Big tech and it’s ever-increasing rate of data collection is a popular talking point for both news organizations and governments in recent times. Lawsuits involving the likes of Facebook and Google are almost commonplace now the methods of user data mining become all the more intrusive. This post will outline some ways to improve your privacy and reduce what data is being collected through your day-to-day browsing.

Chrome Phone Home

I’m unsure of how many non-techy internet users are aware of the scope that Google Chrome’s telemetry covers, as a starting point just know this: every single search or page you visit in Chrome is logged by Google via IP logging and through your Google account if you have one.

‘So what?’ You may ask. Well this is fine and dandy if you enjoy services building a marketing profile around your browsing habits and knowing everything you do online. But for many, including myself, I have no desire for this. I do not care for targeted advertisements nor do I want a log of my online activities.

This is not to say I look up bomb-making tutorials and host a dark-web drug dealing marketplace in my spare time, but I want a level of anonymity in my personal life. If one day I am searching for a product that has caught my attention, it does not mean I will always want to find similar products and I certainly do not appreciate efforts to convince me otherwise.

Does this mean I use none of the above? NO.

It is extremely difficult to avoid big-tech services as the majority of users do not know the extent of the privacy violations they commit. It is unlikely that your parents care at all if Facebook is tracking them and it is even more unlikely that they will delete their accounts for an alternative (especially when current alternatives are prone to extremists)

I would like to say I use Signal for my online messaging needs but this is just not practical for me. A whopping 5 people (if that) in my social circles would be willing to use it, with the rest preferring to use Facebook and WhatsApp and have no personal reasons not to. I am, therefore, complicit in this data collection.

So what is the solution?

This post is simply to advise on some ways to cut down on the companies trying to follow you around the internet, think of it as a progression from eating meat to becoming pescatarian or vegetarian. I am not willing to become a vegan in this sense (and funnily enough in the actual sense) excluding myself from social circles in the name of principle. My life would be inconvenient and I am self-centered.

Instead I use ungoogled-chromium as my browser (essentially Chrome without all the data collection). As I am using an M1 Mac, the latest version of this was found here. It unfortunately does not offer account syncing as this was restricted by Google last year. I also use a VPN connection whenever possible - my provider is Mullvad, based in Sweden. This just sends all my traffic through a server far away from me, so all my ISP sees is a request to the VPN server, not to any of the sites I visit. As well as this I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, which is, in my opinion, just as good as Google without the evilness.

There you have it. I have managed to turn a few sentences into a full blog post about privacy with one or two useful points. Expect more performative writing like this.