Fight For Your Right To Party Privacy
The play on words is literally because this really is a fight... just not to party.
My realisation as to how big companies make money out of users began when Farcebook, during May 2012, was floated on the stock exchange for a ludicrous amount of money. It made me wonder where all that money / value came from.
Long answer short, detailed information about you and me is what they analyse for targeted marketing, and may sell to their customers; analytics companies. Information gathered about the lives of their users is their saleable product, but they lead the user to believe they are the customers and keep quiet about what goes on behind the scenes. This didn't sit easy with me, I saw the unsuspecting user being just used as cattle as an ethical / trust issue.
Facebook had suckered me in, making themselves indispensable to me by maintaining my self esteem through conversation with people I don't see any more (a bizarre business model in itself). After discovering this ethical issue I decided to close my account. Instead of missing the superficial confidence boost it gave, when I quit I felt FREE. Not only free of learning what someone cooked for dinner, but also free of being filed, monitored, tracked, studied, analysed, and in the end; making someone else very rich.
Also in 2012, a statement was issued saying that Facebook would acquire the intellectual property rights to MY images hosted by Instagram, so that was the next social media account to be closed down. Like most people, I also had accounts with Twitter, blogs with 3rd parties, etc... all of which gradually followed suit and were closed. I didn't like that I was steadily losing control of my own material online, and was having to increasingly place my trust in profiteering 3rd parties.
This has made me into a bit of a "Data Vegan" - I look at the menu carefully and restrict my choices based on ethics.
The Dark Ages, of the Internet
Speaking broadly, it feels to me as though large portions of the internet have placed it into a dark period of its evolution, where large corporations misuse trust placed in them by users.
Gone are the bright days of innocence, the early simple websites, and dial-up modems, when the majority of online content was about sharing ideas and finding common ground with others. Now we have the richest companies in the world, getting richer by exploiting everyday people.
This little video clip form episode 1 of The Prisoner form 1967, summed up my growing feeling toward the big companies harvesting details on my life thorough spying:
Coincidentally, at the time of initially writing this article in mid 2020, Elon Musk announced the Neuralink project; a worrying device installed into ones head, capable of two-way communications directly with the brain, wirelessly connected to a mobile phone running their software. Let's just say, for someone who won't have an Amazon Alexa in their house, installing a spying and potentially controlling piece of hardware directly into your head is a little too creepy for me. Also at this time his Starlink satellite programme was being rolled out across the sky. I like the idea of the advances in technology, but its potential for unethical uses worries me.
You and Me
In the regulations governing the use of data acquired from this spying, a legal term is used to describe the user, aka, YOU and ME... this term is: "Data Subject". The ICO's definition is:.
Data Subject
The identified or identifiable living individual to whom personal data relates.
That's the cold harsh reality of it: in the eyes of data harvesting companies, and regulators, we are just "Data Subjects" - forget about humanity, we are but mere numbers to be studied.
The Road To Freedom
Making these changes is not quick, painless, or easy, and you probably won't like doing it. It also costs a little.
Relationships with real friends become strained when you won't be part of their WhatsApp group, and they don't see any point in moving over to an encrypted / privacy respecting platform instead. You can end up feeling like a bit of an outcast, missing the occasional BBQ simply as you weren't part of the online chat.
When discussing with friends the merits of making these changes, most people just don't care, some people actively want to support corporate giants, some people admit to being addicted to these platforms, and for some, questioning the ethics of the platforms they love is like insulting a close member of their family. But for whatever reason, change toward enhanced privacy is more often resisted than accepted.
The one line I have sadly heard spouted countless times is the big bad: "I've got nothing to hide"... Edward Snowden summed up the misconception of this awful phrase really quite eloquently:
Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Source: reddit.com
Another argument made often is: "My life isn't all that interesting anyway"... I respond with: don't underestimate yourself, and the value of learning about you.
People will rightly argue that the tech can make life easier, but ignore the cost because they don't want to see it. This quote from Margaret Heffernan's book Wilful Blindness sums this up neatly:
When we are wilfully blind, there is infotmation we could, and should know, but don't know because it makes us feel better not to know.
Source: Wilfull Blindness, Margaret Heffernan, 2019, Page 356, ISBN 978-1-4711-8080-4
But this page is less about the genuinely difficult social factors of making these changes, more about the technical how-to...
Technical Changes
This process involves a LOT of learning, patience, and effort, spread over years.
Social media makes it easy to have an online presence at the touch of a screen, so easy a child can do it. Having an online presence outside of these "cost free" services is hard work, but so very worthwhile for more reasons than just escape from the corporate giants. The knowledge and experience gained in computing and networking is something I've found of real benefit to my career and other hobbies, and I'm now confident to give my kids an education in real computing that they don't get at school to prepare them for the modern world.
As a general rule of thumb; Libre, FOSS, FLOSS, GNU, 'Free as in free speech', are terms to look for with software choices. The general theme is that if the source code is built by a community and available for inspection, then there's less chance of nasty back-doors existing, or spying / tracking / snooping will be going on. Communities build software for fun, or to solve a problem, not for a profit.
The term Open Source doesn't always mean the software is playing fair, as any company can release their once proprietary code as Open Source, and if nobody has inspected it, who knows what its doing. And then there are Blobs, where an Open Source piece of software may contain some Closed Source code, the Blob, which nobody can inspect, and trust is broken.
Below, I try to list the changes I have made to escape the mainstream.
Operating systems
Windows and Mac are proprietary operating systems, closed source, and purely exist to make some serious money.
The next most common alternative for desktop and server use is Linux, which is community built, and every line of code is available for inspection.
Switching from Windows to Linux isn't done overnight. There is a lot to learn, but the rewards are very much worth it.
Using Linux opens up a world where you are in control of your computer, not the other way around, the tail is no longer wagging the dog. Of the numerous distributions available, I have tried using for desktop: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Linux Lite and Raspbian. For server: CentOS, Ubuntu and Raspbian. For smartphone: Ubuntu Touch.
Own Website
As I enjoyed publishing online through my blogs (on Posterous, which got bought out and closed down by Twitter) I wanted to carry on, so I built this website. However, there are many easy-to-use free online platforms for building a website, but they require you to place your data in their hands, which I did not want to do.
At this point, it is worth noting that I'd not done any sort of computer programming before, so it was all new, all needed to be researched and learnt bit by bit.
So I set about learning how to set up a Linux web-server at home, in order to share with the world a website, hosted from my garage via my home broadband connection.
Building a web server isn't too hard once you get used to Linux, another learning curve.
I also learnt how to program in HTML, CSS, and a touch of Javascript in order to build this site.
VPN
Everything I do on the internet is via a paid VPN by privateinternetaccess.com to make my connection to the internet appear mixed in with thousands of other users. Adding a further layer of protection to this, I often change the country that I am connected via.
Web Browser
Several browsers make claims about respecting privacy, Firefox seem to shout the loudest about it, however, Firefox for being a browser that flies the flag for privacy uses Google (WTF?!) as its default search provider, you have to go and switch it to DuckDuckGo in the settings. It also promotes the use of Amazon, YouTube, Farcebook, and various other promoted websites by showing links on the default landing page, clearly there's some money in promoting them. I find this curious behaviour as it's sort of opposite to their promoted beliefs, but once Firefox is customised for security and all the links to profiteering websites are deleted, it's very useable.
Web Browsing Habits
There are a handful number of websites I use, most don't collect data on me; and on those that try to, I turn off as many of the options as possible.
News websites were always the worst for the sheer quantitiy of trackers and cookies, but GDPR regulations forced them to give you the option to turn off analytics, but in 2024/2025 I noticed that most news websites introduced a penalty for turning off cookies, now for a financial fee. ie: you have to pay them for browse with freedom.
If someone sends me a link to a Facebook page or newspaper article, I tend to use TOR browser to view it.
About the only big company web service I have kept an account with is LinkedIn. This decision wasn't taken lightly as it is contrary to my beliefs, but as i have gained a good job from LinkedIn previously, i figured it could be important to future job hunting.
Search Engine
Part of de-Googling my life was to find an alternative search engine. DuckDuckGo offers the privacy I was looking for.
It returns very good search results, almost exactly comparable to Google and Yahoo, so I have never had a need to go back.
I had to train myself to stop saying "Google for it" and instead say "search online for it". Like saying "Hoover" for vacuum cleaner, incredible how over the course of a few short years they managed to ingrain themselves into our daily language.
I stopped using Gmail and paid for an account with privateemail.com, using this domain name. After allowing a year or so of overlap to let people know I had moved over, I finally deleted my old Google account in 2021. It was a rather unemotional moment.
Using privateemail and my own domain has been on the whole OK, but has a frustrating issue when I email anyone with a Microsoft based account, such as Hotmail, outlook, live, or many corporate email addresses. The emails often end up filed in the recipient's junk mail / spam folder, and sometimes simply bounced back to me with various rejection reasons. I have had many tech-support sessions with privateemail / namecheap, fiddled loads of settings, but the issue seems to be with Microsoft not liking non-mainstream email domains.
One further bind though, I made the assumption that deleting my account and all information would by default also delete my videos on YouTube, however, it turns out that this is not the case. So my videos are still on YouTube, and I now cannot log in to delete them! Never mind.
Calendar
My wife and I years ago had set up a joint Gmail address for all home related things. On the back of this we utilised the Google calendar, which we could both access and use; great, except that Google holds the data.
A neat solution to this was to set up a calendar on a Synology NAS drive at home, and using caldav pointed our computer's calendars (Thunderbird on Linux Mint), and phones calendar apps (hers, Android, mine Ubuntu Touch) toward it. This has worked really well and was easy to configure, I don't know why we didn't do it sooner.
Video Hosting
I used to use YouTube to host my videos, and embed a player into my web pages, however this has a drawback in that the embedded player sets cookies on your machine. So I learnt how to host my own videos on this website from my own home server (such as the Prisoner clip above) using the HTML5 video tag.
This has allowed my website to run with videos, without setting any cookies on your machine.
File Storage / Cloud
It was around this time that online cloud storage boomed with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc... However, I'd realised that placing my files in their hands was another route to mass data gathering.
I have instead used a couple of off-the shelf NAS boxes, and Linux servers over the years to manage my files, with remote access over SFTP / SSH.
Video Conferencing
Jitsi meet has become my go-to for encrypted open-source video conferencing.
I've had to turn down COVID19 video calls with my kids school staff using Zoom due to its numerous security and safety flaws. The school was not interested in trying Jitsi, just sticking with Zoom, knowing all of the concerns over it. The mind boggles...
Messaging
To message friends and family I started using Signal, which is end-to-end encrypted.
Setting up various groups was a doddle, and it has been nice to stay in touch with people during COVID19 using a secure social media platform, even though it takes a while to convince people to give it a try, it's appreciated when they do.
Smartphone
I bought a second hand Oneplus One handset and installed Ubuntu Touch compiled by UBports, to stop Google tracking my position and activity via Android.
At the time of writing, July 2020, I'd had the Ubuntu Touch phone for a few weeks, adjusted to it, and started feeding back to the community bugs I was finding. Overall it works mostly fine, but I certainly do not miss Android.
The app for Signal messenger, Axolotl, is still in development and often breaks, which is a shame to have hassle now using Signal after converting neighbours, family and friends over to Signal!
Dekko2, the email app is also in development, and often won't send an email I've written. Also it struggles to access my contacts, but it's a start on the right road.
Smart Speakers
I won't entertain the idea of introducing digital spies into my family's home. Amazon Alexas, Google pebbles, etc... I even avoid one of our village pubs as they have an Alexa on the bar, I don't want Jeff Bezos learning what beers I like.
Smart Watches and Fit Bits
The concept of allowing a corporation access to my skin temperature, heartbeat and physical arm movements is very abstract to me. When they combine this physical data with visited websites and apps in use at that time, they have a really good idea of what gets people excited. But of course the plus side is that the wearer gets to count steps and read texts... whoopee, every cloud and all...
Home Router
I removed the router supplied by our ISP with proprietary firmware and instead configured one using OpenWRT operating system. Now I am in control of it, not my ISP.
OpenWRT's user interface, Luci, is very user friendly, and incredibly configurable. I have pulled my hair out in the past trying to configure port forwarding on ISP supplied routers, but Luci has been created by people who want to configure these sorts of things, so everything is logical and easy to follow.
Games Consoles
Luckily our kids are not so much into computer gaming, but we do have an old original Xbox360, which is occasionally used offline for games like Minecraft and Sonic the Hedgehog running from DVD.
One day life will get trickier when the kids ask to play against their friends online, as there is no way to be anonymous as paid accounts are needed for most mainstream consoles to work online. The other side of this issue is how comfortable we are with them potentially being exposed to online strangers; read, not comfortable (things were simpler when we were young!).
Domestic Smart Appliances
The idea of allowing a toaster / microwave / fridge running proprietary software to connect to our home network is simply ludicrous! When hell freezes over is when I allow something like this to happen
CCTV
I use CCTV cameras at home. the recordings are managed by open source software running on my server, and are not sent across the internet to any third party servers.
In 2020 / 2021 we saw the boom of Amazon Ring doorbells, which freak me out; as now when walking past a random house where the owners have fitted one to the front door, Jeff Bezos will have access to photographs of my face, so my location can be tracked using their facial recognition software. Where is my opt-out option to this invasion of privacy?
Other Life choices
Caught On Camera
Linked to the CCTV notes above, on the topic of facial recognition; when in public places it's often easy to be photographed by someone else whipping out their smartphone. When I notice this, I am now in the habit of putting my hand up to hide my face from their lens, as who knows where the photographer will upload the photos to without asking my permission. There is an area of legal debate regarding rights to privacy in public spaces, summarised by:
N. A. Moreham. “Privacy in Public Places.” The Cambridge Law Journal, vol. 65, no. 3, 2006, pp. 606–635. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4509242. Accessed 26 July 2021.
Going Out
One pub in my village has an Amazon Alexa behind the bar, the other does not. Needless to say which one I no longer frequent.
Online Ordering - Amazon et al.
Having had an Amazon account in the past, I left and no longer buy from them. Partly due to not wanting them to track my interests, but also having seen documentaries on how warehouse staff are treated with little humanity, the reports on Jeff Bezos' furious temper at high level staff, and how the Amazon marketplace sellers are treated.
Local to us, a very large second hand book shop in a barn tried also selling through Amazon and AbeBooks (also owned by Amazon since 2008). They found there was virtually no profit for them and a lot of hard work, they had no idea who their customers were as Amazon sits in the middle, blocking the seller from engaging with their customers. They now only sell in their converted barn by real face-to-face transactions, plus they rin an awesome cafe with an open fire on the side too.
Another socially difficult aspect: While trying not to seem unappreciateive of other peoples' kind gestures, the efforts by us not to use Amazon get scuppered somewhat when family and friends purchase gifts from Amazon and send them to my home addess. The data giant now knows more information about my household: what products people think we would like; who lives at my address; confirmation of our names; when our birthdays are.
Cashless Society?
This will be a very sad day when anonymous cash is declared obsolete. The concept has been suggested in the UK for years (along with identity cards), but imagine if every single transaction is recorded and traceable, then there really is nowhere to hide.
Endnote
Our privacy is precious, it should be cherished, not sold.
Soon it will be time to re-locate to a desert island, away from this greed.