After some common-sense practices to use, I wanted to switch over to privacy and data online and off. Your privacy is literally under attack every day from countless sources, usually trying to pry out as much data from your activity as they can without breaking the law. I used to not care. I felt that since I had nothing to hide, it didn’t bother me that some companies could use my data points to make new things. However, I’ve come to realize that my data is actually valuable. Not mine, of course. But collectively, the data of a population allows these companies to make incredible strides, which they often then use to create moats and walls around their ecosystems. I believe that these companies honestly can’t be trusted with some of the repercussions of the sheer amount of data they end up with. I don’t believe free email apps and social media are enough to make up for the potential harm they create.

It’s interesting that people are just now starting to worry; data collection and surveillance isn’t new. This isn’t a new practice. Two decades and a flurry of technical developments have made ad-tech and related businesses the modern day gold rush. Google and Facebook got to where they are thanks to massive profits in their ad spaces. Other corporations run smaller operations or just buy the tech, but the end result is the same.

After collecting and hoarding countless data points, companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook are annihilating their competition at a dizzying rate. The story sounds similar to Wal-Mart’s effect on small businesses in rural towns. The new way of doing things was so incredibly efficient that existing businesses simply couldn’t keep up and died out.

That on its own is enough for me to speak up. I like my local butchers, and no superstore will ever compare in quality and service. Similarly, throughout the 90s and early 2000s, the internet was a wild place brimming with absurdity. I’m sure many people fondly remember the early days of geocities and myspace which allowed almost intoxicating amounts of creativity to be prominently displayed on your personal page. As technological giants consolidate and eat up the web, we’re left with a whitewashed rinse-and-repeat cycle of memes and less originality. Today, everyone’s wall looks the same.

Now, I can’t complain too much about competition. I acknowledge that competition drives innovation and lowers prices in many cases. There is however an issue with how they’re getting there. Our data is being collected without our consent, oftentimes without even realizing data can be collected. Lengthy legal documents are appended on every website knowing full well that people cannot read or understand them. It is a predatory way of doing business, and harms interesting smaller businesses at the same time.

Because of these reasons, I try to adopt tools and behaviors that reduce my data footprint and allow me to take back ownership of my data from these entities. They are good at what they do. Disconnecting yourself from them ends up being a painful process because their objective was to become ingrained in your life. However, feat not! In my opinion it’s all about research and comfort. You don’t have to go cold turkey, and you should feel good about a switch before you do anything drastic.

Social Media

This one goes without saying, but sharing your personal information near-publicly on social media gives valuable information to the companies that own those sites. Thanks to plenty of incidents and a worsening reputation, people are starting to realize the costs of social media. There’s still a long way to go, but my recommendation is always to take it slow. Reach out to your friends, let them know you’re thinking of leaving. Get everyone’s phone numbers, and double-check that contact list in your phone you’ve maybe neglected recently. Phone numbers and emails are still a great way to reach people, and less likely to chance compared to other forms of communication.

Grab a copy of your data, if possible, and then take an extra step and ask them to delete it properly. Various companies have various policies, and as a realistic person I just admit that I have lost a good amount of data already that I can’t take back. At least having it lets me enjoy it later. It was pretty fun to go through my messages from grade-school!

Photos

Cloud storage for photos is great. You can automatically backup your memories without having to take a discrete step, and you usually get a bunch of nifty features like searching and special effects. Like everything else, it’s an excuse to get your data.

These companies have now developed imagine recognition software fueled by decades of photos that is beyond anything a reasonable competitor could achieve. Now that many photos might never end up in one piece of software again, who knows if they have the best chance of keeping their foothold?

My alternative is the good old hard drive. We don’t really need to keep photo albums anymore (although I like to), so hard drives are a pretty great way of tucking stuff away long-term. Get the cold-storage type. They’re slower, a bit cheaper, but usually have a specialization in data not being corrupted randomly over time by the elements.

Then, the annoying part is getting all your photos off of those services. Thankfully there’s some workarounds, but realize that they are incentivized to make it harder for you to leave the platform. After your initial batch of downloads and copying to your hard drives, you should make it a practice to just backup your photos every couple months, or after a trip. I make a copy of the hard drive each time to be safe, and then put them away with other sensitive documents!

Phone

Google is a scary one. Their services are usually very well-developed, and they’re integrated into all of our hardware. They listen to you through phones and smart speakers, track your location through maps and cars, and know what you search for and purchase. Recently it dawned on me that I simply can’t be on Android if that bothers me at all. Android is the platform for their whole system, and facilitates all the other objectives they have as well as a bunch of other companies developing on the platform.

This one’s a doozy because there’s simply not that much choice. I ended up making an informed decision to go with Apple. My reasoning is this: I pay them a premium for the device so that they don’t go sell my data to make ends meet. Google parts with much more for free, and so the other side of their business has to make up for it. Apple on the other hand has started playing the role of privacy advocate, and if they start making it a main selling point, I can surely get behind that. At the end of the day, I’ll put up with a lot of inconveniences and minor disagreements for the peace of mind Apple offers me with their data practices.

Smart Devices

Honestly, keep them out of your house for now. It seems that every other month we hear an incident of a device leaking data or granting unauthorized access to a pretty private part of someone’s life. Baby monitors, expensive cars, and plenty of things in between have already been compromised. I think the reason is simply because manufacturers focused on producing the device as quickly as possible without prioritizing security as they would have for other technology.

The result is a minefield of devices that are hard to verify. Rather than take the risk, I like to sit it out a bit and let some other unfortunate people deal with those issues. A smart plug or two can’t hurt too much, but smart speakers and cameras expose a ton of useful information and not yet have standard, secure methods of functioning.

A project I have lined up and my current hope for this issue is software like openHAB. These are essentially smart hubs you can run on many devices, some as simple as Raspberry Pis. They come with plugins developed by the community to hook up to many if not all of your existing services, and since you own it you control what’s going in and out. Clearly it’s not a solution for people who hate technology, but it’s the only realistic solution at the moment. Hopefully someone sees the need for privacy-oriented smart devices in the near future.

These are just a few of the many areas of risk in everyday life. Rather than try to pinpoint each item, I recommend really starting to think about the crumbs you leave behind as you go throughout your days, and see what steps make sense for you to limit them. Security can be taken too far, and before you know it you’re in a cabin in the woods with a tinfoil hat on. You will always be monitored to some degree by the government, your parents, whatever; when it comes to for-profit organizations though, there you can take steps to protect yourself.