Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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As far as Steam goes, I believe there are privacy options to keep anyone from seeing your activity. Honestly, as long as you don't play multiplayer games or add any friends, you mitigate a lot of privacy risk. I do not see Linux as some kind of panacea for privacy. You have to be careful not to give away your identity or personal information, online or in real life.
I sometimes buy from GOG, but for the most part I use Itch.io. Like movies and music, I have a strong preference for independent work and experimentation.
Also, there is decades of history in gaming, with physical media or with emulation that does not require making an account or being online.
Those are good points. I too really love GOG’s DRN free policy. It’s what keeps me buying from them. Now that Steam has amazing Linux support though I’m torn. Steam’s games are so easy to get running it really makes me want to support them for wider Linux adoption.
That is an enormous dilemma. Steam, besides having incredible Linux support either natively or with proton, is also extemely economical.
I used to have a moderately large Steam collection, over 300 games. One day I drank too much of the privacy kool-aide and deleted my Steam account. It felt liberating at the time, but not too long after Steam started becoming more Linux centric, and seeing free and open source zealots be so enthusiastic made me feel like an outright fool.
Yet, my entire collection were gained through bundles and sales, so the amount of my money I "threw away" was actuall very little, but still a waste. I now have a new Steam account, and once again I buy convervatively the stuff I actually want to play at the lowest price I can wait for.
Side note: It is still important to buy DRM, and set up a robust system to backup and organize those purchases. The archiving efforts by certain communities and enthusiasts make it almost guaranteed that most video games will be preserved... but that is not true, is it? If you want to play a game 20 years from now, you have to own it and preserve it. There are so many games I used to love but simply cannot find anymore.
... and no, I am foolish and have not set up a system yet for all of my digital media.