My privacy journey started with a YouTube video by SomeOrdinaryGamers about the Club Penguin Online doxing situation in 2020. Then, through Techlore and other YouTubers, I learned about private browsers, VPNs, password managers, Linux, FOSS, and more. What made you start?
Online ads, they were so annoying to deal with, I tried Adblock (don’t use it) then ABP (don’t use it) then finally I found UBlock Origin (absolutely use this) and just seeing the amount of unnecessary connections on every single website annoyed me even more. On mobile I used Adaway and looking at the logs for that annoyed me so much I switched to LineageOS.
I “upgraded” to windows 10 and I couldn’t deal with how annoying it was with all the bloatware and random notifications so I switched to linux
Online ads, same here.
Was a small thing, I was vaguely aware of online ads but only at a high level.
Was browsing online for garden sheds then turned the laptop off. Came back in the evening and every single site was pushing ads for gardens sheds.
Did some research and 7 years later, de-googled phone, all social media long since closed, linux (mostly), VPN etc etc.
Not going to pretend I can do anything against state actors (CIA, GCHQ) , my threat actors are businesses, Meta, Amazon, Googlr etc.
Can’t beat them all, but I can make my data exepensive to them at least.