I have been fighting for my privacy for so long. At first, it was fun, informational and I have learnt a great deal.
Lately, I don’s think privacy is worth fighting anymore. We fight for nothing, nothing seems to be gained except those big corporate have less money. I will still continue to improve my security because I feel like that is much more important than privacy for the vast vast majority of people and still looking for font-ends to stop intrusive ads. But, I genuinely think fighting for privacy is just time wasting, the end user gain nothing and they waste more time, get paranoid and things are less convenient which waste even more time. Not to mention, you are isolating yourself from the rest of your social peers. For instance, switching to Gnu/Linux is time wasting enough already, now I jumped ship during the pandemic and I have fallen in love with this OS, but I must admit, it was very time-consuming, learning, finding software. And I did that during the pandemic which time is all people have LoL, imagine an average person have to do this on top of all the stuffs they have to deal with in their personal life, it is simply not worth it. Although, I am living very happily and comfortably in my Linux environment and it is miles better when I was on windows, customization, workflow, useful apps…I still find it time wasting. I guess the net benefit of everything depends of the person.
Fight for privacy if you are an activist or something but for most people, better focus on something else. You are just wasting your time and money, may as well gain something while those corporate mine your data
If that’s where you’ve found your balance, that’s completely fine. My suggestion would be to try to form a threat model and really understand what you want to achieve with it. This’ll then help you pick and choose the tools you use. If some of those tools are “normie”, that’s fine, because it’s your threat model.
For example, if you don’t really consider Google a threat, but you don’t trust anyone else, then Gmail would probably be a better option for you than maybe a lesser-known provider like Tutanota. Google also has excellent security practices, so you’d be benefiting from that too. Just an example, but I hope you get my point.
Threat modelling is important and it helps you solve the exact problem you’re having.
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