Internet Privacy

This is going to be a page for me to discuss tools and platforms i recommend so more people can enjoy the internet freely as it should be. With all the push nowadays for surveillance, it's easy to think "is this a right or privelege", but it's not debatable, your privacy online is equal to real life.

First and best advice i can give is the advice of the early days of the internet, "Don't put any of your personal info online, cause everyone can see it".

Let's start with what i myself do by first looking at my threat model, a threat model is what you're trying to protect yourself from and what data you want to protect, this protects your mental health against paranoia and overdoing it for yourself. I try to protect myself against data collection by tech companies, most companies collect data that they pool into a profile of you, this profile is then usually sold off to be bought by other companies to help build their profiles of you better. It doesn't have to be scary though, since data loses accuracy and value overtime, taking steps now to hide any further data you produce, can disrupt their profits and make you a less valuable asset. I found it easiest to break this into parts for myself, each covers a point of interest that companies look to use for identifying you; cellphone, ip, email, messaging, financial.

+ For cellphone, i use textfree or anonymSMS, textfree gives you a free number that can call and text over wifi, sadly you must pay if you want to receive authentication codes. If i just need a number for something i don't care about, like buying something online, i'll use anonymSMS, it's like a reverse group chat, anyone can use the number and all messages it receives shows up in a list that you need to refresh.

+ For ip a vpn is the easiest tool to use, the only vpn i can vouch for is Mullvad, they keep no logs of anything users do outside of the account number and payment method used. They accept whatever form of payment you're most comfortable with, credit, debit, crypto, and mail in cash, which you'd do by providing the account number in the envelope along with the cash. Mullvad has some of the best security tools, including filters for content like ads or social media, multihop which like tor will connect to multiple vpn nodes to make tracing traffic arduous, and DAITA which protects against ai monitoring of your internet. So with DAITA, it takes your traffic and breaks it up into chunks(if you're doing something bandwidth heavy) or bloats it(if you're doing something small) so everything looks the same to an ai monitoring your network, cause encryption of a vpn only protects what exactly you're doing, but the size of the traffic could be enough to discern that you're sending messages, streaming, gaming, browsing.

+ Email is tricky, the most secure option would be hosting your own, but what i personally do is use iCLoud, i know, i know. Apple is considered insecure for the privacy conscious, cause Apple collects data on users, but what separates them from companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, is that they do it to personalize user experience to keep with the premium tech illusion, not to sell to data brokers. Apple has went to court several times over protecting user data from collection, they would rather remove a feature than to include a backdoor for spying on you, as shown when they removed adp in a couple countries. iCloud has one of the best user privacy tools, email aliases, no they didn't invent the idea, but they execute the idea well and seamlessly. Another secure email i've used that i vouch for is tutamail, who has also fought in courts for user privacy and has pulled out of some countries in protest of it.

So email aliasing is when an email service generates a disposable email for you to use instead of your actual email in case of data breaches or if you just need it for a one time use. Personally i have over 100 alias' so far, each for an app or website i've had to use at one point.

+ Messaging, definitely the broadest category i can talk on, platforms you choose to use will be based on your threat level, social life, and how private is too private. I personally use Fluffychat, it's a discord looking app that connects to the matrix protocol, which is just an encrypted messaging protocol. Like discord, with matrix you can host your own servers or join well known ones, only you're not locked to one app(fluffychat just has some of the best features) or a company secretly selling your data.

Also while i'm on the topic of messsaging and social platforms, let's brush up on the Fediverse, basically if you prefer privacy and actual community, it's better than the Meta/Twitter/reddit/tiktok bubbles. You get to pick a platform and either host a server or join one, then you can interact with other accounts on different fediverse platforms thanks to the activityhub protocol, so someone on Mastodon can follow someone on Lemmy and their posts will show up in the Mastodon feed. I personally use Pleroma.

+ Lastly, i'm gonna brush up on finances, mainly for people who still enjoy online shopping, i'm not gonna talk about crypto now, because it's still niche. We'd all love to buy our groceries with crypto so stores like walmart can't be creeps. Instead i'm gonna bring an app to light that many people haven't heard of enough, Privacy.com, and yes that is also the app name for some reason. You link your bank account and they let you make burner cards, which is wonderful in the age of payment processors thinking they have any say over our purchases. Their free plan is very generous, letting you make 12 cards a month, not including the one time use cards you can make endlessly. It really is useful for avoiding scams and companies that want to keep your card info and put you at risk of a data breach or getting it sold to data brokers.