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.

First of all, I try to offer her alternative and better ways of doing things. I selfhost a number of services that we both use and she also knows that she can come to me for advice and technical help.

I also got her a hardware key that is used together with a software password manager, to keep her passwords safe.

We also have a rule when it comes to social media. If she wants to post a picture of me, she needs to ask permission first.