I honestly believe we all have the power to get to maybe 95% privacy, but it requires effort, time, consistency and willing to change some actions that have become muscle memory.

Trying ro do it all at once was ridiculously overwhelming for me. I deleted all social networks overnight, and plastered a status on my WhatsApp that said “I will delete my WhatsApp account in 90 days. Install Signal of you want to keep texting with me”, and kept counting down the days on that status. I called my close friends and family on the phone, and told each of them what I was doing and why, and some other ‘not-so-close’ acquaintances and relatives that asked me in WhatsApp because of the status asked me and got the same information. When the days hit 0, I just deleted that account.

Removing Google, Microsoft and many others was a way longer run, as I had accumulated too much data in their drives and email services over the years, so that took me almost 3 full years. I started by building an UnRaid NAS, and slowly moving the files over.

With my Gmail, I added QN automatic auto-reply, similar to the countdown on WhatsApp, that said something along the lines of ‘this email address will stop being monitored on xx-xx-xxxx. To continue communication, please reach out to me via Signal, or call me’. Then exported all my email and cleared the full inbox, leaving it at 0 emails. Microsoft was easier, as I only used it for my ISP and my kids’ Minecraft account.

I opened 2 different accounts on different email providers (tuta, proton, etc) and started using those instead, created a permanent forward on gmail to 1 of the accounts, and started monitoring what was coming in, and sending all the garbage I didn’t want to spam in the new services. The other account on each service would be the ones I planned kn using permanently when I had finally chosen which one to keep.

This is only part of the road, going private after years of choosing convenience is not easy, and if you want as little disruption as possible and want to minimize loss of data, it’s a long journey.

However, the benefit of dropping all that garbage from my life, and dare I say, the people this has removed from my life, has been the dramatic improvement to my mental health. And of course, its incredible how much I learned along the way, and how Much I keep on learning.

One more benefit that wasn’t immediately evident was the type of people I now interact with in the internet. It used to be all the gossip, the ‘look at what my dumb kid does’, and other honestly irrelevant shit for me. Now, I interact with people that I consider to be some of the smartes individuals alive on Lemmy and even Mastodon. Sure, there’s still a shitload of imbeciles too, but the numbers pale in comparison to the number of people with common sense and that are looking to learn more, as well as help me and others learn, and have the capacity to have civilized (some times 🤣) discussions to figure out new ways together to increasingly better solutiona, while also warning others of some new dangers when they come to light.

All this to say that, it is hard, maybe even painful, but absolutely worth it.

Today my tech infrastructure is basically my steam deck, a System76 laptop running CachyOS, GrapheneOS phone and a server on Proxmox running about 40 services with 20TB of storage to keep my own shit. This backs up weekly to a similar setup at my brother’s house, and I keep an offline backup that I update every 3 months or so.

It’s fun and refreshing, feeling this level of ownership of my data.