Privacy Guides

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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.

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Self-host This, Subscribe to That (self.privacyguides)

submitted 1 year ago by prilemmy to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'll go first with an example below.

What are y'all opinions as to what to self-host (on a computer, instance, or local computer) vs what is better to pay for through subscription or purchase?

The goal is to increase

privacy from databrokers, ad brokers, corporate overlords, and from family and friends.
security from threats below targeted nation state attacks, below zero-day vulns.

Example:

Self-host your calendar, contacts, and tasks Subscribe to email via protonmail to avoid all the issues with self-hosting mail servers

top 7 comments

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I self-host basically everything I can, aside from email. Self-host Calendar, contacts, streaming, budgeting, documents and storage, passwords, private chat, etc.

Email I'd love to self-host, but consensus seems to be that it's between moderately difficult to impossible to get outbound deliverability depending on quite a few factors, some of which are out of one's control.

As for reasons why I self-host, basically everything you've listed in your post. I want to be the owner of my data, not some corp making profit by mining it for ad revenue or selling it to data brokers. Also I love digging into the guts of standing up my own services and keeping them maintained, I've learned so much over the years from it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I do as you, and run my own services for everything I use frequently except for email. keeping it all behind a vpn prevents unwanted access. I pay for protonmail but operate my own mail server for internal use. I have machinery to download messages from protonmail upon receipt and make them available to me, and to send through protonmail. so I'm doing both and using protonmail as the interface with outside servers.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I'm going to go against the grain a small bit.

The only things I don't self-host that I use on a daily basis are lemmy instance, password manager (bitwarden), backup storage and a Proton drive box for really sensitive documents.

Email is not that bad to self-host, you just need to pick a reliable provider and hope for clean IPs. Then take care of keeping it secure with standard best practices.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Self-host

Notes: Joplin server is great, the sync is way more efficient (and private) than using a 3rd party storage service like OneDrive or Dropbox.
Photo Library: Immich photo management server. No clandestine scanning of your images or using them for AI training.

Offsite backup location: Backblaze has super cheap prices on data storage. You can encrypt the buckets with a toggle on BB, but TrueNAS has a sweet automatic backup option that encrypts data before sending to your backblaze bucket.

[–] GreatBlue 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For backup you can look into rclone. It's what TrueNAS is using. You can set rclone up to only upload your data encrypted to a lot of storage providers like BackBlaze, Google, Dropbox, S3 etc. So you don't have to trust the provider with the ~~privacy~~ confidentiality of your data.