Ask HN: How to protect one's privacy? How difficult is it?

- Don't use the Internet.

- Don't use a computer.

- Don't use a phone.

- Don't use a credit card.

- Don't use a bank.

- Don't go to hospitals and clinics.

- Don't live in a city with CCTVs.

- Don't live in a city with tourists taking pictures/videos.

- Cover your entire body when you go outside.

Basically, live like an hermit, or live in a remote undeveloped location and use cash for everything.

A better approach would be to stop being so possessive about your personal data, and understand that privacy is not inherently valuable.

I'll take an actual stab at this, as this is something I've been working on for the better part of a year

Prerequisites (non-optional): 1. A good VPN 2. A non-Google browser (Mozilla Nightly/Privacy browser) 3. Extensions - AdBlock, UMatrix 4. Browser settings - purge all trackers, don't save history, etc. 5. Private, secure services (e.g., Protonmail for email, something similar to a Dropbox for filesharing, etc) 6. there are other things to mention here, but for brevity, I'll skip them (e.g., TOR)

Now that you have all the necessary tools, this is where things get a bit tricky.

See the fact of the matter is, you have to settle for some part of your life being public online - this is simply non-negotiable.

But this isn't inherently a bad thing right?

I'm sure there are people who know that your name is $NAME, and you work at $JOB, and you have $N siblings, etc - basically, parts of your life are already very public and that's OK. The same goes with online. It's totally OK for some parts of your digital life to be public. Example: you visit github.com regularly, you check your Gmail account, you watch youtube videos, etc. For these public aspects of your digital life, DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT use a VPN, or a privacy browser, or any privacy tools. You want to come off as being a regular person, doing regular people things (this is sort of the bait).

This way, you can build an online profile that says "Hey, John Doe's online behavior looks like $XYZ, so if we see something that looks like $ZYX, it probably has a low probability of being John Doe".

However, this strategy requires you to almost live a double online life (a sad necessity), where you're John Doe by day (i.e., watching youtube, checking gmail, looking at funny cat memes, not using privacy tools), but Doe John by night (i.e., using all of your privacy tools to do what you actually want to do online - look at conspiracy videos, read up on politics, etc).

It can be a bit cumbersome and tiring to switch back and forth in that way, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes much more natural. You learn not to mix your "John Doe" digital life, with your "Doe John" digital life. Because if you log into say LinkedIn via your VPN and they record your VPN IP, that can easily be cross-referenced across other platforms/sites for that same IP (it's not an exact match, but it can leave a trail of cookie crumbs).

So can you protect your real digital privacy when needed? Yes. Is it hard? To start, yes. Even when you get comfortable with switching back and forth, it can still be cumbersome. But until the world catches up and realizes that digital privacy is important (maybe in 50 years we'll be there), I wouldn't sit around waiting for things to change. Take action into your own hands.

Cheers

One step I am taking besides trying to reduce Google usage (eg use fastmail, DuckDuckGo) I am trying to stop using my real name as my username and when I want to particularly reduce links to my email use a service like Abine Blur which provides email and phone forwarding with multiple email aliases.

I switched from GMail to my own mail server, from Mac to Linux, Google to DuckDuckGo, browse the web through through Tor, and stopped using my credit card. Switching was relatively easy. It was mostly a change of mindset.

The hard part is finding a better phone (both iPhone and Android get tracked). Maybe I'll get a PureOS phone.