For the past few months I have been thinking a lot about my online privacy. I think what started this thought process was Windows 10 and the tracking that Microsoft enables by default. I am well aware that Google, Amazon, and Facebook have been doing this sort of thing for years, but for whatever reason adding Microsoft in the mix bothered me. The more I thought about it the more not just Microsoft but also Google started to bother me.
I have, to the best of my ability disabled/turned off the tracking and advertising features in Windows 10. I have now started the journey of weening myself off of Google. I’m using Firefox and Vivaldi for my web browsers as apposed to Google Chrome. Instead of Google searches I’ve started using duckduckgo and startpage (I know startpage uses Google, but in theory the searches are tied to their servers, not my computer). Eventually I would like to stop using Gmail and Google drive. I have also been contemplating leaving Facebook.
In the mean time I’ve setup email encryption for Ashley and I. Mostly it is for fun, but more and more it annoys me that Google goes through my email to target adds at me. I followed the instructions from this website, and used mailvelope to get it all setup. In all fairness to Google, when I signed up I gave them permission to go through my emails.
The eventual part 2 of this post will hopefully be me building my own email server. I suspect that could be a ways off, given time, money, and knowledge constraints. I would also like to figure out a home brew public calendar. I don’t suspect I will ever get rid of my Google account, but I would like to rely on it less.
Feel free to insert tin foil hat jokes here.
In case you are wondering (and I don’t suspect you are) here is my public key:
Edit (6/7/2016)– I had to redo my keys because I forgot my password. I’ve updated the key below, but if for some strange reason you have a copy of the old one feel free to discard it.
—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: Mailvelope v1.4.0
Comment: https://www.mailvelope.com
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—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–