Why privacy matters?
Your all internet activity is getting logged like what is your preference while making choices of your Shopping choices, your political views and all those little things will be used to show targeted ads and put you in a specific category to influence you in one and another way.
We don’t even share that much info with our family members then why would you like to make a second copy that exactly thinks as you do, knows which choice would you make.
Really? How much tracking is going on?
We often ignore reading terms and conditions while signing up for any service. Most probably you are using services from big corporations like Google, Microsoft, Facebook.
Remember this thing If the service is free then you are a product.
If you buy a new laptop or computer, most of the times windows will be preinstalled, there are so many Pirated Copies of Microsoft’s windows but why they are not doing anything to stop it. Because Microsoft’s Windows is becoming more and more bloated and it is designed to collect Tailored Data from your system and send it back to their servers. Microsoft is also notorious for ruining Digital Privacy.
Now, let’s take an example of Whatsapp which is offered by Facebook. It sends telemetry data to respective Facebook servers. Often we have seen that it is getting monitored by Law enforcement to monitor things whether it’s for political things or just to censor, monitor specific information.
If you take a close look at your Google account, By default It is set to collect Your Search History, Phone usage and even it tracks your location like where you go often what’s your habit of visiting. It can exactly tell you where you were last Sunday.
Open Source Softwares and Alternatives
Convenience at cost of Privacy and Security, Not really. If you want to claim your privacy, you need to give up on your convenience a little bit But the good news is that now people and developers are more and more getting aware of these things.
First, stop using a centralized service for all your internet activity. Alternatives exist which can help you to secure your privacy. For email accounts use ProtonMail or Tutanota. And If it’s a third party where you don’t want to put your primary email address, use temporary emails for the safer side.
I would recommend you use Linux. Most of the Servers in the world are on Linux. Linux has over 450 sponsors. Founding members include Google, CoreOS, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Twitter, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Docker, Univa, and VMware. If you are coming for windows or OS X, there are so many Linux Distro out there that can helpful for you at the beginning. Personally, I would recommend Linux Mint or Manjaro for Windows users and Elementary OS for OS X users. Linux is an open-source OS, even you can take a look at the source code. Linux gives you more customization compared to Windows or OS X. You can find more about Linux on the Internet.
And You know what? Learning Linux is easy but unlearning windows is hard.
Another Important thing is Browser, for Normies I would recommend
you use Brave because it comes with good privacy settings out of the box, and For more advanced users I would recommend Mozilla Firefox with some tweaking. Using Tor browser with tor network is also more preferable.
If you want to take your privacy to the next level, use a good VPN. Many companies claim that they don’t sell your data but if you have done some nasty stuff and even if you have used VPN or proxy you are going to get back-traced. I would personally don’t like to buy VPN from my credit card or any type of payment method which can link me and my account. Mullvad VPN is a great privacy-respecting VPN, you can even buy it with cash which method I would prefer.
I would like to share more about this stuff in the future.
Thanks for reading till the end.
