cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/151310
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.
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I can’t say I went all the way but I think I’m past the middle.
I try as much as possible to own the tools I use through self-hosting (mail, mastodon, pixelfed, matrix, lemmy, blog, cloud, firefox sync, photo hosting, rss, …) and when it’s not possible I choose privacy-oriented ones but sometimes floss alternatives just aren’t good enough and I won’t/can’t sacrifice the required efficiency.
That’s the case for search engines, I use my own searx instance but sometimes I just can’t find what I’m looking for so I switch to google for those.
My biggest issue is that I could not find an alternative that suits me to Youtube, I like peertube but there isn’t enough content for me and I don’t have the resources to host it (to control the federation settings).
As for android, I used to bother with aosp projects in the past but I don’t have the time anymore so I just rooted my device and disabled as much junk as I could and use f-droid as much as possible.
That last bit about the android is exactly what I’ve done. I’ve followed @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml’s guide on hardening an Android and I found it super useful. As for a YouTube alternative, I also agree. The content is just too good on YouTube, but luckily more of the niche creators I follow are on Peertube.