Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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What steps do you feel like are before a VPN? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by ericbomb@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Context: my gf mentioned getting a vpn for privacy, and I tried to explain that it "does" help, but it's more like type of windows on a house. It certainly can be part of the package, but it's no where near the foundation.

So i tried to explain the best that i could That if she was worried about online privacy the first step wasn't to mask traffic, but to not submit personal data to anything online like FB, not use Google services that package everything on you together to sell to advertisers, and to limit phone apps to essentials.

But I'm curious on what other steps you guys would consider the "foundation" of online privacy that should be prioritized before a vpn. Any thoughts? Or am I way off base?

Note: this is in context of vpn for privacy. Using vpn to avoid Geo blocking and censorship I see as incredibly valid for those that need it.

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[–] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 5 points 8 months ago

Both of you make valid points. The trouble is that the Internet is getting more complicated and also getting more exploited by corporations, e.g. with the recent addition of the A.I. hype. And all kind of people think that they know the answer but later it turns out that they were wrong (Take for example all the Apple fans years ago thinking that Apple + privacy was a really good way of life). The other trouble is that maybe only a few VPN providers are really trustworthy. And then your browser fingerprint can be unique if you add too many extensions or fiddle with certain settings, which means you are track-able and user profiles can be created. And so on and so forth.

It makes sense to think about what you want to protect and avoid. Here some generic suggestion :

Get yourself a pi-hole at home for your devices to connect to.
Limit the amount of Java-Script in your web browsers. Lots of websites will do fine.
Limit the amount of phone apps usage (like you wrote)
Use Tor browser (slow) or Mullvad VPN in some cases you want to hide your IP address
Be weary about default settings of Firefox, take a look at LibreWolf
Use different browsers for different tasks