Privacy

Reading 1984

I used to relied a lot on Google. Google drive , google photos , google everything. After reading this article . I decided to self host most of online life and use privacy and security tools as much as I can.

My Runescape account was hacked when i was younger. They got in via a dataleak leaking my email credentials. At that point i was already into computers more than the average person, so it kinda was a kick in the butt that pushed me to pursue better security practices, which opened up the rabbit whole into data privacy for me. Rip my mith armor from 2006 lol.

One day I was on a website at 2am that blasted an advertisement for TIDE DETURGENT at full volume. Then I found out about AdBlockers, then how creepy advertisement were.

Then Snowden happened.

Wanted to see if I could get my phone to show me ads for Tamale pots, a food I don't make nor know how, and also not something that's not commonly bought outside of holiday times. So I talked about it for days/weeks, not a single typed word, then one day I was seeing them on Facebook. Deleted my facebook, Instagram, installed app cloner to scramble my phone model/gps/location/google analytics ID, got mullvad vpn, and adblockers + uguard. App cloner also let's you isolate apps and force them into a sandbox where they can have fun with my fake data.

Someone online introduced me to redirector. I saw it as a tool for efficiency and redirecting my internet consumption when I was mindlessly surfing the internet.

Then I came across libredirect which was less-customizable but had built-in redirects towards privacy-focused front-ends for popular websites.

Then I made the exodus from Reddit and the resulting communities tend to have a greater focus on privacy and security.

Then I switched from Windows -> Debian and that's all she wrote.

Mine started when I switched teams and ended up in an infosec org at work. Being around a bunch of privacy and security minded folks really taught me a LOT.

It has just been a gradual change but having children is also a big part of it. I'm in my late 30s so feel the early part of my life compared to now are complete opposite ends of the privacy scale...

I got into piracy because I was 11 and wanted to edit videos

I got out of piracy when I got software through work and streaming made things convenient and fair.

Now I'm thinking of getting back in because things are no longer convenient nor are they fair.

[Edit] oops, we're talking privacy.

Well I started my privacy journey this year when too many services I used changed their policies for the worse