Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Degoogling my phoone - Feeling like is too much trouble for the privacy (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

60 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey guys, it's pretty much the tittle. I've been using Lineage with microg for a year now and despite using the majority of FOSS apps in my routine I still feel like I have to struggle to preserve my privacy and keep Google away from my data. Do you guys feel the same sometimes?

Every time I have to use a banking app is a pain ..I kept changing banks to the ones who I could use with Magisk but every app update breaks my setup and I have to find a workaround or change to another app. I just quit using banking apps and passed them all to the wife.Now even home brokers have been blocking me asking to use a "official android version"

Today even a government app we must use to get access to services and information started complaining about my play store.

I self host a nextcloud service on my old desktop that serves as a server but every now and then the updates crash something. Sharing calendar and notes is too complicated if you don't have a vps or a domain. I keep getting complains from the wife about how come I just don't use google keep and Google drive anymore.

After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins

What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm using GrapheneOS, and suprising amount of apps (including my bank app) works without Google Services. And if there's something I need for work that doesn't work without them, I have another profile with sandboxed Google play (which isn't enabled on my main profile), and use the app there, where it's separated from all of my data. No need to root my phone, and so far it worked great.

As for sharing your Nextcloud stuff, what I did was for services that need to be public, I just got a cheap (like, few dollars per year) domain and use Cloudflare Tunnel (Cloudflared). It handles all port forwarding for you, and you don't have to make anything public on your router - just install cloudflared on the server and have it forward the port you want to your domain. You can also set up geoblocking and ACL pretty easily, so it's perfect for that.

I've however recently moved to using ZeroTier, because it has a nice mobile VPN app, so I just run zerotier (it's literally two commands to install and join a network) on my server, and if I need to access something there I just launch it on my phone and connect through ZeroTier. This, however, won't help if you want to share stuff from your server with others, since they'd have to install a ZeroTier client and also join your network. For Jellyfin, Nextcloud and Sunshine, though, it's amazing.

And if that still feels like too much hassle for you, I'd recommend looking into Proton Drive. I'd consider that one of the best hassle-free alternatives to GDrive, which launched recently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Gonna look the cloudflare thibg. Thanks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

If you're not completely giving up on privacy I would avoid cloudflare. I just run an always-on wireguard tunnel that routes back to my home network from my wife's and my phones, and that kills like 3 birds with one stone (phone traffic is encrypted and hidden from my carrier, home server is accessible, and ads are blocked via DNS).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Cloudflare is not at all sensible from a privacy standpoint. Cloudflare is a bigger privacy offender than Google and far more detrimental to our rights.

https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md

Reverse proxying your website through Cloudflare is actually an attack on privacy. You make yourself part of the problem by arbitrarily blocking several demographics of people from your website including Tor and VPN users (people doing their part to retain privacy).

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

One thing I forgot to mention - last time I recommended cloudflared, I was told that the TOS for cloudflared forbid use for high-volume streaming of data, such as movie/audio streaming, or sharing of large files for download.

I never had an issue with it, but I didn't use it for streaming, only to share/download a small to medium sized file once per few weeks. I suppose that if you were to publicly post a link to a few Gb large file, and had hundreds of people download it through the cloudflared, they may take an issue with it. Maybe even if you were regurally watching streamed movies from your server through it. So just a heads up, make sure to check the ToS first.