This post will be my personal experience about trying to gain back my privacy after years of being privacy unconscious. And foremost I want to apologize for my English, if it isn’t perfect, 'cause English is not my first language.
I was already using Linux for the past year. I tried switching to it three times, and only the third time was successful. Also interested in open source I was for quite a long time, but the privacy topic has never really interested me. I was following this stupid statement: «I don’t worry about privacy because I have nothing to hide», which I regret now. But last Christmas, I suddenly realized how much data I was giving away to Big Tech (and not only them). I can’t perfectly remember what did lead me to that realization. Was it some YouTube video, privacy policy that I suddenly decided to check out or something else, but I immediately started to action.
For the past 6 months I deleted more than 100 accounts. Sometimes it was as easy as to press the button, sometimes I had to email support, and sometimes I literally had to fight for my right to remove the account. Even today there are still 7 accounts left, that I can not delete either because support is ignoring me, or because the process is too slow, or because the service simply does not give the right to remove user account.
JustDeleteMe actually helped me very much with that process, and I’ve even contributed to the project a few times, so to the other users who’ll follow my way the process would be at least a little easier.
Today is a special day, though, because I finally get rid of my Google and Microsoft accounts. I can finally breathe free. My situation is still not perfect, 'cause I still have some proprietary, privacy invasive accounts left, like Steam, Discord, or my banking apps. I can’t just immediately drop them, but at least I’ve reduced the amount of information I left behind.
What’s the moral? Welp, it would be so much easier for today’s me if yesterday’s me had been concerned about privacy in the first place.
I think one of the most important things people should consider when discussing or deciding to improve your privacy is to first define your threat model. In other words, what is it you want to protect exactly? What are you worried about? Because there are some things that just can’t be done realistically, or things one person might take as a requirement that really doesn’t matter to the next person, sometimes for surprising reasons.
For example if you’re worried about three letter agencies doing something, well, sorry to say but you’re probably screwed if you’re reading this.
If you want to be able to browse online 100% anonymously, that’s also extremely difficult (and some say impossible, cough creepjs) even for the smartest people.
If you’re worried about companies and advertisers selling your data, I think there’s a lot more you can do to mitigate this than the above things. But some will still argue even going outside at all, having a job, or spending money on things can be a big threat to that too.
Basically decide on what things you actually care about, and start there vs just reading randomdude.com’s “subjective guide to privacy 101”.