from Hacker News

Online privacy: how to protect it for normal people

by nunorbatista on 6/24/22, 9:10 PM with 9 comments

  • by zzyzxd on 6/24/22, 11:33 PM

    I think a lot of measures mentioned in the article are not good recommendations, not only many are way harder than "low" or "low-medium" difficulty, IMHO, some recommendations have serious security tradeoffs that may not help protecting "privacy" at all.

    > Be very careful of the browser extensions you use and install an Ad Blocker

    In order to make an Ad Blocker extension work, usually you need to give it permission to inspect and manipulate all websites you visit. How could a normal people be careful about that?

    > If you like Chrome, there’s an “un-googled” version of Chromium you can use

    You need to either know how to build that thing from source (and vet the un-google patches), or learn to verify a pre-build binaries provided by some random dude on the internet.

    > If you buy your own personal storage (NAS), you can also have your own personal cloud instance. It’s not that hard.

    In order to have an ok-ish experience that does not suck, you need to expose it to the internet, setup certificates for TLS, do 3-2-1 backup, learn RAID ... oh, and before all these, good luck finding a consumer grade NAS system with good security.

  • by cratermoon on 6/24/22, 9:35 PM

    I've soured on the whole idea that protecting your privacy is solely an individual responsibility. Individual-level solutions can never fix what is a system problem with privacy-invading organizations and weak-to-nonexistent laws restraining them.

  • by kradeelav on 6/25/22, 1:32 AM

    "Set up your own personal cloud instance" is adamantly not what I'd expect a non-techie to ever have the bandwidth to do, let alone a novice techie who was getting comfortable with some of the other suggestions.

    I appreciate the intent of this article (even thought about writing something similar but more for a 'resisting censorship for artists' angle). But this strikes me as naive at best as to what your average Joe can be expected to manage without shepherding. I had to teach my dad how to turn on a computer for crying out loud.