Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

As you said, let's not confuse privacy and security. In regards to privacy, I've given up on absolute privacy. However, I still self-host various things such as email, calendar, contacts, password managers and whatnot, but it's less for privacy reasons at this point, a bit for security reasons, but in reality it's mainly for control.

I won't lose access to my data if a company shuts down, or if some bad actor decides to maliciously send child pornography to my email and get my whole Apple/Google account cancelled (with no easy support for getting it back)

All in all, being able to export (data portability) comes first and foremost, regardless if it's not the most privacy-friendly program. If I can self-host it? All the better.

I have given up on privacy.

Any steps I take to preserve my privacy are negated by my inactions of years past, the current actions of my friends and family, and the actions of my government

That said…

I use an adblocker because it makes the browsing experience better and I use Firefox because it makes me feel better about browsing the internet.

I’m in the apple ecosystem which makes me feel slightly more private and occasionally use signal to have certain conversations with certain people

Of course at the end of the day I know whatever I do doesn’t really matter and the worst thing that could happen is I get more targeted ads.

Sure, I could get targeted by the government should it turn evil, but I don’t believe that online privacy would prevent that from happening anyways. I’m just not that interesting of a person so I take solace in that.

Now that I’m writing this.. I’m non religious and I believe in the right to own firearms. These opinions could make me a target or make me more interesting to an evil government. I guess I just hope the checks and balances we have are enough.

I don't feel like I do much either, but I loathe advertising, so I do run a (to me) modest suite of defenses. I run uBlock Origin, set to default block all third-party content, and DuckDuckGo's extension in Firefox. I have the Tor Browser installed for when I'm feeling particularly paranoid, and a blocking VPN on my Android phone. There are certainly leaks, but I never see any malicious content.

>inactions of years past

Completely untrue. Data becomes less valuable as time goes on to the point that it becomes worthless.

Because the effects are subtle and not obvious (Like climate change). If revealing your address meant hooligans would come over to your house and throw bricks through your windows every time you did that, you'd pretty quickly stop doing it. But spending more money over time and social cooling aren't bricks through the window.