Securing your privacy breadcrumbs
Over the last year I have become particularly aware of the vast amount of personal data that I leave behind as I go about my day to day activities — work related or personal.
While at a micro scale this wasn’t something I cared about much, at the macro scale this became particularly evident following the events of the past few years — a feeling that somehow I was trading “free services” for my “freedoms”.
As new laws/legislations have come into effect, they are revealing the sheer volumes of data and tracking that happens behind every single click/interaction we perform online. I recently came across this 2 page long cookie consent page. It felt as though I took the “red pill” and the façade was pull away in front of my eyes. Needless to say a part of me was not surprised.
Another worrisome aspect of this for me was the fact that conversations/discussions we were having were “auto-magically” resulting in ads across various apps and websites we used.
With this backdrop, we started to make changes to our day-to-day lifestyle to break this strangle-hold. Below I would like to share some of the changes we embraced over the last year and the outcomes.
1. “Unfollow” Social Media
I started this journey by cleaning up all of my social media accounts, likes, profiles. While this was by far the hardest to pull off, it has also been the most effective. Everyone in my household agreed to remove all social media apps from their personal devices.
We also either deleted our profile or cleaned it up by unfollowing everything (there are some nifty plugins that let you unfollow everything with a single click). If we need to go check out a post for some reason (friend shared his vacation pictures), we would use the web versions of these platforms using the Brave browser (more on that next).
Doing this has effectively stopped majority of location or cross app tracking that was happening without consent. And a really nice side benefit is that we have regain lots of our personal time back. That last point could be a whole article in and of itself :-).
2. Browser Switch
Switching our default browser from Chrome/Safari/etc over to Brave. If you haven’t come across it before it is worth a try. Brave is a privacy & security focused browser with a really unique business model based on a blockchain based Basic Attention Token (BAT). You can read up more about its privacy features. The basic idea here is that it lets you control what ads you want to see and lets you choose to monetize your attention. This is an alternative approach to the current tracking heavy approach to personalized ads which I find quite intriguing and has a lot of potential to be successful.
Following the switch, I noticed significant reduction in unwanted ads/popups and over a period of time benefits from not being “fingerprinted”. And a nice side benefit is that I get somewhere around 5 to 10 BAT tokens a month while just browsing or choosing to watch ads that I like.
I would highly recommend you try it out.
3. Goodbye! Siri/Alexa/Google
Turning off all listening devices — Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, HomePods etc. While we did not have many, there were a few which were on by default on our phones for convenience. While it was a mild inconvenience not to be able to ask for the weather or forecast, overall its has been easy to transition.
Now while I don’t have any evidence of the amount of data being collected without consent — and yes there might be some paranoia here — I feel it was something that we could live without.
4. Switch to IOS
Lastly, we switched all of our devices from Android to IOS. While this is a personal preference, in my case this choice was easy because the majority of the devices at home (personal computer, work laptop, family computer, tablets, etc) were already running MacOS or IOS.
The primary reason I’ve added this to the discussion here is the new “tracking” request feature which lets me as the user decide which apps I am willing to give permission to track — None! :-).
I don’t see Google ever adding this to the Android stack as it will encroach upon their primary source of revenue — which is unfortunate!
Conclusion
Overall this has been a very effective experiment for us. Some decisions were hards to pull off and did result in some challenges. But overall I feel we have made good stride in limiting how we are tracked. The great indication of this came just last week — we are shopping for new kitchen appliances and even though we have been visiting various sites looking for product and reviews — I have not received a single ad for the same. Maybe I can claim “Mission Accomplished”!?? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In conclusion, if you are curious (or annoyed) at all the tracking or erosion of personal privacy, come up with a plan, one that fits your lifestyle. I am sure you will be glad you did. I was.
