Personally, I use a password manager, vpn, and all of my devices have minimal tracking and are fully encrypted. Just wanted to hear what others do.
No proprietary software. Open source only. (Partial exception for certain games, in a virtual machine, after I review their privacy policies.)
No retail rewards memberships.
No Google anything.
No Meta anything. (Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram/etc.)
No phone number given to web sites or (most) businesses. VoIP number for the handful that might legitimately need to call me.
Unique email addresses for each web account and service provider. When one gets leaked or spammed, I know who did it and I cut them off.
VPN when I feel it’s appropriate.
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Live in a fairly secluded area. Have privacy film on most of my windows, anywhere that a person could possible see in. Back window overlooks a hill though so airing out after a shower in front of it is still pretty private.
Where sunglasses to hide the windows to my soul when I’m out and about.
Thinking about growing a giant dense bamboo fence around the perimeter of my property.
I thought of a similar thread but I think the results would be pretty much the same. It’s great to have some mutual inspiration here.
Anyway, there’s tons of stuff I can list here. I’m gonna list some stuff but will probably forget 70% of the other stuff because it’s become so common in my daily life.
- Own NAS as private cloud
- Self-host on my NAS to not use internet services that spy on me (like Bitwarden, Joplin server, cryptgeon, Syncthing, Nextcloud)
- OPNsense as my router of choice
- W10Privacy (because I still can’t switch to Linux because of circumstances)
- Firefox as my browser of choice with some extra settings to harden it (I tried something like LibreWolf in the past but I can’t use Spotify without DRM)
- uBlock Origin of course (and some other browser addons like LibRedirect, ClearURLs, Decentraleyes and so on)
- Privacy respecting mail provider (mailbox.org)
- Signal (instead of WhatsApp)
- Thunderbird (instead of something like Outlook)
- Piped (instead of YouTube)
- Uninstalled/disabled all apps on my phone that I don’t need (also saves battery)
- Been using custom ROMs on my phone (but I made some bad experiences with stability so I stick with the stock ROM for now)
- NextDNS (with encrypted DNS)
- Whoogle (instead of Google)
- Lemmy (instead of reddit, haha)
- Avoid accounts (and even links) to something like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and so on
- Libreddit, Nitter and all the other privacy friendly frontends for social media
- Never connected devices to my LAN/Wi-Fi that don’t need an internet connection (like a stove lol) and never installed the apps on my phone to operate them
Gonna add some more to the list whenever something comes up in my mind. Like I said it’s become so basic in my life that I don’t always think about it anymore when I use it.
Btw things like 2FA only help with security, not privacy.
Not using my real name on any social media profiles except LinkedIn (so potential employers don’t think I’m weird), posting at random times of the day, commenting on something not related to the country where I live, using email alias (and multiple ones), never posting a picture of my real face.
My main line of defense is using services I fully own (they’re however hosted on a VPS. I’m fine with that) :
- I use my own password manager (safe)
- I use my own DNS with DoT wherever possible
- Emails are selfhosted as well, and I use spamgourmet for deliveries that require a signup email
- Duckduckgo as my search engine and mobile browser
- Adblock plus on Firefox for desktop browsing, with an occasionnal SOCKS5 proxy on my servers
- I used to run SailfoshOS on my phone, but it’s unusable right now. I’m waiting for lineage or /e/OS to support my hardware
- I’m very picky with my cookie selection, and store them in RAM to flush them on reboot
- Occasionally use Tor (though it’s a bit overkill for my usage)
And that’s it for the most part :)
I pay for Kagi.com for search, I use NextDNS over my personal Tailscale network that blocks all the commercial social networking sites and their CDNs, as well as a ton of ad networks. I use uBlock Origin in firefox to further remove content that may be served 1st party. Opted out of as many analytics services as I can and frozen my credit with all four US credit agencies. I alternate between using a VPS as a Tailscale exit node, or ProtonVPN for country-specific location egress.
Password manager, DNS level malware, ads, etc blocking on all devices, run linux on all my computers, run degoogled lineageos, dont upload data to clouds, use protonmail, and im prob missing some off the top of my head
To add to this
Use fake data where possible.
Disposable virtual cards when buying stuff
Email aliases
Fdroid for phone apps.
Cash payments
Ah yes. I use fdroid as my primary app store and use Monero as often as i can. I actually just bought my new phone yesterday with monero
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I have a friend who will take monero and use it and i give them an extra 5% for doing it. If i had to do it without them i would buy an amazon giftcard from one of the giftcard sites like coinsbee or coincards and buy it through amazon. Since i dont have an amazon account i send the monero to my friend and she uses amazon to get it. All i have to do is send her a link. She tells me how much it cost after governmyth extorgion fees are added and i send her that amount of monero +5%.
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- Password manager (Bitwarden)
- Two-factor authentication enabled wherever I can (with my YubiKeys if supported, TOTP from Authy otherwise)
- Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled, Cookie Auto Delete, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin
- PiHole with my own DNS resolver as well as DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS proxy to use it on all my devices
- both uBlock and PiHole have privacy-minded blocklists enabled
- Linux on all computers
- Windows only for gaming
My email client supports masked emails so every account I sign up for has its own email address. That’s all synced to my password manager which generates passwords for said account. Vpn always on. I think that’s it?
What’s the client
Fastmail
In addition to what others have said, I don’t store cookies between browser sessions. This of course removes all your logins but eliminates cookie fingerprinting.
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Live in a fairly secluded area. Have privacy film on most of my windows, anywhere that a person could possible see in. Back window overlooks a hill though so airing out after a shower in front of it is still pretty private.
Where sunglasses to hide the windows to my soul when I’m out and about.
Thinking about growing a giant dense bamboo fence around the perimeter of my property.
Live in a fairly secluded area. Have privacy film on most of my windows, anywhere that a person could possible see in. Back window overlooks a hill though so airing out after a shower in front of it is still pretty private.
Wear sunglasses to hide the windows to my soul when I’m out and about.
Thinking about growing a giant dense bamboo fence around the perimeter of my property.
