Ask HN: How do you manage your digital footprint in 2023?

I have most of my services at home:

- email on a personal domain name, local IMAPs/SMTPs relay to a third party ones for crappy antispam practice by giants, but having anything at home migrating the domain to another third party is easy and almost no one have my real mails addresses only dedicated or spare aliases easy to drop being just a third party an alias;

- homeserver with most of my services, so no need for third party stuff by well-known name (let's say Alphabet/Microsoft etc) so not so many nor much used accounts;

- I have, again, a craphone (Android-based macro-spy [1] device) since I have an EV as a primary vehicle now and I can't manage public recharge on the go properly without... BUT it's just for limited usage, and as for email most do not have my mobile number, just VoIP accounts on a home PBX;

- not much social (HN, Reddit) just because Usenet is almost full only of spam...

My biggest digital footprint is mandated de facto by:

- government, who push connected services who happen to be crappy stockpiled crap, I can't do much for them beside annotate and diffuse any bad design and issue;

- crappy surveillance capitalism crap built-in modern vehicles, again I need a car, I do not strictly need a new one but it's still useful for some aspects so...

- crappy IoT crapware, I normally confine it, it's just domestic p.v. and hot water heater, managed in a separate network by my homeserver and operated via Home Assistant WITHOUT internet access for them except for rare crapware updates needed here and there...

No smart dumbwatches, spy environmental mic called typically "digital assistant" devices, no video spying tools commonly know as IP cameras (ok I have some, but again managed via the homeserver, with no direct internet access to them) or smart TVs, ...

So far it does work a bit...

[1] because in the past such information-munging devices was smaller and typically paid by those who spy, now are bigger, apparent and maintained and paid by those spied on, and apparently most of them like that...

Where I work is not hard to find from my posting history on HN and under my same user name on Reddit.

It’s a company I know you have heard of

Where’s the lie in my statement? Do you fly? Use credit cards? Use a cell phone? Have a bank account? Ever applied for credit? Go to a doctor?

I’ve worked with both payment processors and integrated with EMR/EHR systems. I’m well aware of the information captured. No one cares about your Reddit history.

Sounds like a lot of effort for very minimal gains. Is there anything that important about you that you have to go these extremes?

And you don't have a cellphone? Kudos to you but I, for one, do not envy you.

Wouldn't that imply that you were an employee at Google sometime between 2002-2004? :P Unless I'm not getting the full picture (I was not old enough to be fully aware of Gmail's existence in 2004)

At least in some systems, assuming you have a separate modem device and router, only the modem is involved in the authentication/billing which is where they care about the modem's MAC to identify you. If your router's MAC changes, DHCP would issue it a new IP.

My modest understanding is that the modem is operating at a lower layer of the networking stack, so the DHCP server involved in actually issuing you an IP, higher up in the stack, doesn't need to worry about identifying you -- it's happy to give anybody an IP because it knows that if it can see you, the modem-level authentication has confirmed you're someone who is paying your Internet bill.

I used to run an open source router a long time ago, which made changing your router WAN MAC something you could easily script.