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Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

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51–60 of 82 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#51
Absolutely nothing at all. I do not mind being tracked, all that happens I get targeted (better?!) ads for it. If I'd have something to hide, it's the government I would want to hide it from, not corporations. And you can't really hide from the government...

That being said I do run ad&popup blockers for a better browsing experience. Those idiotic cookie prompts are the bane of web browsing inside the EU and I run the "I don't care about cookies" extension to get rid of them.

I also encrypt sensitive private folders on all my machines.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#52
I take privacy pretty seriously and to protect my privacy I do the following: * Use GrapheneOS on my smartphone with nearly no third-party apps * Use a VPN, because I don't trust my ISP * Use NoScript & uBlock * Use several ProtonMail addresses I change on a regular basis and use one-way trash mails. I also try to be on as few services as possible. If an email is leaked (didn't happened yet) delete it and create a new one. * Use Qubes + Whonix with FDE on a seperate laptop for things, which should stay private. I classify every other data from other devices as public. * Regulary check my home network traffic on my firewall. Especially when I do nothing on my devices or got a new device. * Destroy every camera and microphone in devices which can only be bought "smart" like every new TV. * Be aware that if I use an online service my data gets collected and act like someone is looking over my shoulder. Its not so bad, if you are aware of that. * Glueing my finger domes on a regular basis * Scan my house regulary for new WIFI and bluetooth devices in range

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#53
post #20

Nothing. Nothing bad ever happened to me due to lack of privacy protection. I am only happy if I get ads tailored to my interests. Even if Backblaze, where I store backups of all my data, would be hacked and leaked – nobody would probably care enough to dig through my personal data. People wildly overestimate how much other people care about them or their secrets.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#54
post #20

Nothing. Nothing bad ever happened to me due to lack of privacy protection. I am only happy if I get ads tailored to my interests. Even if Backblaze, where I store backups of all my data, would be hacked and leaked – nobody would probably care enough to dig through my personal data. People wildly overestimate how much other people care about them or their secrets.

This is fascinating take and I love that this view is being represented on HN, specifically because it is not a minority opinion in the real world based on my interactions with my social circle.

People may not care about your secrets now. Right now you may be young. Right now you may have not pissed anyone off sufficiently to hire a private investigator to dig up stuff on you. Right now you may not be a party to a lawsuit.

All those things may be true right now, but things change. You have no idea how valuable right information can be at a given time. And here you are, volunteering it on a silver plate for anyone to pick as they please.

In other words, I think you are missing a key word here:"Yet". Nothing happened to you yet.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#55
I'd say I'm a bit concerned with this, but without being paranoid. I try to follow security "best practices", but more so that my devices don't become part of some botnet. If given the chance, I'll go for the privacy-protecting option, but only to a point. I don't consider all my computing devices equivalent: I can tolerate much more invasive apps on my phone, which I basically only use to make calls and to find my way around town, than on my computer, which has access to a bunch of personal things. But I do deny all requests to access my contacts to any and all 3rd party apps, and only allow them to use GPS if at all necessary (say for a navigation app) and then only when I'm using them. No access to my pictures, either.

> ### Applications, Operating Systems

I mostly use Linux for reasons unrelated to tracking: I genuinely enjoy using it the most, since it just gets out of my way. The only thing that had a better OOB experience was my macbook pro. Windows annoys me to no end and doesn't fully support my bog-standard HP laptop (!). I still use it on my gaming PC, though. I used to like macOS, but it's becoming more and more windowsy, so I got back on Linux when it stopped supporting my aging MBP.

I don't do any particular hardening, apart from using OpenSnitch (which doesn't seem to catch anything interesting - but I use a basic system). My servers do use linux-hardened kernel and have a default deny firewall with containerized (lxc) everything, but it's more "because I can" and some are on the internet. My laptop runs linux-zen because I value responsiveness and figure it's secure enough.

I mostly use local applications, since I value comfort. For me, that means not having to wait around for a browser to load 1 GB of JS just to show me a list. But if there's no other option, I'll use online apps.

I use Firefox because I'm not comfortable with Google's push of accounts and whatnot on the browser. I also think it's important for there to be a diversity of browsers, and Firefox works well enough for my needs. I run UBO and uMatrix on it.

I use an iPhone because I find it gets out of my way. Android is sluggish, and the interface is janky. Moreover, my iPhone 7 works as good as when it was new, and still gets security updates (installed one yesterday). I'd be hard-pressed to find an equivalent Android phone. I don't care to change phones every other year.

I used to mess around with custom ROMs on my older Samsungs GSs, but I'm past that. To me, my phone is basically an appliance. Its most important feature is getting out of my way. I only have a few apps installed that weren't there in the default install. I sympathize with the people who are angry about not being able to install whatever they want. But I just don't need to do that, so I prioritize other factors much more, so the iphone comes out on top.

> ### Online Storage

I use paid GSuite (or whatever it's called now) for the email of my company. I chose it so I can use Google Drive for my backups, since it's the cheapest way to get email + storage (for the amount I require). I back up my photography to it via Arq, which encrypts it before sending. Other than that, I use a bog-standard Linux on a geriatric server as my file server. No XCloud distro or whatever, just Arch Linux + (encrypted) ZFS + Samba. I try to have all data encrypted at rest and move it around encrypted (wireguard).

I also try to avoid depending too much on my internet connection, so all my home automation (lights + temp sensors) are running locally on a Home Assistant VM. My lights are set up in such a way that I can still use them when all the computers and internet are down.

> ### Social Media

Don't block it. I don't avoid it, so much as I just don't care about it. I simply never got any use out of it. The longest I used TikTok was like 10 minutes when I saw an HN thread about how the algorithm learns and got curious. After the Nth half-naked dancing girl and people screaming at police (I'm not even in the US), I just got bored and deleted the app. Ditto for twitter / facebook / reddit: I'll go see a post if someone sends me a link, but I don't have the patience to "browse" them and never just open them up. The only social-media I regularly use is HN, because I find the content interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#56
I spent the last two years slowly deleting profiles or stripping them of information. I used maigret and Firefox' saved logins to list my profiles.

I also used Redacted to wipe my social media profiles clean. It was hard because I didn't want to delete the useful advice I wrote for others.

I reviewed the privacy settings of all the profiles I kept and turned off as much tracking as possible. I enforce the rest with browser extensions, and by staying logged out.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#57
post #49

Support Firefox. The last independent browser resisting Google. I don't need to list all the things that Google are doing to undermine the web and adblocking. Safari is also fine in my book, but it's obviously proprietary and you may not trust Apple. Enable strict HTTPS and use an adblocker. Encrypted cloud storage is fine but it's simply not convenient and sadly lacks good usability. If you don't trust your ISP, use…

> The last independent browser resisting Google.

The irony is it's probably only still alive courtesy of Google.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#58

Not much and I don't plan to do much. It's easy to think "I have nothing to hide", but that's not what I mean. A better analogy is risk analysis/attack surface area you expect. The privacy requirements of someone doing investigative journalism are wildly different from a regular joe who only needs to worry about targeted ads. I'm generally in that bucket, where my only real privacy concern is ads, and I'm ok with tai…

One thing to think is that new ways to use data will be created in the future.

Some companies (e.g. Google) by default will capture multi-gigabyte decades-long records of information about us. We might let them do it thinking that it is not much threat to us.

But new technologies can be invented, for example things like widespread use of facial recognition, or deepfakes, or AI, which could make the trove of data we gave away become more dangerous in the future.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#59

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…

>inactions of years past Completely untrue. Data becomes less valuable as time goes on to the point that it becomes worthless.

It is valuable, you can tell because companies like Google and Facebook have no intention to automatically forget old data, instead they are intent on keeping it forever. I expect they see data=money.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?

#60
My habits are mixed; it depends on the scenario. I tend to balance privacy with convenience. For example, I have a discount through work for mobile phone service. Technically, it's a company account to get the discount, which means the company has access to the account. But practically, we have too many employees for them to care, so I believe them when they say they won't access it except to find me if I skip out and don't pay.

For browsers, I use Firefox personally and Chrome for a few NPOs that use Google Workspace. Though I might switch back to Firefox for those, too. I use VMs to isolate the NPO stuff, and Chrome often crashes in a VM. I use VMs because my volunteer work is pretty heavy duty, technically; application adminstration, bookkeeping, etc. Lots of logins and accounts and what-no that I don't want to get mixed up with my personal stuff. My laptop runs Fedora. It used to be Debian, but some rando change they made set me off one day, and I quit it. It would be FreeBSD, because I'm nostalgic, but I can't find a decent laptop that works well with FreeBSD. I have a Yoga 6, which is almost there; just waiting on support for the Wi-Fi card, which is actually being worked on (yay!). I tried Qubes; it was neat, but the laptop is not beefy enough for it.

At home, I have two boxes running FreeBSD and a router running OpenWRT. The Ethernet and Wi-Fi networks are isolated, and I use Wireguard to connect to the boxes on the Ethernet network, even when I'm on the home Wi-Fi. This was more because I wanted a fun project, and also a bit of a convenience factor: I don't want to toggle Wireguard on my laptop or phone when I come and go. [Side-note: Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole, out of which I came with a better Wireguard setup. I had issues on the phone when changing networks, and realized it was DNS. So I fixed it, and now I don't have to restart the VPN when I change networks! Yay.]

I run Nextcloud on one of the BSD boxes; again, only accessible via Wireguard or Ethernet. I made it public once just to try out Nextcloud Social, but as much as I want to like the app, it's still a bit of a mess. I don't think is has even been updated to be compatible with the latest version of Nextcloud.

In addition to the machines at home, I have a low-rent VPS running Debian. It would run FreeBSD, too, but it was too much work to figure that out with that particular provider. It was also cheap enough that I didn't care ($23 a year or something). I use it to host my email, Postfix+Dovecot+Postgrey with regex aliases for unique email addresses for sign-ups, etc. Again, more fun project than paranoia. But honestly, I don't like giving random people my actual email address; even humans I know and like send me junk mail. I still have Gmail as a throwaway and because I have an Android phone, but I'm slowly moving things over to my other email address(es). I wouldn't mind switching to something like a Librem 5 or a Punkt MP02, but the convenience (not a requirement) of workplace apps keeps me on a mainstream smartphone.

As for storage, mostly Nextcloud. The laptop disk is encrypted, but I don't do disk encryption on the BSD boxes. I need them up and running automatically after a power outage when I'm away. The router also has some external storage, mostly for music and movies (via minidlna).

I try to stay away from too much social media. I quit Twitter before quitting Twitter was cool (long before Musk was even considering buying it). I quit Facebook before the pandemic, then rejoined during the pandemic. I figured if the world was ending, it wouldn't matter. Sadly, the world did not end. I'm planning my second exit from Facebook.

For me, privacy is less about what I need and more about, "why do you need this?" The answer is usually, "you don't." I will turn off location services for apps that don't need them. I once deleted my bank's mobile app, because it wouldn't let me log in without turning on location services. I get it, you probably want to show me where your branches are or something. Hey, guess what? I work for you, so I know where they are: Everywhere I don't live. I complained, "our competitors don't do this." They fixed it, and I downloaded it again once they stopped requiring location. I do similarly with other mobile apps; unless there is a clear need or convenience, baleted.

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