This post will be my personal experience about trying to gain back my privacy after years of being privacy unconscious. And foremost I want to apologize for my English, if it isn’t perfect, 'cause English is not my first language.
I was already using Linux for the past year. I tried switching to it three times, and only the third time was successful. Also interested in open source I was for quite a long time, but the privacy topic has never really interested me. I was following this stupid statement: «I don’t worry about privacy because I have nothing to hide», which I regret now. But last Christmas, I suddenly realized how much data I was giving away to Big Tech (and not only them). I can’t perfectly remember what did lead me to that realization. Was it some YouTube video, privacy policy that I suddenly decided to check out or something else, but I immediately started to action.
For the past 6 months I deleted more than 100 accounts. Sometimes it was as easy as to press the button, sometimes I had to email support, and sometimes I literally had to fight for my right to remove the account. Even today there are still 7 accounts left, that I can not delete either because support is ignoring me, or because the process is too slow, or because the service simply does not give the right to remove user account.
JustDeleteMe actually helped me very much with that process, and I’ve even contributed to the project a few times, so to the other users who’ll follow my way the process would be at least a little easier.
Today is a special day, though, because I finally get rid of my Google and Microsoft accounts. I can finally breathe free. My situation is still not perfect, 'cause I still have some proprietary, privacy invasive accounts left, like Steam, Discord, or my banking apps. I can’t just immediately drop them, but at least I’ve reduced the amount of information I left behind.
What’s the moral? Welp, it would be so much easier for today’s me if yesterday’s me had been concerned about privacy in the first place.
It’s the privacy vs convenience problem. For most people, the convenience is so much more important so when you can just use Google to sign in everywhere, you get rid of your passwords remembering issue (oh my god how many people have blamed me for losing their passwords, I’m an IT guy).
Companies want to maximise profits by ‘knowing’ (ie tracking) their customers so they can tailor their products or services to actual usage. A noble goal? They just want to be more convenient for us.
In the end I guess having an account anywhere and the companies seeing anonimised or aggregated, no personally identifiable records, should not be an issue. But they don’t need to keep track of where I live, what my e-mail adress or phone number is and especially need not now any third party stuff.
It has become a very untrustworthy business just because the companies could do whatever they wanted and now that there is more scrutiny, they just find back alley ways to screw us over.
Who remembers their passwords? Use a password manager and it’s as simple as a Google login. It even fills in the credentials automatically on a hotkey.
Ok you have to create a new password the first time you want to register somewhere. But how lazy can people get? It’s also just a button click in a password manager.
I’ve suggested password managers to loads of people who’d rather cling to updating their little pocketbooks where it’s impossible to distinguish between certain characters and password versions. The stubbornness of tech illiterates is stunning.