this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
66 points (90.2% liked)
Privacy
31869 readers
503 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am just a casual person who takes privacy a bit more seriously than the general public. To be frank, I don't even use Google services that much. I just wished to end my reliance on Google due to what I learned about their practices. However I can only go so far. I have a busy life and I do all these privacy related work during my free time. I don't have a GrapheneOS compatible android phone, I don't have the liberty to switch to a new phone, and I don't have the knowledge to set up a custom ROM. I just want to take as many measures to increase my privacy without going to extreme measures like rooting my phone or setting up pihole.
I've tried to use alternatives from f-droid. switched to firefox (specifically mull), disabled unnecessary permissions and telemetry from Google apps etc. However, seeing all of the comments here suggesting actions that I am simply unable to take feels like all the other things I've done so far have been in vain and I should just succumb to Google's spying, which I am feeling to do indeed especially after learning how much data Google has collected about me, making privacy in my phone virtually nonexistent.
Look people have a very “all or nothing” approach that I myself disagree with. They want true privacy? Buy a dumb phone, never go online, and disconnect the landline.
I hear you, I also started out with just proton, but I’ve gone deeper slowly — I do have Pihole, I don’t use Google services, but these are not things you need to do to get more privacy.
I think from your comments it seems like you’re just worried Google will know your email address, and that’s… not a big deal?.You probably will give out that email address anyway, so they’ll find it eventually.
The contents of the emails, which is where important data really is, are encrypted in proton. Google shouldn’t be able to read your screen contents, but who knows for sure. So you should be fine for now, don’t worry about logging in the phone.
I sincerely thank you for understanding my situation and giving me actually useful advice.