There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.
Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!
Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.
Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!
And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.
Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.
the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough
I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.
There are definitely some steps you can take for your personal privacy. Get a phone with GrapheneOS, use LibreWolf as your browser, switch from Windows/Mac to Linux, use a DNS filter like NextDNS and try to communicate with people over Signal. You can also use a reputable VPN like IVPN or Mullvad and switch away from Google/Big Tech services (Google search -> DuckDuckGo, Gmail -> ProtonMail, Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice, Google Drive -> Proton Drive, YouTube -> Odysee, etc.)
Is IVPN and Mullvad better than ProtonVPN ?
They allow for anonymous registration without an Email address. They just give you an Account ID. They also allow you to sign up via Tor. Mullvad even has an onion site.
Just chiming in, that the biggest selling point of Mullvad (and IVPN also, I think) is the possibility to pay with cash-by-mail or with crypto. Also, Proton has an onion site, too (at least I used it for ProtonMail, not sure if it’s for Drive too).
Proton has an onion site for Proton Mail, (not sure if it’s for Proton VPN as well) but it’s a huge pain in the butt to sign up for an account. They often require email or sometimes SMS verification. Also, they redirect you back to the clear web page for the sign up process. It’s less than ideal. I use Proton Mail and I pay for it, so I also get Proton VPN but it only use it for torrenting. For all other things I use IVPN and I’m pretty happy with them. Customer support is great btw.
With the verification thing on Proton, there is a button which allows you to bypass it.
Edit: at least there was when I created mine
If there’s verification that you can just bypass by clicking a button it’s not a very effective method of verification xD
I agree. I was also confused back then. Because of this, I tried creating an account yesterday and found out, that verification is in fact needed. But I simply used one of the disposable email services and it was done. No need for a phone number.
Sometimes, when signing up over Tor, they don’t allow email verification and require a phone number.
What about reading an article that has a Facebook share button or independent trackers? Using your credit/debit cards, buying anything online. There’s a million ways to track people’s habits
If you have an adblocker, you can block the Facebook embedded spyware and other trackers. You can use Monero, a privacy-focused crypto currency to anonymously buy a prepaid credit card, and then use that to make your payment.
Can I? Most places don’t accept it, or any cryptocurrency for that matter. It’s just not a viable alternative currently.
The more people use it, the more businesses will accept it. There’s a list of businesses that accept Monero: https://monerica.com/. Maybe Monero is not a viable alternative today, but the situation might change, once we live in a cashless society. Until then, use cash or Monero. You can also anonymously get prepaid credit cards and gift cards at Cake Pay or Coinsbee.
GrapheneOS only supports pixel phonea therefor /e/OS is a great option too. I don’t recommend Librewolf. Any firefox fork is unnecessary just use arkenfox and ublock origin set it up to block scripts. Except fennec or mull, they are necessary on mobile firefox is atrocious. I have never heard of IVPN before so I question how private it actually is and Odysee is filled with alt-right wastes of space. Linux Experiment tried using it a while ago ended up leaving. So there is no true alternative to youtube but privacy frontends like Libretube and Newpipe on mobile and individious or piped on PC. Or you can use freetube on both as well.
/e/OS is a terrible option, they sometimes take half a year to ship basic security patches. If your device is not supported by Graphene, you can check out DivestOS. Sure, you can use arkenfox, I just included LibreWolf, because it’s easier to set up. +1 for Mull on Android. I use it too. IVPN is one of the most private VPNs, I’d say it’s on the same level as Mullvad in regards to privacy. Check out the Privacy Guides article: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/#ivpn Yes, there are currently some really weird people on Odysee, but the more normal people like TLE leave, the worse it gets. I hate these right-wing bastards as much as you do, especially in the comments, but that’s the reason why more people should use Odysee instead of YouTube. We just need to outnumber them. Odysee is definitely not perfect, but it’s better than being dependent on YouTube, who currently try to shut down all private frontends. They sent a lovely cease and desist letter to Invidious, and they IP-ban Piped instances (which LibreTube relies on).
I see, you might be right about Odysee. though /e/OS actually is really good, don’t be so prejudiced about it. I didn’t try to disprove your guide or anything BTW, tried to expand it a bit.
I’ve never used /e/OS before, so I don’t know what it feels like to use it, and I really don’t want to shit on a FOSS project for no reason, but the frequency at which they deliver updates is terrifying. I wouldn’t recommend people to run an OS that is constantly out-of-date and has unpatched security vulnerabilities. But I would appreciate it, if you could tell me what is so awesome about /e/OS. I did some research and as far as I can see it’s just LineageOS with microG and a skinned Aurora Store, and a Launcher that desperately tries to look like iOS. You can recreate a better version of all of this with ease on GrapheneOS. The Sandboxed Google Play services implementation is miles ahead of microG, and has better app compatibility, while not compromising on privacy. Also, Graphene has many low-level security improvements to the system like a hardened memory allocator, hardened SELinux policies, etc. I like that Murena ships /e/OS on Fairphones, but I will always prefer GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel, because of the hardware security features (Titan M2 Secure Element). TL;DR: /e/OS has better privacy than stock Android ROMs, but pretty bad security, because of a lack of frequent security patches.
I don’t mind being slightly behind other android ROMs in terms of updates, I get updates every once in a few months on e/OS. One of the main freatures is that there is a feature caled advanced privacy you can block all trackers, spoof your GPS location and Tunnel your IP Adress through Tor from the settings or from its Widget at a per App basis without root out of the box. It also comes completly degoogled and with microg all default apps replaced with a foss alternatives. Its fork of Aurora store “app lounge” has privacy ratings for all the apps calculated using the permissions they require and trackers they have, it includes FOSS and pwa apps too.(also must admit I mostly just use fdroid). There is a lot to love about it and it is compatible with a lot more phones than grapheneOS. I know that you can achieve most of it, if not all of it on graphene too but /e/OS makes privacy “convenient”.
It’s probably just a DNS filter. You can achieve the same thing on any Android phone using NextDNS (or any DNS resolver that blocks trackers) and the native Android DNS-over-TLS implementation, which is present on every Android ROM that’s based on Android 9 or higher. It takes 5 minutes to set up.
You can do that with the free Orbot app released by the Tor Project.
The information about Trackers and Permissions comes from Exodus Privacy and it’s included in the normal Aurora Store too
This is actually a nice feature. Of course, you can get FOSS apps and PWAs on other ROMs as well, but it’s nice to have all the apps in one central place. Very useful, especially for new users.
That’s what I do on GrapheneOS too
It is not DNS as far as I can tell since you can edit dns settings seperately. I use quad9 dns for example
You understand, that you can locally filter DNS and then send these filtered requests to a remote nameserver, right? DNS filtering can absolutely happen locally. A great example for that is the /etc/hosts file on Unix/Unix-like operating systems (including Android, e.g. DivestOS locally filters network requests using a hosts file)