Privacy Overhaul – Computer (#100DaysToOffload Post_3)
This post is about my journey so far in terms of taking action to improve my privacy online.
After joining Fosstodon, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people who are deep into privacy stuff and I see a lot of actions being taken. This some how helped me to take actions, I made a lot of changes in the past month.
I use two hardware the most, like every one else, and those are my phone and my computer. In order to secure these two, I made a whole lot of changes.
The first post is just about my computer.
I know that windows is not really good for privacy, but I have to have windows OS because there a lot of software that are not available in GNU/Linux community and to also collaborate work with others in my work.
So the solution was simple, dual-boot, one OS for my work (Windows) and an other OS for everything (GNU/Linux). It was not so simple, actually dual-booting has its own disadvantages, sharing the same hard disk with two OS is not a good thing when it comes to privacy. So, I just added an extra hard disk and installed GNU/Linux on that. my GNU/Linux of choice was Pure OS as I was already using elementary OS and this was very similar to that and it is FSF approved OS.
As for the applications I use in Windows: Browsers: ✏️Tor (Unmodified) ✏️Firefox- added a few add-ons for Firefox (Nothing else than the bare essentials like pdf reader and libre office) (Note: I found a piece of software called OOSU10.exe from www.oo-software.com, this software is awesome, it shows all the privacy options you can enable to reduce the amount of information you send to Windows)
As for the applications I use in GNU/Linux:
Browsers: ✏️Tor (Unmodified) -Use this to general browsing (note: modifying anything including using the browser in full screen is not recommended as the can be used to uniquely identify the users)
✏️Firefox– added a few add-ons for Firefox like -Privacy badger -uBlock Origin -Bit warden -No-script -HTTPS everywhere -Decentralize -Clear Urls -Facebook container -Cookie AutoDelete (My logic since I use this to sign in to different accounts I don't care about finger printing and that's why I don't care about using too many add-ons)
Other Applications: -Bleachbit -VLC -Signal -Transmission -QuiteRss
Websites: This is a whole another story, getting away from google is a lot more difficult than I thought, especially the Gmail.
The alternatives I use:
✏️Search engine – Searx – DuckDuckGo ✏️Google Dive- Next cloud (free account- 2GB) (I only save documents of mine in the cloud, so the 2GB is enough for me) ✏️Gmail- Protonmail – Tutanota (Still figuring out how to move away from Gmail) ✏️Youtube – Invido.us – Peertube ✏️Messenger – Signal
Things I wish to figure out: – Buy Librebooted Hardware – set up 2FA (Authy) – VPN – Qubes OS
*My Thoughts: * This process is not as hard as I thought it would be. Even though I missed social media and can't keep up with conversations with my friends about the new trend and sorts, I feel this is much better than letting the major corporations steal from me.
I hope to explore more things that I can implememt.