Secure digital life
Every day, we hear about scams, data breaches, data collection, ad tracking, phishing, and all kinds of things happening everywhere on the internet. It can be credit card fraud, losing access to an account, personal data being leaked, or even losing money.
Personally, I haven't faced any of these so far, mostly because I try to be careful. But eventually, there are certain things I am trying to maintain to keep my digital life as secure as possible.
Because once something happens, there is often no real way to get back lost data or lost money. Prevention is much easier than dealing with the damage later.
Email: I have been using Gmail for a long time, and I still use it today.
Recently, I started using Proton Mail, and it looks pretty promising in terms of security and privacy. Gmail doesn't give end-to-end encryption to personal emails.
As they clearly mentioned, at least till the date I am writing this, and I am not expecting it to change much for privacy:
To provide you features like smart inbox categories, Smart Compose, and spam detection, we use Gmail data to provide a more intelligent email experience and keep you safe.
While Proton Mail completely has e2e encryption for email content between Proton users.
I still use Gmail as of now. It's convenient, but more importantly, so many accounts are connected to it.
The basic security practices still matter a lot, though. Don't click on unknown links. Be careful with email attachments and images. Check whether the sender and domain are actually legitimate. If an email looks suspicious, don't interact with it.
And for marketing emails, if there isn't a simple unsubscribe button and they are asking me to log in somewhere just to unsubscribe, I simply block the sender and report it as spam.
I have limited time. I opened my laptop to work, I don't want to spend time dealing with all these stupid things.
Passwords and aliases: I used Bitwarden for a long time, and it is still a great password manager. My experience with it has been very good. Recently I started trying out Proton Pass as well.
Another thing I need is email aliases. You might often want to sign up for some website without revealing your actual email address. Proton does this pretty well, and I find it useful to have separate aliases instead of giving my primary email everywhere.
Browser: For the browser, I recommend Brave. Its built-in ad and tracker blocker gives a great browsing experience.
The modern web has become ridiculous. You visit a website and there are ads, trackers, cookies, analytics scripts, third-party requests, and who knows what else running in the background.
Brave blocks a lot of that by default, and it makes the browsing experience feel much cleaner.
For search, I do use Brave Search. I also think the way we use search engines is going to change over time. You don't always need a search engine homepage anymore. If I already know what I'm looking for, I can simply type the link.
DNS: I use NextDNS at the device level. It blocks a lot of trackers and can also block scam or potentially harmful domains. It's another layer that mostly works in the background without needing much attention.
What I'm actually trying to achieve: What I mean to do is keep it simple, even if that means being a little boring. I don't want to completely stop using every product that collects data. I understand that some information has to be collected because it is important for the product to work.
What I don't like is when every product starts collecting everything, building a profile around me, and then using that information for ads, recommendations, or engagement.
Google Search, YouTube, Maps, the way location is used for recommendations, Instagram, and eventually even WhatsApp, all of these products are moving more and more toward understanding what you do so they can personalize what you see.
At some point, I wouldn't be surprised if I stopped using WhatsApp as well. WhatsApp is not simply about texting anymore, and the way the app is getting bloated, I am increasingly uncomfortable with.
Give them the information they actually need to provide the product. That's fair.
But I don't want every service to know everything about me just because I happen to use it.
For credit cards and other sensitive information, I generally don't store them digitally unless I really need to. Password managers do provide the ability to store this kind of information, but I personally prefer to keep it limited.
And finally, what's not on the list: So this isn't really about finding the "most private" product for everything.
I want products that respect my privacy, collect only what they genuinely need, and don't turn every part of my digital life into a source of tracking and advertising.
I just want to be careful enough that I can use technology normally.