My privacy stack

My privacy stack

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0 min read

Privacy has become a very important aspect of our day to day lives. With the onset of state surveillance and surveillance capitalism, our life is being recorded, analyzed and used against us, for profit, every second.

In such a crazy world, I want to make sure that I give as much importance as possible to my privacy so that my personal data is not in the hands of people who want to profit over it. There are several aspects to this movement and my goal is to always strive towards a more privacy-conscious lifestyle.

In this particular article, I want to share the tools and services I make use of to protect myself from surveillance and store my data securely.

The essentials

Store your data offline

The first thing that you can do to start living a privacy-conscious lifestyle is by going offline. Yes, you heard it right, considering that almost all the surveillance these days is done online via your social media accounts, and browser footprints etc, argueably the best way to protect your data is by keeping as much of it as possible, offline. I periodically backup all of my personal data to an external hard drive which is encrypted and safely stored.

Migrate to Fediverse & P2P Social networks

The next important thing to do is to delete your facebook, twitter accounts and if possible, google account as well. Obviously this will not be as easy and will take a lot of time and determination to do so especially since these services are made to be as addictive as possible. You can start small, for example, instead of using Google search, you can start using Startpage or DuckDuckGo and slowly build up.

Introducing Fediverse

Fediverse is a decentralised network of servers hosted by communities and individuals all over the world. These servers form a uniform global social network that is decentralized and distributed across the world. This means that no single entity in the network has control over your data and you can always choose which provider to trust your data with, and if you feel adventurous, you can even start your own social network / fediverse server! Here are some good places to start:

  • Pleroma
  • Misskey
  • Peertube
  • WriteFreely

P2P Social networks

P2P networks are the ultimate way to secure your privacy online while still being able to connect to people. In a peer to peer network, there is absolutely no central entity, which means that you store all of your data on your computer and anyone who wants to access it have to do it directly from your computer! with your permission of course! One really interesting P2P network that I love is Scuttlebutt.

Use free software

There are several free software alternatives to mainstream software which are open source, ethical and privacy-friendly. Free software is usually agaisnt propreitary software and is maintained by a community of volunteers and contributors. Some free software alternatives to popular propreitary software include:

PropreitaryFree software
Google DriveDuckDuckGo
Google ChromeMozilla Firefox

Learn more

Surveillance Capitalism & State Surveillance

Privacy and GAFAM

Credits

  • Cover photo by ev on Unsplash