Comment I protect the privacy that I can control (Score 1) 319
I can't control what providers do with my data. If my dentist sells my information to a marketing firm, and then that gets sold to someone looking at setting up new id's for people, I don't have much control over that. I also don't have a lot of control over how my phone can be used to track me (which is why I use it a lot less, and am going to be installing CyanogenMod to reduce that control footprint).
What I can do are two things- put as much of my information under my direct control as possible, and make it easier for myself and others to continue doing so.
I'm still migrating off of Google services. I didn't realize just how much they have taken over so many aspects of "making things easy". Looking back on it, it was naive to put things there, but at the time there really weren't any affordable services that offered me what I needed. If anything, the only reason I used Google for free was because there wasn't anything low cost and reliable that I could have used instead. That included self-hosting. And it wouldn't have mattered if I had everything in another cloud or vps, because it still would have been a US based service, and that means it would still have to migrate to a server in my home or on a vps in someplace like Switzerland. The end goal is to get everything important being served out of my home off of equipment that I have secured and verified, and to stop using external services (even the ones in places like Switzerland, because laws can and do change). I'm also no longer sharing services that I do host on my own, because I do not want to be considered an ISP for the purposes of receiving something like an NSL.
The second thing is what is causing me to do this slowly. I'm critically looking at all the things that I need to do and use, and what I am finding to be really important and what isn't. I'm keeping track of my time in setting all of this up, and figuring out what is a time sink and what isn't. Going forward, I'm developing my own installation packages under my favorite OS to streamline my effort to make the hard things I've had to do easy for other people, and at some point I will probably contact a hardware shop that deals in small production runs of ARM microsystems and have a platform put together so I can make it easy for people just to "plug and play" darknet services. And, more importantly, I'm helping anyone out who is doing the same in whatever small ways that I can. It is one thing to tap the communications of most Americans and others in the world by working with willing partners (Google, MSoft, Apple, etc), it is quite another to try to monitor millions of systems that all have major differences and none of which are going to be open to cooperation.