Ask HN: Deactivating Facebook and moving out of Google services enough? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Deactivating Facebook and moving out of Google services enough?

8 pointslinux_devil13 comments

After NSA fiasco , and further reading about privacy issues I decided to deactivate my Facebook account and trying to migrate from Google services , such as changing my default search engine to "Duck duck Go" , migrating away from Gmail etc. What else can be done?

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I did the same about a month ago, just to see what it'd be like, an experiment of sorts, NY resolution style ... Deleted all my social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Google), Started using Firefox completely locked down with various plugins. If you're really paranoid you may want to look into getting a Raspberry Pi & setting it up as tor WiFi access point (Duckduckgo "Onion Pi"). After one month in here's my experience:

* No FB, Google+ & Twitter is easy, they were a waste of time anyway. Glad I did that.

* No Google: harder ... the search results from Google are still better than DDG.

* Always running your browser in "Private" mode: harder still ...I reverted to using one browser (Safari) for sites that require logins / cookies and Firefox for pure consumption.

* Onion Pi Tor WiFi: depends mostly on the network speed. On my home network I find the slowdown intolerable & often switch to the non-tor network. On a fast connection it is good enough that it doesn't bother me 80% of the time.

* VPN: I also have a HideMyAss VPN account which I use to bypass country firewalls. Here too the connection too often flakes out to use as an always-on solution.

* (Edit): I replaced Dropbox with Bittorrent Sync running on said Raspberry Pi. (I actually have two in different physical locations).

Verdict: While I'm glad I quit the social media nonsense & took some steps to protect my privacy, going into "Tinfoil Hat" mode all-day, every day just seems too hard.

I also recently unplugged from the social media / Google ecosystem http://mil3s.com/post/why_i_left_the_google_ecosystem.htm

What I found was that aside from the unplugging and deactivating, I have to change my mindset or how I look at the internet and where it is going. If I continue looking at and wanting to use the internet as I have in the past, I will find myself painted into a corner.

With all the new security and privacy revelations recently, I believe that simplifying and taking stock of what we really want out of the internet, is imperative.

The Internet will surely be changing and if we don't keep that in mind we may find ourself at more of a disadvantage than we ever thought.

If you're okay with trying to work around it, I'd remove your cell phone from service. Keep it around as a wifi device if you will, but if you seriously want to keep your privacy, it seems essential to pull a Stallman here. After a couple months, you really won't miss it.

No matter what you encrypt, transmitting your location off to be archived by the NSA is a reality of cellular service.

A question to all of your responses:

Are you guys basically living in some type of fear of your own government (if you are, as I assume, American and living in the USA)?

That would kind of seriously contradict the freedom that your leaders preach to the world.

Install Adblock Edge, NoScript, Disconnect, CipherFox (and disable RC4), BetterPrivacy, RequestPolicy etc.

Remove Chrome if you haven't already. If you really want a Chromium-based browser for something (e.g. testing), use Opera or SRWare Iron.

Learn GPG.

The same documents implicate Microsoft and Apple and some others too. So depending on your relative trust of them compared to Facebook and Google, you might like to avoid Windows, OS X, iOS, Windows Phone, etc also.

* Create a GPG key and learn how to store and use it properly (it looks easy, but it took me some time, and several lost passwords to do it)

* Start using OTR as default in your XMMP conversations

> Create a GPG key and learn how to store and use it properly

Could you be more verbose about the "store and use properly" part?

Use a privacy plugin for your browser e.g. Disconnect ( https://disconnect.me/ ).

Thanks , looks like a great product , but at the moment I will go with open source and free steps

Hmmm... Adblock Edge ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/ ) with one of the privacy filter lists ( https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/ ) would do in that case.

Disconnect is open source, licensed under the GPL: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect/

nice

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