About my privacy, I feel I need to be proactive and ask:
- What can go wrong? Are you trading convenience that you don't really need for a privacy level that you need? Or you have enough information to move forward? If you are doing an intervention to protect your privacy, what does it protect you from? Did other such interventions fail or led to inconvenience?
- What's the likelihood?
- How bad would that be?
By the time you decide to install a product or signup on a service, it's too late to read the privacy policy and search for reviews.
Privacy is not about security
Last but not least, another myth is that privacy and security are the same thing. In order to protect your privacy, first you need to protect your security. In my case a password manager like 1password helped me:
- generate (14 or more number, characters and symbols), store, sync between devices and share secrets like passwords with my family
- find which of my services (especially email providers and cloud providers) support 2 factor authentication and add it instead of authy or sms for faster copy paste
- put tags on thing like local services so that I focus on the rest by searching for
tag:
Top comments (3)
Seems like more of a Google purge, which isn't a bad thing. Sometimes I worry that I am far too tied into Google based on the products I use, and then wonder if there is a way out.
I have a Facebook purely for messenger. I can't remember when I last logged in to Facebook, and I've certainly not added content for them in over a year (probably closer to 2).
Part of the problem faced by people wanting to do a data purge is the number of services signed up to over the years which have been forgotten. Trying to catch up or remember all of them to go back through will be a pain.
I am doing an experiment to see how much addicted I am to google but I will write about it in another series, so I removed most info from this post. So far so good.
Data purging of old services is impossible, unless you get an alert from the following and you need to start digging :)
haveibeenpwned.com
I don't hate targeted ads. Last month I was trying to buy a new phone and a bunch of ads showed me different options I could choose from. The final buying decision came from knowing all those options and lots of research.
I think all businesses need to survive somehow. Want an ads free social media? Pay for it. Wants ads free search engine? Pay for it. Lots of the alternative search engines for example may opt for the no track but then they will serve you untargeted ads. That's worse imo. If I have to see ads, I would rather see the ones that may benefit me