Intro to privacy

Welcome! This post is an intro to privacy and this website in general.

What is privacy at all?

To understand what I will be talikng about on this page, you will need to get a basic understandig of privacy.

Cambridge University defines privacy like this: "Someone's right to keep their personal matters and relationships secret".

I wouldn't quite agree on this, as it is a) very vague and b) I'm not sure that it is a right.

So, lets talk about a). Companies might collect some of your data that can't be quite defined as a "personal matter". They might log your IP address (basically your location) and timestamp.

They don't know what *exactly* you are doing, but I still consider that an invasion of my privacy.

Now, lets address b). Privacy may be a right, but online privacy isn't guaranteed by anyone. No one ever said, that you are entitled to online privacy.

That's why there are so many companies actively selling your data. Now, what I want to do, is to find a way to get a little of that privacy back.

That is easier said than done, mostly due to million dollar corporations trying to steal it from you. Now, I'm trying to find a sane approach to fight back, without wasting my life on it.

Ethical vs. Practical approach.

Let's start with the ethical approach. It defines a certain "ethical bad" and then avoids/boycotts it.

A typical ethical approach is: I value my privacy, There are corporations trying to steal it, These corporations are bad, I will boycott them.

The problem with this is, that you soon burn out, due to the lack of usable projects that are acutally good. If you sell data, you get lots of money, which you can invest in maintaing the product yourself.

The privacy-aware initiatives, on the other hand, don't have that much time or money to maintain the product as good, meaning that they either create

a) fork from a big company, making them dependant.(I also belive they can't remove all of the spyware from the previous codebase)

b) create a shitty product, that is unusable and not maintained

There are of course some exeptions, but I highly doubt you can successfully remove google and mozilla entirely from your life anyways.

My approach, the Practical one, is a little bit more flexible, meaing you don't have to boycott everything, but also more complex. So, the typical Practical approach looks like this:

I value my privacy, there are corporations tying to steal it, which of them threaten my privacy more? Can I boycott them? Are there alternatives? Do I need their services/products at all?

With this you can create a curated list of all the products you are using, what they provide, how much do you need it from 1-10 and their potential alternatives.

That list will be the rough skeleton of your thread model. This will be important later.

As you can see, with such an approach you will be able to protect your privacy way better. You are suddenly not fighting with *everyone*, you have tons of options and feel way less pressure.

About this page

Here I will guide you through creating a curated list of services you use and companies you rely on, then we will build our threat model, afterwards we can fight for our privacy where it is most required and ignore it where we don't really care about.

I update the page weekly, so new pages will be created soon. If you want to contact me for any reason, here is my email: mentalmatrix@disroot.org (Don't worry we will talk about disroot later)