security cameras

Most people don’t care about internet privacy for a variety of reasons:

“They’ll get my data anyway”

“Advertisements help me pick what to buy”

“Staying connected is important to me”

Keeping your data out of the hands of mega-corporations is difficult, inconvenient, and the benefits are mostly intangible–but it’s also a rights-preserving measure which could be more important than ever under this administration. Liberties that we may have thought of as foundational are under attack every day, and taking measures to protect ourselves is becoming more and more necessary as a prerequisite to safeguarding our rights.

What’s the risk?

Companies such as Meta, Google, X, Reddit, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, and and Microsoft (to name a few) mine you for data. They sell it to advertisers, governments, and data brokers. Your habits are broken down, distilled, sorted, and analyzed. They aren’t just trying to sell you products; your political views, morals, and news are all sold, manipulated, and influenced. If you value autonomy and independence, cracking down on data leaks is paramount.

Not only can your data be used to manipulate you, it also poses a risk to your finances, employment, and personal security. When reservoirs of your information get hacked, there are absolutely no limits to how maliciously it can be used. And leaks happen all the time, even to large companies.

What can we do?

There are a few easy ways we can limit our exposure to these companies’ tactics:

  • Limit the data they can scrape from our activity
  • Limit the influence they exert on us
  • Limit the data we leave behind

We can never get anything; if a state-level actor or mega-corporation wants to find you, they will find you, speaking broadly. Even the time you, as an individual, take to type different orders from letter to letter can be used to identify you.

However, there’s a difference between being searched for and being searchable. Most people aren’t being uniquely targeted by expensive tracking mechanisms, so limiting your data makes it financially non-viable for most small-to-medium level trackers to pin you down.

Easy wins

There are a few minor lifestyle changes which go a long way:

  • Browser: Chrome and Edge both steal your data; Firefox and Brave are user-friendly drop-in replacements that will hardly feel any different in use, but which come with privacy settings enabled by default.
    • On iOS, Brave will even block YouTube ads.
  • Extensions: uBlock Origin will not only reduce trackers and speed your pages up, it makes your whole experience better. Skip YouTube ads, block annoying popups, and remove distracting banners around your content.
  • Search engines: This one is a bit harder to wean off, but even replacing some of your searching with a privacy-conscious Google alternative such as DuckDuckGo will ensure your searches are significantly harder to track.

From here, you can dig deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole–I’ve stopped using Windows entirely (except at work), for example, and route all mobile internet traffic through a self-hosted filter that further prunes internet content for me–but these are accessible measures that barely influence your day-to-day internet activity while still making a dent in the data you’re exposed to and leave behind.

Marginalized folks most at risk

Anyone can benefit from privacy-conscious behavior, but people most at risk under this administration have the most to gain by clamping down on the data they leave on the internet. While it’s important that we resist the erosion of our freedoms and speak out when we can, we must (sadly) ensure that we protect ourselves too.

And, consider this: you don’t have to value your own privacy to still stand up for it. Straight people can stand up for gay rights and white can people show up for civil rights both for altruistic reasons, but also because we all benefit from a stronger, fairer foundation of rights. If privacy isn’t a concern for you, you should still stand up for the values it protects.

If you’ve done anything to increase your privacy that was easy yet effective, please feel free to share.