Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Degoogling my phoone - Feeling like is too much trouble for the privacy (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by fernandu00@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hey guys, it's pretty much the tittle. I've been using Lineage with microg for a year now and despite using the majority of FOSS apps in my routine I still feel like I have to struggle to preserve my privacy and keep Google away from my data. Do you guys feel the same sometimes?

Every time I have to use a banking app is a pain ..I kept changing banks to the ones who I could use with Magisk but every app update breaks my setup and I have to find a workaround or change to another app. I just quit using banking apps and passed them all to the wife.Now even home brokers have been blocking me asking to use a "official android version"

Today even a government app we must use to get access to services and information started complaining about my play store.

I self host a nextcloud service on my old desktop that serves as a server but every now and then the updates crash something. Sharing calendar and notes is too complicated if you don't have a vps or a domain. I keep getting complains from the wife about how come I just don't use google keep and Google drive anymore.

After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins

What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

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[–] Unmapped@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Not really a answer to your question but I thought it might help.

I tried the next cloud setup since I already self-host a bunch. And I didn't like it. Like you said updates can mess it up and sharing is annoying. Just in general it was buggy for me.

So I switched to proton. Which even though is hosted on someone else computer, it feels plenty private to me with the E2E encryption. I use proton drive which is easy to share things just like google drive. I use proton Calendar. And I use proton Email. Its slow progress but proton really seems to be fully replacing google for me. They even just added live collaboration to drive. Which was like the one thing I still use google drive for sometimes.

[–] smpl@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago

The other commenters in this thread seems to be giving you good advice and moral support, so I'm just going to give my input which comes from a perspective that's a bit different.

Sometimes especially when the options we have are contrary to our beliefs, we have to consider if we really need to be a part of it. Sometimes the burden is the smartphone itself. I don't use smartphones and I couldn't be happier, somehow my life didn't end. The last one I had was the N900 and even though it was a pretty cool pocketcomputer, I guess it's now been around 10 years since I last had a smartphone. I don't miss it and especially not when I see other people who have one. It's scary so addictive it seems to be. Pen and paper for data sharing and just calling people can accomplish many tasks.

Old people with bad eyesight also need banking, so I'd hope theres a bank out there who don't require a smartphone. In my country banks use the national id for authentication and you can get a TOTP keychain for the 2FA instead of an app, perhabs similar options exist.

Anyway, I hope you find something that works for you. Life is a process.

[–] featured@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 4 months ago

On the topic of struggling to connect to self hosted services without a VPS or domain: check out mesh VPNs like ZeroTier or Tailscale. I access all my internal services over Tailscale these days and it’s super simple

[–] Randomgal@lemmy.ca -2 points 4 months ago

It is. People do it because they enjoy the process or they drank too much of the cool aid.

Hot take: All you are doing by de googling yourself is denying you the conforts and conveniences Google spends time and money developing.

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