I don't try and push my weird opinions on my wife lmao. She knows how I feel and understands and does what she wants and that's okay. My advice is to communicate and respect each other even if you don't agree and don't be a controlling dork.

Part of relationships is accepting people. They behave the way they do because they have values and preferences and don't always align with ours. Respect that. Make your case, but respect that they may not come to the same conclusions you do.

My spouse is almost the opposite of me in the privacy/FOSS realm.

They use TikTok and other social media, don't mind ads, use Windows, love Chrome and their Macbook, etc.

We've talked about privacy and FOSS a lot. They have the "I don't care if China/corpos/NSA mine my data, I have nothing to hide." Plus they like targeted ads and algorithmic content suggestions.

We have a lot of mutual respect for each other and I don't force my views on them, and they know I won't use certain apps. I gently suggest FOSS apps to them and sometimes they use them, sometimes not.

They also don't object to watching shows and movies with me that I "aquire totally legally" because I don't use streaming services.

I have told them that any children we have, I want to raise with a "FOSS first" philosophy, and they are cool with that.

Ultimately, I want my kids to have the choice of what software they use, FOSS or not. But for my part, they will know that I will only support the FOSS stuff, if they want to go proprietary, that's on them.

I make the private option easier than the locked in version.

Homeassistant will let us see our locations, run lights, run media centers, control AC, etc. So why do you need Google Home or Google Maps Location Sharing?

Signal will let us chat over WIFI unlike texts, and I will answer it unlike a Google chat account. Before the SMS death it was easier since it did SMS and signal in one app, easier to convince someone if it can replace the old one and add new features.

I configure two SSIDs, one for things I trust and one for those I don't. I can run firewall rules and add security on the backend where they can't see it.

Tiktok you can run a campaign against it by saying it damages cognition, is harmful to youth, supports the CCP.

You can run a pi hole style filter list,ehich might break some stuff so you have to be willing to play tech support.

I don't know anything about kids but it couldn't hurt to teach them some simple skills like html so they get a taste for what's happening behind the scenes.

I wouldn't say that my partner "doesn't care", but they take a much more pragmatic view than I which results in more exposure. In general, we do the following:

1. To a first approximation, they decide what apps and services they use. It's not a monarchy. They'll ask for feedback when comparison shopping, but often the answer is "every dominant ecosystem in this space is terrible, the privacy respecting options don't meet your requirements, this option is 5% worse and this one is 5% better... glhf".
2. For social media accounts that share posts about our nuclear family, we come to broad consensus on the privacy settings and practices. There's give and take here, but I make space to use dominant sharing apps and they make space to limit our collective exposure within reason. If I have a desire to "harden" the privacy settings on a service, it's on me to put in the effort to craft the proposed settings changes and get their buy in on the implications.
3. I have many fewer privacy raiding accounts than they do. I both benefit from transitive access to the junk they sign up for, and pay a cost in my own privacy by association. This just is what it is. The market for partners that align with my own views perfectly is basically zero though, and honestly I probably wouldn't put up with my shit even if I could find one.
4. If I can self-host a competitive option for a use-case that I'm happier with... they'll give it the old college try. But it has to actually be competitive or they'll fail out of the system and fall back to whatever works for them. If we can figure out what's not working we'll sometimes iterate together, but sometimes it's just not good enough and we go back to something I like worse.

It's basically like navigating any other conflict in values. You each have to articulate what your goals are, and make meaningful compromise on how to achieve something that preserves the essentials on both sides. As a privacy outlier, sometimes one also needs to be able to hear "I want to do normal shit and not feel bad about it" and accept it. But if we do want to reach for outlier privacy practices in some specific area, it's on us to break that desire down into actionable steps in realistic directions at a sustainable pace and to not ignore the impacts to our partners of the various tradeoffs we're proposing. Privacy is often uncomfortable and we need to acknowledge the totality of what we're asking for when we ask our partners to accommodate our goals there.

It's a bigger sacrifice for her to come to my side on these issues, or even just meet me in the middle, then it is for me to do the opposite. Also, at the beginning of our relationship I was nowhere near as privacy-conscious as I am now, so I feel it is very unfair for me to turn around years into a relationship and start making demands of the other person. At the same time, she is respectful of my individual choices and doesn't mock them even though she doesn't see the value in them herself (which is the same for many aspects of our lives). We come from significantly different backgrounds and have very different perspectives on a whole range of things (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc), but we both see beyond those superficial differences to the person at the core. That's what we fell in love with, not all the other stuff which we are repeatedly told is so very important in our increasingly polarised society.

I'd they're compassionate, have them watch The Social Dilemma

I've been surprised by the number of people who dont care about privacy but deleted their Facebook accounts after seeing that film

What good is your privacy of those closest to you can be used to track you.

In short. I won't force them, my spouse, to use privacy apps if she does not want it. I've accepted that absolute privacy in my case is impossible. So I use privacy apps because I like them not because I don't want to be tracked. Heck, even my credit card tracks me, a service i cannot continue living without.

Got the wife a grapheneOS pixel, she likes it and the adblock as well. But can't let go of Facebook , Spotify ,WhatsApp etc. Small steps

I'm annoying my girlfriend by installing a dns ad blocker that sometimes interferes with her work, and I have to whitelist things when her work links doesn't work (Microsoft stuff).

It's a bit of an annoyance but I feel strongly about not letting these companies get data about what we are doing.

Just yesterday I installed a kodi plugin (called "up next" ), and turns out it's reporting back what shows I'm watching! The only reason I became aware of this is because it was blocked by the dns ad blocker.

I care about my apps not calling home and reporting what im doing. It should be illegal.

Im in that situation but instead of stubbornly refusing she just does not want to invest the times or effort into privacy. But she was cool with me doing a few things like changing her to different mail providers, changing her browser to firefox and installing a few add-ons that help without being intrusive. But other than that she doesn't really care enough. She uses Instagram and all those apps and I won't try convince her. It is her life and her decision.

However the topic has a different tone when it comes to our kids. We discussed this before having kids and agreed on rules we both are okay with. Things like no pics on social media or WhatsApp of any of them. Or which apps they get to use at what age etc. Luckily when it comes to them my wife is more willing to invest time and effort into privacy.

What I've done is set up a default DNS block list for the whole home internet, and given others their own. I'm using NextDNS, so profiles are easy to set up for individual people with different tastes. I have my own that is relatively strict, and I have lighter configurations for others so that less things are blocked for them. I think you can do a similar thing with a PiHole, but I'm not entirely sure on that.

My girlfriend has allowed me get her bitwarden so she can at least have complex passwords but thats about as far as I’m gonna get I believe.

I semi forced my partner to move to Telegram instead of Facebook Messenger to chat with me, but aside from that I kinda just accepted their own decisions

More for security than privacy, I also set up a Bitwarden account for them so they stopped ussing the same password on everything lol

An agressive DNS and packet inspection based adblocker (to block CNAME cloaking attempts to bypass blocklists and share cookies when blocked), and teaching my SO how to bypass it to play her mobile games, or load websites that are blocked unintentionally.

Despite being a Chrome user, she shows an interest in Firefox due to the effectiveness of its addons, pop-up blocking, and our steamlinks actually shows the Netflix/APV stream when watching from Firefox, whereas Chrome shows a black screen.

TikTok and Instagram are accessed very, very sparingly in the household.

My parents on the other hand, keep trying to convince me to come back onto WhatsApp, which is a hard no for me personally. Ever since it stopped working on one of my devices a while back, I haven't exactly missed it, and I don't want Facebook-owned apps on my mobile anymore out of principle.

I imagine it being quite difficult to explain the many, many reasons to them behind my reasoning for caring about who stores my personal data, tracks my personal activity for purposes that don't benefit myself, and what apps go on my device.

IME something like Signal is an easy sell since it's simple and works well. For all the fair criticism about relying on phone numbers it makes the onboarding easy. For other things compartmentalising helps, e.g., "okay we'll collaborate using this cloud file storage but I personally will be accessing it through the browser while keeping most of my files in a SyncThing over here". While I self-host certain things I don't volunteer to do that for family/friends because it will be too frustrating for everyone if/when I let them down.

In this kind of situation there's a fine line between someone who maximises their privacy through tech decisions and someone who makes their "correct" tech choices their self identity. If you drift into the latter, being asked to compromise can feel like an attack, leading to overreacting and coming across as insecure and annoying. Not to psychoanalyse anyone in particular but sometimes I think people need a reminder.