Several years ago, I quite accidently ran into an article on privacy while I was browsing a website belonging to a sister project of Wikimedia Foundation. It is amazing how carefully we are manipulated not to care about so basic a right as privacy. But it is even more amazing how hard it is to find anything on privacy online unless you’re actually looking for it, and most privacy activism groups seem to have no idea regarding this. Otherwise, none of them would have put this famous Ed Snowden quote at the front:

Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Because this quote doesn’t mean anything to those who have no idea what privacy means. Privacy is not something that is taught in educational institutions, at least, not seriously. And why should it be? Privacy awareness is perceived to be harmful for the governments and intelligence agencies. Profiling citizens in the name of terrorism is not just good for population control, it turned out to be a very profitable business too.

So, you are one of the few (unfortunate!) people who are not only satisfied with learning about privacy but also ready to actually do something about it, this writing is for you. If you are a critic, please ignore this because I shall not begin this by asking the readers to choose a threat model. When I was looking for advice regarding privacy, people told me to choose a threat model too. But the entire privacy-thing was new to me, and that particular statement, at that time, seemed a little overwhelming.

Before getting started, there are a few things you should remember:

  1. You cannot achieve privacy overnight. Depending on your online presence, it might take a couple of weeks to several years. Even then, there is no guarantee whether you’ve achieved total privacy.
  2. You have to be ready to make some sacrifices. Like any sacrifice, they would seem quite depressing from time to time. But eventually, you will find yourself happier than you ever were.
  3. You will begin to see the real faces of the people around you. This could be the most painful thing for you if you’re fond of company. But it’s better to learn the true nature of people around you early on so that you won’t feel betrayed later in the most vulnerable moment of your life. This, you could say, is a byproduct of achieving privacy. Ease of communication, it appears, made it quite easy to deceive people.
  4. You might have to lead a solo life if you do not have people who share your views. A great way to avoid this would be meeting people online in various groups where people discuss about privacy. You may end up finding some real good people there.

Getting Started

The first thing you should do is change your E-Mail address. This might seem quite silly thing to do to some people, especially those who do not use E-Mail in a daily basis. But E-Mail plays an important role in tasks such as creating accounts, delivery of good and services, and so on. E-Mail is your primary identity on the Internet, thus, changing it is essential to achieve any privacy at all.

There are many privacy-friendly E-Mail providers such as Riseup, Disroot, Proton and Tutanota. Each offers free services, and a few of them also offer premium services. Riseup requires an invitation code meaning that you need to know someone who already use the service in order to create an account there. In other cases, this is quite straightforward. However, since you’re just getting started, I would recommend Disroot as it offers a wide range of features including NextCloud which is quite useful as we shall see later.

After changing your E-Mail address, you may still need to use the old E-Mail, at least, for receiving messages from contacts who may not know your new E-Mail address. Some E-Mail providers such as Gmail offer E-Mail forwarding feature which, when enabled, forwards all the messages to the specified E-Mail address.

Next, you need a temporay E-Mail service. This is essential for many reasons such as creating temporary accounts to use a service with known privacy issues or inserting E-Mail address in a download page which prevents you to download your desired content unless you insert a verified E-Mail address. This may not immediately be clear to you, but as you start to understand fingerprinting methods, you’ll find yourself using temporary E-Mails quite often. There are many providers which offer such service such as AnonAddy and Simple Login. Both are open source, privacy friendly, and has free tiers which should be enough for most use.

Migrate Cloud Services

Thanks to services offered by Google or iCloud, we become quite reliant on the cloud services to store personal information such as contact list, calendar events, notes, documents, etc., and due to how they are integrated and somewhat abstracted, it might seem quite difficult to move away from them. This is not quite true, however. You can quite easily replace most of these services with privacy-friendly alternatives. The best alternative is NextCloud.

NextCloud is a self-hostable, open-source and quite popular alternative to the cloud services offered by the big companies. Despite its being quite easy to setup and use, it is understandable that you may not want to self-host it due to financial or other reasons. This is where Disroot can help you. Because Disroot offers most of the NextCloud features for free. This means when you create an account in Disroot, you automatically get most of the features offered by those big companies in addition to privacy.

You can easily set up contact and calendar synchronisation in your favourite app or operating system by setting up NextCloud as your CardDAV and CalDAV provider just like E-Mails. In Android, you can achieve both using DAVx⁵.

However, one of the biggest cloud services appears to be something people don’t even know of: Web Browsers. Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge use your respective account for synchronisation which means that it knows all your browsing history and timeline, and, thereby, knowing everything you do in the Internet. The easiest way to migrate is to use a privacy friendly browser. For Android, Cromite is considered the best alternative to Google Chrome. But for iOS, the only alternative at present is Brave Browser. If you’ve used Firefox, you can continue using it, but be aware that Firefox, by default, is not a privacy-friendly browser and requires a lot of tweaking to do. For Desktop, Ungoogled Chromium could be used, but although Ungoogled Chromium does not contain anything from Google, most of the privacy features are disabled by default and you will need to enable them manually. In addition, you need to install a few browser extensions to prevent big brothers from tracking you across the web. I would recommend the following browser extensions:

  1. uBlock Origin - For blocking trackers and ads
  2. LibRedirect - Redirect popular websites to their privacy-friendly alternatives
  3. Floccus - Synchronise bookmarks in the cloud such as NextCloud
  4. Chromium Web Store - Keep your web extensions up-to-date
  5. Decentraleyes - Cache regularly used files delivered by a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to prevent tracking.

If you are an advanced user, you can also install the following extensions:

  1. uMatrix - Similar to uBlock Origin but it gives tighter control
  2. JShelter - Prevents browser fingerprinting by controlling certain JavaScript features
  3. ScriptSafe - Similar to uBlock Origin and uMatrix but with a different philosophy
  4. Vytal - Control trivial features that are used to generate unique fingerprint from your browser such as timezone.

However, a few days ago, the best VPN provider, Mullvad VPN along with the team behind the Tor Browser has launched a tweaked version of Firefox Browser. This browser, called Mullvad Browser, generates a single fingerprint for all users, making it difficult to track you across the web.

Note that the browser-default synchronisation is disabled in those browsers. For better privacy, you should synchronise your bookmarks using a browser extension such as the one specified above. Also, never save your passwords in the browser-default password manger. Every interested person knows where those passwords are located.

Secure Your Logins

Securing your login details is something you should do even when you don’t care about privacy. Because this might help you avoiding a lot of griefs due to your weak security measures. As you may already know, for better security, it is necessary to use strong and unique passwords for every account you create along with two- or multi-factor authentication. Managing unique passwords is not something you can do using your memory alone, you need a password manager. Depending on what you need, you can choose BitWarden or KeePassXC/KeePassDX as your password manager. Since you’re only getting started, I would suggest BitWarden since it provides more flexibilities than the others. For authenticator, never use outdated, insecure and closed-source providers such as Google Authenticator or Authy. Instead use well-known open source alternatives such as Aegis Authenticator.

If you are already using a password manager such as Google or Lastpass, you should immediately migrate to a better and privacy-friendly alternative.

Secure Your Phone

If you use a smartphone, it’s essential to secure it properly in order to achieve both privacy and security. First of all, check if your existing phone is enough for you. If the phone does not receive regular updates or is not from a reputed company, it may not be a sutiable phone, and if you afford it, you should upgrade your phone so that you can use a secure operating system such as Graphene OS. Otherwise, you should uninstall all the unnecessary system applications from your phone and pay attention to what you install even if you trust the source of the application.

Secondly, make sure that the device is encrypted. When it’s possible, the encryption password should be as long as possible. Avoid using insecure security features such as fingerprint or face ID, and use pin or password.

Thirdly, replace the closed source apps with good and tracker-free open source alternatives. While this may not improve your security, it will improve your privacy. Here’s a list of apps that I frequently use which may help you getting started.

Be Clever, Consume Less

Less consumption is freqently associated with economic and health benefits. But it plays an important role in achieving privacy, and it, sort of, answers the question as to why companies want us to consume more. By displaying advertises appealing to you, the big companies want you to consume more because ads are a good source of revenue for them. Through social media, they also induce people to show themselves off so that you, fearing of being missing out, would imitate them and start consuming all those useless things you are trying to keep yourself distant from as it is well-known that these needs, though may provide temporary happiness, are the cause for depression in the long run. Instead of going after temporary happiness, I think, we should sought for things that give us a more permanent happiness. I am not a psychiatrist, but I found that reflecting on your deeds and beliefs, that is, self-judgement, is a powerful tool to gain long term happiness as you start to understand yourself better this way and what you really need, as opposed to the ones imposed on you through the above mentioned “induction” process.

Obliviate Yourself from the Internet

Hermione Granger obliviating herself from the people she loved Hermione Granger obliviating herself from the people she loved

This could the most tedious task depending on how interactive you were. If you were like me and used a lot of sites carelessly, you will need to do a lot of things to wipe youself from the Internet. When I first started to wipe my online activities, it was quite difficult thing to do since a lot of services did not offer a way to delete an account or profile. But nowadays, it is quite easy as they have to oblige various policies around the world regarding data retention and privacy. These services can work even if you’re not located in a country with such laws. However, some services might not entirely delete your data or claim to delete your data while all they did was made it private. In both cases, if there’s an account involved, you might want to keep it in your password manager to check whether you’re account is still present a few years later. But even if they made the data private, it should be enough to keep the search engines from indexing your data which should be your primary concern. Because OSINT (open source intelligence) experts and data brokers primarily use various search engines with special keywords (e.g. Google dorks) to collect data about you. During this process, you should keep a low profile to allow search engines to gradually forget you.

Keep Informed and Inform the Family and Friends

The only way to effectively achieve total privacy is by spreading privacy awareness among the people you care about. This is because the importance of privacy is not immediately clear to people, even to those who are new to all these. If you’re the latter, at first ask yourself why you’re here. This should get you started. Another important thing is keeping yourself informed about what is happening around you. Accept it or not, you’re now a member of an extended economic society which some poeple call “Global Village”. The Internet is not created for you to watch some movies or play games, it was created for speeding up the communication which are vital for economy and defence. So, as member of this society, it’s your responsibility to keep yourself well-informed about events and issues that may affect you or the people you care about.

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