Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?
I&#x27;d say I&#x27;m a bit concerned with this, but without being paranoid. I try to follow security &quot;best practices&quot;, but more so that my devices don&#x27;t become part of some botnet. If given the chance, I&#x27;ll go for the privacy-protecting option, but only to a point. I don&#x27;t consider all my computing devices equivalent: I can tolerate much more invasive apps on my phone, which I basically only use to make calls and to find my way around town, than on my computer, which has access to a bunch of personal things. But I do deny all requests to access my contacts to any and all 3rd party apps, and only allow them to use GPS if at all necessary (say for a navigation app) and then only when I&#x27;m using them. No access to my pictures, either.<p>&gt; ### Applications, Operating Systems<p>I mostly use Linux for reasons unrelated to tracking: I genuinely enjoy using it the most, since it just gets out of my way. The only thing that had a better OOB experience was my macbook pro. Windows annoys me to no end and doesn&#x27;t fully support my bog-standard HP laptop (!). I still use it on my gaming PC, though. I used to like macOS, but it&#x27;s becoming more and more windowsy, so I got back on Linux when it stopped supporting my aging MBP.<p>I don&#x27;t do any particular hardening, apart from using OpenSnitch (which doesn&#x27;t seem to catch anything interesting - but I use a basic system). My servers do use linux-hardened kernel and have a default deny firewall with containerized (lxc) everything, but it&#x27;s more &quot;because I can&quot; and some are on the internet. My laptop runs linux-zen because I value responsiveness and figure it&#x27;s secure enough.<p>I mostly use local applications, since I value comfort. For me, that means not having to wait around for a browser to load 1 GB of JS just to show me a list. But if there&#x27;s no other option, I&#x27;ll use online apps.<p>I use Firefox because I&#x27;m not comfortable with Google&#x27;s push of accounts and whatnot on the browser. I also think it&#x27;s important for there to be a diversity of browsers, and Firefox works well enough for my needs. I run UBO and uMatrix on it.<p>I use an iPhone because I find it gets out of my way. Android is sluggish, and the interface is janky. Moreover, my iPhone 7 works as good as when it was new, and still gets security updates (installed one yesterday). I&#x27;d be hard-pressed to find an equivalent Android phone. I don&#x27;t care to change phones every other year.<p>I used to mess around with custom ROMs on my older Samsungs GSs, but I&#x27;m past that. To me, my phone is basically an appliance. Its most important feature is getting out of my way. I only have a few apps installed that weren&#x27;t there in the default install. I sympathize with the people who are angry about not being able to install whatever they want. But I just don&#x27;t need to do that, so I prioritize other factors much more, so the iphone comes out on top.<p>&gt; ### Online Storage<p>I use paid GSuite (or whatever it&#x27;s called now) for the email of my company. I chose it so I can use Google Drive for my backups, since it&#x27;s the cheapest way to get email + storage (for the amount I require). I back up my photography to it via Arq, which encrypts it before sending. Other than that, I use a bog-standard Linux on a geriatric server as my file server. No XCloud distro or whatever, just Arch Linux + (encrypted) ZFS + Samba. I try to have all data encrypted at rest and move it around encrypted (wireguard).<p>I also try to avoid depending too much on my internet connection, so all my home automation (lights + temp sensors) are running locally on a Home Assistant VM. My lights are set up in such a way that I can still use them when all the computers and internet are down.<p>&gt; ### Social Media<p>Don&#x27;t block it. I don&#x27;t <i>avoid</i> it, so much as I just don&#x27;t care about it. I simply never got any use out of it. The longest I used TikTok was like 10 minutes when I saw an HN thread about how the algorithm learns and got curious. After the Nth half-naked dancing girl and people screaming at police (I&#x27;m not even in the US), I just got bored and deleted the app. Ditto for twitter &#x2F; facebook &#x2F; reddit: I&#x27;ll go see a post if someone sends me a link, but I don&#x27;t have the patience to &quot;browse&quot; them and never just open them up. The only social-media I regularly use is HN, because I find the content interesting.