How can I go back to using Google Drive, Gmail, downloading the WhatsApp application, trusting proprietary software in general?
How can I go back to convenience knowing what I know now? Constantly aware that I’m trading my privacy and my data for convenience? Why must this road be so arduous?
Genuinely struggling with this, how do you all manage? Do you just accept it and use this stuff trying to minimize how much information on yourself you give away? Or have you resigned to self-hosted email and wood cabins (unable to fully interface with payment systems, government bureaucracy, modern technology)?
In my opinion you definitely can’t, or need to wait until your strengths for privacy decrease
It’s only difficult because you’re making it difficult. There is a balance between security and convenience, and you choose where you want to land on that spectrum. If that means Google products are useful to you, then just use them.
When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?
Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.
“If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?
Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.
Don’t put your personal info in a work account, regardless of whether it’s local or cloud.
Do you need to go back? What exactly are you going back from? Is it not serving your needs? There are plenty of alternatives to Google services; I’d be happy to provide some suggestions, if you’d like, having been through this ever since The Snowden Affair.
I don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I do my best to be as private as possible, but if my work or any other external factor requires me to surrender some data, I will probably end up giving in. And I think that’s okay.
I just do what is easy for me, some things are not worth the hassle of switching to a privacy focused alternative.
For example replacing google drive with Syncthing was really easy for my use cases. Gmail was easy with my own domain and a good email service.
Other things like facebook/reddit, banking, telegram, discord, etc… I don’t worry about it because the hassle factor is extreme.
my own domain and a good email service
Sorry for being dense, but how does this work exactly? Do you register your own domain as something like mangopenguin.com and then how do you get email to go through that?
Yep, you can register a domain through a company like namecheap or cloudflare. It’s about $10 a year.
Then you just need an email service that supports custom domains, mailbox.org is a good one. Change your DNS records on your domain control panel to point to the servers given to you by your email service, and that’s it.
And your outgoing emails aren’t getting caught in Google’s spam filters & what not?
Generally no with a reputable email host.
Work and networking (people) makes fully ditching Google, Whatsapp, etc. a practical impossibility for me. So I have a laptop, tablet, and phone dedicated to those purposes and nothing else. I check them on a schedule that my colleagues are aware of, at locations I consider safe. Otherwise they are stowed away, out of sight, and out of mind.
