Five Quick Privacy Wins
Use this simple, trusted technique to improve your personal privacy
Welcome to another issue of Secrets of Privacy where we discuss personal privacy related topics and provide practical tips to enhance your personal privacy.
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If you’re just getting started on the journey of improving your personal privacy, where do you start? The invasiveness of technology in our lives makes the task feel overwhelming. Which is why few take action to switch to or at least try privacy friendly products and services.
Our Five Quick Privacy Wins will get you started on the right track. Limiting reliance on Big Tech products and services is our initial focus - Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. Those companies rely on you being lazy and resistant to change. Their products and services are “sticky” and hard to transition from. But if you found this newsletter, we know you’re better than that and up for the challenge.
Fortunately there’s a proven strategy to break the Big Tech bad habit loop, which many of you are probably aware of - the quick wins strategy.
Quick Wins Strategy
For background, this strategy was popularized by the bestselling book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The concept is fairly simple - look for easy, visible things to do and improve upon. Each win builds upon the other, giving you confidence to do more and bigger improvements.
This strategy has two important benefits for improving your personal privacy. First, each additional quick win compounds on a prior one, strengthening your overall privacy health. Then multiply your individual wins by thousands, even millions of like-minded privacy-conscious individuals. Big Tech will feel the pressure in that scenario. They’ll be pressured to adapt more privacy-friendly policies and practices, or lose market share and influence.
Our Five Quick Privacy Wins
Without further delay, here are five quick privacy wins you can do right now to regain control of your personal privacy. We even included a handy summary graphic at the end.
Change Your Web Search Service
Action: Change to a privacy friendly search engine like Brave, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Mojeek, MegaGer or Swisscows.
Privacy Benefit: These privacy-friendly search engines are not designed to harvest your data for commercial and who knows what other purposes. DuckDuckGo isn’t as privacy friendly focused as originally believed (source), but it’s still a better option than Google or Bing.
Burden on You: Low. It may take a little effort to get used to the look and feel of these alternative search engines. However, the end result is the same if not better. There certainly are less ads and you’ll discover how badly Google manipulates results to align with their corporate objectives (source). Using a privacy conscious search engine also makes it harder for Big Tech to track you and comoditize your consumer profile.
Change Your Browser
Action: Uninstall or at least don’t use Microsoft Edge, Chrome, and Safari. Switch instead to a privacy friendly web browser like Brave (desktop and mobile) Tor (desktop and mobile), Iridium (mobile only) or DuckDuckGo (mobile only). Firefox is another option, but they are openly pro-censorship, so tread carefully.
Privacy Benefit: Browsers, like mobile apps, are data harvesting tools. Ditching a Big 3 browser will greatly enhance your personal privacy. Brave is a chromium based browser so you get all the benefits and functionality of Google Chrome but without the privacy headaches.
Burden on You: Low. Most browsers have the same look and feel. After a few days, you probably won’t even notice the difference.
Minimize Apps on Your Phone
Action: Uninstall any unused apps. Uninstall any apps that can be easily accessed through a privacy friendly browser. Create shortcuts for those websites for easy access.
Privacy Benefit: Companies push you to install their app because it’s easier to harvest your data and build consumer profiles. By minimizing app usage and/or using a properly configured browser instead, you keep more of your data private.
Burden on You: Low to Medium. For many sites, particularly news sites, the browser experience isn’t all that different than the app experience. You’ll need to experiment to figure out what works best in an app or browser.
Change Messaging Services
Action: Switch to a privacy friendly messaging service like Signal Private Messenger. Stop or minimize usage of unsecure and non-privacy friendly services like Google (talk), Microsoft (skype), Apple (FaceTime), Facebook (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger), and Snapchat.
Privacy Benefit: Increase the confidentiality of your communications. While Signal’s security has been challenged, your messages are not stored in the cloud. Also, Big Tech can’t use your communications to train their AI programs or create consumer profiles.
Burden on You: Installing and using Signal is easy. Sustained usage can be more challenging if your personal network doesn’t use the service.
Create a Privacy Friendly Email Account
Action: Open up an account with a privacy friendly email provider. Popular ones are Proton, Tutanota, Skiff and Startmail. Full disclosure: we use Proton Mail.
Privacy Benefit: Email is inherently an unsecure and vulnerable form of communication. But switching from a Big Tech email service is one of the top actions you can take to improve your privacy for the same reasons as changing messaging services or ditching apps. Google claims they don’t scan emails for advertising purposes any longer, but do you really trust them?
Burden on You. You can create free accounts for most privacy friendly email providers in a matter of minutes. However, switching over full time requires greater effort. We’ll make this the subject of a stand-alone article in the future.
Closing Thoughts
Breaking a Big Tech habit loop demonstrates you have the power to free yourself of their grip. This sets you up for even bigger, more impactful privacy wins, such as regularly using a VPN or even switching to a de-Googled phone like e/OS.
We’ll expand on these quick wins and add others as Secrets of Privacy gets off the ground. In the meantime, remember that perfection is not needed. Take a methodical, targeted approach to transitioning to privacy friendly products and services. Figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. Use a personalized cost benefit analysis. Every privacy first driven decision creates a win and gets you further to improving your personal privacy.
This is a great post! I recently wrote about data rights and why they’re important, and this post is great for showing how people can protect their data in practice. Great advice!