Please Do not tell me, another blog about VPNs. Do not worry this isn’t an article telling you to sign up for a VPN immediately, simply a diary of my transition from Big Tech fan boy to a privacy driven lifestyle. I used to love Google, I thought their technology was so convenient and innovative. What I did not know at the time, behind their progressive appearance and the perception of being the good guys, laid unleashed greed. We allowed ourselves to believe they were here to advance our lives and take us into the future like we thought we would have been living as kids. Yet, it has now become clear to be nothing more than a scam for our personal data. Big tech has been building profiles and dossiers on us for the last decade, selling our lives to advance profits and even manipulate election voting.
After making the transition into IT with a focus on cybersecurity, I realized how vulnerable my personal life was, including my family. My biggest fear is that my daughter will have her entire personality and profile completed by the time she is 18 making her another victim to evil corps. While it may be impossible to eliminate this completely without living as a ghost, I knew that I could easily reduce the amount of data collected by ninety percent. So how can I do this?
My first step was not using IOT devices like Alexa and Google Home, never bought one never will. Secondly, I relied too heavily on Gmail and Google Drive. This sparked my journey down the rabbit hole for secure email. I read lots of reviews and checked out a few different providers, but they all seem to have some sort of con(not as in a scam, but as in a negative) attached to them. Until I discovered Proton. Proton is the becoming the Secure version of Google, they offer email, VPN and even their own drive, to store documents fully encrypted in their cloud storage. While they offer a free email service, which I use, their services are at a small cost. Thinking about this even more deeply, laughing on how much we have been accustomed to “Free”. Free of course means that we are often the product. Using Proton, I am guaranteed that when I open an email, no one is on the back end logging the contents into a database. Their VPN service is spectacular, I have it on my laptop, phones, and even my firewall. Wait, did I say Firewall? That is a conversation for another day but if you are technically advanced and you do not have a firewall at home, shame on you. Just kidding, but seriously, what are you even doing.
Ok so I got my email changed to a secure service, and I use a VPN that does not track my activity. What about the daily internet stuff? I had to ditch the resource hog, Google Chrome browser. I switched to Firefox and made DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. DDG has filled themselves with pride as not only do they not have trackers, but they also block third party trackers from your internet browsing. Firefox and DDG(DuckDuckGo) will take a short of amount of time to get used to because will very quickly realize how much your search results are not personalized. In fact, comparing some of your search results to Firefox, not signed in, to a Google result, while signed in, is appalling. That will tell you just how much data was collected, compiled, and formulated to guess and predict your browsing habits. I have just recently read that DDG is releasing their own internet browser, not built on chromium. Ugh, yes please!
When you tell your friends about Google tracking and predicting your life habits, your peers may say “I like that, that’s a cool feature.” Well, as Voltaire once said, “Fools often revere the chains.” Do not be a fool, data collection is evil and should not be tolerated.
This is not the conclusion, I will continue to document how I went from Google boy, to Privacy Man. Stay Tuned!
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