best private choices), you have already won.
Take care 
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SOME PEOPLE IN OUR COMMUNITY SUCK:
I’m sorry that some people in the privacy community made you feel unwelcome and were not more understanding of your needs. In regard to feeling isolated, I completely hear you.
I left Facebook and other social media platforms a long time ago for two reasons:
1) Mental Health
2) Concerns about my privacy
Although I always cite both to people IRL, the truth is my mental health was probably a bigger factor than my very real concerns about privacy. I don’t even use LinkedIn or Dating apps.
NOT BEING ON SOCIAL MEDIA CAN CRIPPLE YOUR SOCIAL LIFE:
IMHO, leaving social media and other non-privacy-friendly platforms, is only easy if you’re already very socially confident and desirable. By desirable, I don’t mean physically or romantically, though that is part of it. I mean desirable in the general sense that you’re the kind of person people are drawn too, which includes, friends, family, co-workers, potential employers, and yes romantic partners too.
If you are the cool / popular kid, and you tell people in your life that you’re switching to Signal, far more people are likely to follow you there, just because they want to be in touch with you. Far more people are also willing to listen to your arguments in defense of privacy, too.
If you’re socially confident and desirable, it’s much easier to fill the gap with not being on social media. Sometimes, it feels like you have to be exceptional to make up for it.
If you used to be an entrepreneur who sold their company for millions of dollars, but you’re now applying for a normal company job, nobody is going to give a toss that you’re not on LinkedIn. Or that you didn’t graduate college.
FOSS APPS CAN LEAVE A LOT TO BE DESIRED
I agree with you that a lot of FOSS apps have terrible UI & UX, and suck in comparison to proprietary, privacy invasive apps. But many are getting better, and I do hope you come back and don’t give up hope.
My dream is for a mainstream, privacy-friendly OS that is an alternative to Windows/macOS and Android/iOS. Same with hardware. I hope we get there soon.
SLOW DOWN, TAKE A BREAK, & TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
That doesn’t mean the privacy journey isn’t worth it, but it perhaps means you need to take it a little slower. Like some have suggested, I encourage you to take care of your mental and physical health.
A friend of mine use to live in a walkable city with great public transport, and has since moved to a city with bad public transport, and that it heavily car dependent.
That kind of paradigm shift can have a huge impact on your health. By living in a walkable city, even if you never go to the gym or play sports, you are exercising every day without realizing it. Hence, you’re now anymore in a car centric city, and it affects your physical health. In a walkable city, you also socialize with strangers more because the way your city is built, encourages it. Less so in car centric town. That can affect your mental health.
It’s the same with privacy. It’s a big paradigm shift, and it can affect your social health, and the kind of opportunities you get in life if you don’t transition to it well.
TL;DR / CONCLUSION
I understand why you made the decision you made, and I hope our community gets better at welcoming people newbies. I’m still a newbie. Take a break, enjoy your life, and I hope to see you back soon. I wish you the best of luck!
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To keep my sanity and not fall too far down the rabbit hole I focus on the nexus of Security, Privacy and Anonymity.
This mean I focus on Browser,Search engine, Password Mgr, Authenticator App, Secure Email & VPN tools.
Specifically: Brave, BraveSearch, KeePass, Aegis , Proton & Simplelogin
Have a bog standard Android phone running VPN 24x7 with no expectation that its either private or anonymous.
Leave social media to friends and family. I haven’t been on any in years. Never posted on FB.
Google Voice is used to mediate SIM-swaps. Its only for 2FA where text & email are the only options.
Yubikeys and/or TOTP everywhere else.
Dont use app push notifications or passkeys yet because, well…passkeys 
I do practice limited browser compartmentaliztion on a split tunnel with Edge for KYC sites & Chrome only to manage my Google account.
Gmail is only used to communicate with Google where I’ve also opted in to have them suppress search results but not to blur where I live.
Credit freezes at the 5 majors and the OPTERY databroker opt-out service are low effort ways to improve security and privacy.
A layered A/V approach with 2nd and 3rd opinion scans.
In case ransomware does get thru a 2-bay Synology NAS backs up up the dekstops and its backed up to multiple USB and SSD drives.
@everyone, first of all thanks for providing some advice, since I was really struggling and last week had a breakdown. I am constantly anxious since I started this privacy journey since 2019/20. I went to various paths, using custom roms, using netguard, using Matrix, Tails OS, Whonix OS, hardening guides, Tor Browser, Mullvad, Brave, Duckduckgo, Mastodon, pixelfed, invidious, piped, newpipe, bibliogram, nitter everything, over past few years I have become really paranoid and anxious.
What started as a simple privacy journey by starting to use firefox focus in 2019 with duckduckgo or sometimes google while researching for a VPN had out me into this huge privacy rabbit hole.
I have stayed constantly anxious, even after making a threat model and following it with a system, I have failed time to time, always trying to go above my threat model. Sometimes, I do made several compromises but I always strived to keep my threat model as baseline but better was always what I aimed for even sometimes with an aim to achieve complete ghost mode with no email address (yes, I have achieved that once).
At the same time I have been missing out a lot of things because I struggled with no social media. I was a facebook user since 2011 all the way to 2015, then deleted my account and shifted to Instagram until 2019 when my journey started and then I have been in an constant cycle of creating/deleting my instagram account.
Everytime I would resist the urge to create any Meta account but sometimes (happens once in 5 or 6 months), I would fail and finally accept that I don’t have such a high threat model, life is short, I can apply many privacy settings and open a personal Instagram account. But day and night I was always anxious as meta is tracking me all the time. This anxiousness would slowly make me stop using my account, until one day I would delete it out of paranoia and this cycle has been repeating ever since. This is not only the case with instagram but many other services as well.
Degoogling, then realizing it’s not worth it, start using google products, stay anxious and finally again stop using them and cycle repeats.
At the same time, I switched from windows to linux, and oh god I have wasted 1000+ hours in recent years configuring linux and again above cycle repeats, I want to play a game AAA title, I used windows and when feeling paranoid installed linux again, remade the configurations and once it broke grub and that corrupted my entire motherboard, had a lot of financial loss by linux that time.
While Struggling with so much, then having a TOXIC Community (Many people were really kind and helpful, made great friends throughout) but this Elitist Mentality was never gone. Just because some people aren’t too tech savy then usually rely on help from others. I would install something like brave browser and someone will argue to switch to firefox, you go to firefox someone will come with brave, mullvad browser, librewolf etc, same with linux you installed ubuntu? It’s shit, they had amazon trackers, use something else. There’s been so much arguing with the people that I can’t tell how many times, I have wasted and felt bad with this. Once I created a blog, to demonstrate many issues I faced with these FOSS and Privacy Focused Alternatives but all I ever received was Hatred and Bashing from this privacy community, everywhere.
Long story short; Last week due to huge stress and loneliness (You know most people face this issue in privacy communities), I had a breakdown and I told myself “LIFE IS SHORT, STOP FOLLOWING THIS PRIVACY BS & MOVE ON”. Since then (Past Week), I have reverted back to many privacy invasive options but see the brainwashing (if you may call that) over the years and I have still so anxious everyday using this software. I hope this time I’ll break this vicious cycle and be happy normie like I once was before 2019.
I don’t know what else to say anymore. Thanks once again everyone who gave advice to me. Thanks.
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It’s not your software choices that are causing the loneliness. People were perfectly capable of making friends IRL before Facebook came along, and will continue to do so in the future.
The first paragraph sounds as if you unfortunately hyper focused on on tools to solve a problem rather than the other way round. I consider myself knowledgeable about this area (have been contributing to PG for years) and even I don’t use all those things you mentioned. More privacy is not necessarily obtained by using more pieces of software.
Instead I think about what it is I am trying to do. For example I do find myself quite often using Google Messages with RCS, because with other Android users that is E2EE (if I was an iOS user I’d use iMessage). Did I degoogle my phone? Nope, but I still obtained more privacy than using some random SMS application even if it was FOSS.
Of course for the few iOS users, I focused my energy on getting them on to Signal if I talk to them regularly. Maybe you build a connection with those people first and they will be more likely to want to switch to maintain that connection with you.
This means maybe you do meet someone on a general social media network, but it doesn’t mean you have to remain there. In fact, if communications don’t generally get to the stage of exchanging phone numbers, then these person(s) are likely just transient online friends, and not real friends as in the kind which will stimulate your brain chemistry or the sorts of people you’d meet IRL for coffee.
Other than that I use an email provider, and a password manager. These things again are trivial and don’t impact who I can communicate with. They do however increase privacy and general operational security.
Here are some general dot points about my privacy application:
- Do I use a VPN? Sure, when I’m not logged into a “known identity”. When I am using a search engine or visiting websites once-off it helps shield my IP address.
- Do I use Tor? Quite rarely, because I don’t really need strong anonymity on the Internet. One of the main uses I have is when a VPN is blocked for some reason or another, but that is about it.
- Do I use any of those frontends you mentioned? Nope. They usually don’t work as well, and my VPN protects me sufficiently for me not to care.
- I do use Firefox, /w arkenfox for my regular browser, that’s something I spent some time learning about. I do still have Chromium on my machine for other things where that works better.
- Do I use Linux? Sure I use Fedora, I have used other distributions in the past, (eg archlinux, and am very capable of doing so), but time is valuable and I trust the Fedora team to set me up with good defaults.
- Do I use Windows? Yes, sure why not, when I need to run Windows specific software.
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That sounds very difficult, and I’m sorry to hear it’s caused harm in your life. At the end of the day, I believe your mental health comes first. All of this privacy stuff should come from a place of love and joy that you are gaining some sovereignty in yourself, not a fear that your life will be worse not doing so. Some people must approach this with some fear based by totalitarian regimes or that they are under threat, but if you don’t have actual actors targeting you then it’s unnecessary stress.
If the journey is causing you distress, then it makes sense to take a hard look at what’s important to you. Don’t let the FUD and the online elites take away the joy. Thanks for sharing your story, and I wish you best of luck.
There are offline ways to connect, but spending all your time getting offline without having a plan for your social life will make for a rocky road. I’ve noticed this seems to be an under discussed topic, and there isn’t a guide on how to connect with friends and family after being yanked from the matrix. Maybe something for PG to consider in a blog or addendum.
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Thanks man, I think there must be a section where people could share their workflows (like you mention, I use windows) because in such a community it’s often happen that people feel that everyone just use linux with entire traffic routing through tor or something or similar to other programs as well.
Tbh I don’t know if I am even in right state of mind for all the above garbage I said made any sense, I just put anything that came to heart right here, but thanks for your reply, specially the points where you explained about their usage help me a lot when I think about it!
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If the journey is causing you distress, then it makes sense to take a hard look at what’s important to you. Don’t let the FUD and the online elites take away the joy. Thanks for sharing your story, and I wish you best of luck.
Thanks a lot friend. Sure I have learned how to ignore others when the advice is harmful in general for me. This took a lot of time but I have learned this the hard way.
There are offline ways to connect, but spending all your time getting offline without having a plan for your social life will make for a rocky road. I’ve noticed this seems to be an under discussed topic, and there isn’t a guide on how to connect with friends and family after being yanked from the matrix. Maybe something for PG to consider in a blog or addendum.
I know there’s offline ways to connect but in reality everyone is busy with their lives, some people move to far away places either for work or other cause and most will never care for privacy and me not using common social media apps had only made me feel more lonely and disconnected from others. I always try to make my loved ones move to privacy respecting platforms for communication but It hasn’t worked out pretty well, so many times I tried in past years. But Thanks for your advice.
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That’s pretty unlikely, because everything would be super slow, and it’s absolutely unnecessary for the known identity, which is something you will always have.
So sometimes, privacy is easier gained by spending the time smart as opposed to trying to do all the things eg a few more:
- I use GrapheneOS as it has some features like media scopes and user profiles that I find useful (again not super technical), and I use this with sandboxed play services (so not degoogled). The main reason I use the pixel with GrapheneOS is because I didn’t want to deal with all the other half baked not necessarily well supported builds on not so good hardware. The pixel is a good solid device which is why we recommend it.
- I wanted to use my VPN more, so I do use policy based routing on my router to ensure parts of my network always go through VPN. This took me some time to set up, but it was more useful than all the frontends in the world. Main benefit is that I don’t need VPN software on any of my computers when at home.
I have quite severe autism, and find making friends difficult, but I will say social media does not really help besides initial interaction, contact. If you want to know more about that, look into what actually happens to your body when you make friends IRL.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking all your decisions from 2019 were making life “good” and reverting to that will necessarily return that state of mind. That way of thinking is likely to lead to disappointment.
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Sure, I will take this into consideration going forward in my new balanced digital journey.
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