Why I am Changing

For a number of years now I have been uneasy about the companies I support through my internet usage and my interaction with computers generally. Over the last 20 years, or so, a number of shady online industries have blossomed. Between online surveillance, online profiling and a criminal online advertising underbelly things are getting pretty bad. The biggest problem is that most of this is nearly invisible to most internet users. Not only that, it leaves a person feeling helpless about what to do. This is not an accident. Your feeling of helplessness is an intentional outcome of the actions these companies take to ensure you feel you can't do anything about it. These are companies that have the biggest budgets for corruption, sorry, I mean lobbying, in Washington.

The main culprits are Google, YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook). These are the public companies we know about. There are plenty of companies acting in the background to collect and sell people's private information, we just don't know who they are.

Google is just throwing up more and more red flags in their behaviour. It really started when they abandoned their motto of "Do no evil". It was a very quiet step they took, but at least an honest acknowledgement that their business model is no longer compatible with a claim of social good. It is just disappointing how far down they have been willing to go to chase their profits.

Here is just one of many articles which are enormous red flags regarding Google's anti-social behaviour.

There are many more examples like this. They are not hard to find.

If you haven't seen red flags when it comes to Facebook then you've been living under a rock. You also haven't been reading Bob Hoffman. It's really worth following him as you get a double whammy information overdose. A regular dose of Facebook ranting with lots of facts and evidence; along with long running exposure of the toxic online advertising industry. You can see him here:

And here:

I follow him on LinkedIn. I generally don't follow anyone as I am not a sheep but I do follow Bob Hoffman.

The big tipping point for me was this article from Forbes. Just in case you don't know what "epistemic" means, it means "Of, relating to, or involving knowledge; cognitive." I had to look it up. :-) It is long and written by an academic which makes it a little dense but it is ABSOLUTELY worth reading.

If you managed to get through this rather long, but outstanding, piece of writing you will hopefully be a little more motivated to do something about changing the tools you use to access the internet in order to stop being cannon fodder for the online tracking companies.

So what can we do?

If you want to change you need to find alternatives. Good alternatives, not weak, lame, faux replacements.

Email

There are way too many people, including myself, which are completely dependent on Gmail. I was so early on Gmail that I submitted my name before it was released and got an invite to start my Gmail account before it was available to the general public. I was quite chuffed with myself at the time. I am not so enamored with Gmail anymore.

I don't know what to do in every case for every person but I can tell you what I am doing now for myself.

First I have created a new email account with Protonmail:

One of the big advantages of Protonmail is that it's servers are based in Switzerland so it falls in the jurisdiction of the much stricter Swiss privacy laws and it ensures that foreign companies and governments don't have open access to your email data. On top of this their servers are in a mine shaft about a kilometer underground so they also take their safety pretty seriously. Protonmail make a big deal about how attractive this is to people who care about their privacy because, well, it is a big deal.

Gmail scans the private emails you receive and builds online profiles of you which it sells to target you with advertising. This is the main reason I am leaving Gmail. I know longer want to provide financial support to these rapacious companies. When they combine this with your search history (in Google Search), your web browsing history (in Google Chrome), YouTube (Google) watching habits and many sites online tracking you on Google's behalf then their information set on you becomes substantial. They have done all this without my permission although I am sure they have it all buried somewhere in their Term of Service which they know no one will read and from which no governments provide me with any protection.

I have two email accounts. One is my personal one which I will be replacing with Protonmail as above. The other is one I use mainly for newsletter subscriptions. So I created a second account with:

I used to have both of my email accounts with the same provider. I now think it is smarter to use 2 different providers.

Both of these email providers provide great free tiers with the ability to upgrade to really good feature sets for very reasonable prices. For my email which I use for all my newsletter subscriptions I will need basically no storage space as I delete emails once I read them.

Browsing

I have downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox. I will be moving all my internet browsing to Firefox.

This link shows how to set up Firefox with as much privacy as possible:

On my new Firefox installation I have set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. I will be avoiding Google Search as much as possible in future.

I have also downloaded and installed the TOR browser. Probably the most secure and private way to access the internet. For anything political or sensitive, you can use this browser. TOR is known for being quite slow, due to all the different layers it routes your internet traffic through, so it is not really good for video streaming or anything that involves heavy bandwidth usage.

Over time I will move all my email to the new email addresses. At this point I will close both my Gmail accounts and then uninstall the Chrome Browser. This could take six to 12 months, I am not sure. But every time I receive an email I want, in my old account, I will notify that person of my new account. Or if it is a subscription I will subscribe with my new account and unsubscribe with my old account. Eventually those email addresses should not receive anything. Then I can shut them down. This could take a while as my MS Office account uses one of these emails and my old bank accounts in South Africa. The bank accounts could actually be the most challenging.

As for my old emails I will probably transfer some essential emails over to the new address. I've always kept a lot of email "just in case I want to read it again". But I have found I never go back to old emails and re-read them. So I will get rid of nearly all my old emails.

I have also downloaded a Browser called Brave which is a very privacy conscious browser. I will experiment with that one too to see how good it is. I like Mozilla Firefox but it is mostly financially supported by Google so I don't trust it fully. They are making a real effort to be privacy conscious and a good citizen but I regard them as compromised. Opera isn't really an option anymore as it has been purchased by a Chinese consortium.

Most of the privacy conscious browsers do a lot of ad-blocking, try to keep you on encrypted connections and in general work to keep you safe online. For me it is becoming more and more important to use European-based services. Europe is becoming the vanguard for protecting people's privacy and for opposing companies which are completely unfettered elsewhere.

Messaging

I have installed Signal on my phone. Signal is a very secure instant messaging platform which will eventually replace WhatsApp for my instant messaging needs.

Signal encrypts all communications with an encryption which the company (Signal) cannot access. It is not perfect as you still have to provide an email address but I am not too fussed about that. There are other more hyper-secure instant messaging apps but Signal is good enough for my needs. It is well known and gets overwhelmingly positive reviews, including privacy advocates and thought leaders.

Social Media

I left Facebook about 3 years ago. I just could no longer support a platform that was so criminal. The main reason I was on Facebook was to communicate with my family. Having emigrated from South Africa to New Zealand I wanted to stay in touch and have my mom and siblings see photos of my kids and us as a family to let them know we were okay. We moved onto a WhatsApp group to stay in touch and that worked really well for us. Hopefully we can move the group from WhatsApp to Signal over the next year or so. The best thing I did to get off Facebook was when I got a new phone. I simply did not install FB on my new phone. It is one of the best choices I ever made.

As for Twitter, they stood back and did nothing while a psychopath built a base of hatred on their platform. He routinely violated their terms of service, reason enough to shut down the accounts of others, but not him. Then a week before he left they shut his account in what they think was some kind of brave political statement. It is one of the most cowardly things I have ever seen. They were only willing to take action when it made no difference whatsoever. I also have a Twitter account. I never log on to it. I should go shut it down some time as I have no interest in ever going on Twitter again.

The Forbes article linked to above goes to great lengths to discuss exactly how toxic the most prominent social media companies are.

Virtual Private Networks

My next step will be to use a VPN for my browsing. This makes it much harder for online information predators to track you. Of course if you sign in to a site like Amazon they will know who you are and what you're buying but for everything else it makes your connections more secure and your browsing anonymous.

One advantage of using Protonmail, mentioned earlier, is that it comes with a free VPN. Of course all free VPNs have drawbacks - mainly throttled bandwidth or limited data. The worse ones load you up on advertising. I know NordVPN is the big name in VPN at the moment so I will check that out too.

Online Buying

Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world now and it is not letting a small matter like "the law" hold it back. It works hard to track you around the web and it doesn't have much in the way of ethics either. One of the lawsuits it is currently facing is from it's own sellers online. People can register and create a store online and sell stuff. Amazon is accused of finding the most successful products they sell (their sales are through Amazon) and then releasing Amazon brands to compete with those sellers. How about stabbing your own community in the back? Amazon is of course strongly denying any wrongdoing. This is one of just many examples of Amazon, ahem, shall we say, "pushing boundaries"?

Luckily around the world there are local online options. Here in New Zealand we have:

Book sellers at Fishpond:

Online new and used items, as well as real estate and vehicles at TradeMe:

Gaming and electronics here at MightyApe:

If you don't just default to going to the world's biggest online retailer you will find a whole world of sites that want your businesses. The customer service is often hundreds of times better than some online chat bot from a Billion dollar business that couldn't care less about you.

Conclusion

I am taking action to stop using applications and services provided by companies that have no respect for my/our privacy. The main actions I am taking are:

1. Replace my gmail accounts with other email providers that respect my privacy.
2. Move to Firefox, Brave and TOR to make my browsing safer and more private.
3. Uninstall Google Chrome.
4. I don't use Facebook or Twitter. Or any social media for that matter.
5. Move to a VPN service to anonymize my internet surfing habits to stop shady companies from tracking me and turning a profit on my personal information.
6. Buy online using local sites and avoid Amazon as much where possible.

I hope people start taking this more seriously and take their own steps to become less visible (i.e. trackable) online. The more people that do this the stronger the message will be to these companies that don't respect our privacy. We cannot rely on governments to protect us. They have proven to be highly ineffective in reigning in even the worst behaviour of these companies. You would think they would at least go after the low hanging fruit of the worst criminality but so far they have proven to be about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.