🎭 Online Privacy Guide

Nowadays, it's difficult to maintain your privacy by blending in with the crowd, because everyone else is letting their information get sold to the corpos and the governments - and, for some reason, fighting back against this is stigmatised. However, that doesn't make it impossible!

NOTE: This guide is not foolproof, and in no way does it encompass every aspect of OpSec. I've boiled it down to a few specific steps, but this is simply a layman's starting point of sorts. Your own research is necessary if you're doing anything that requires lots of privacy and security, do not expect these simple steps to protect you from the glowies if you're trying to run a darknet market.

Step 0: Switch to GrapheneOS
For brevity's sake, I won't get into the details of this here, but default Android and iOS are bad news when it comes to privacy. Android by default relies on various Google services, and Apple, the company behind iOS, was a member of the US government's PRISM initiative in 2013 when it was leaked by Snowden.

See some full install guides here and here.

Step 1: Get Rid your Existing Online Fingerprint
The first thing to do is to stop letting those who hate privacy continue to violate it - migrate away from the networks controlled by the privacy-hating corpos. This mostly means:
1. Delete existing social media accounts. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and (god help me) "X" all profit by selling your personal information. They have no reason to help you stay private online, so it's in your best interest get rid of these.
2. Delete accounts on proprietary services. This includes services like:

Networked storage, such as: Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Adobe Creative Cloud - etc. All the clouds, especially free ones where you're expected to store information without encryption.
Proprietary IM platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, etc.
Services controlled by Google in specific: think Google search, GMail, Google Docs, YouTube, etc.


After you stop using these services, your existing online fingerprint should be reduced by a decent amount. If any services need to be replaced, consider the next section.

Step 2: Switching to Privacy-Centered Services
It's hard to get by on the internet without access to stuff like email, a search engine, or a way to connect with people instantaneously. For such services, you should consider the alternatives listed below:

Email: Popular options for more private email include ProtonMail, Cockmail, and Tuta Mail (previously Tutanota). Regardless of your choice, remember to use PGP encryption when transmitting private or incriminating information.
Cloud Storage: Proton Drive or NextCloud (self-hosted).
Instant Messaging (ranked in terms of UX): Signal, Matrix, Session, XMPP/Jabber, paired with OMEMO, Ricochet-Refresh, and Tox. I've also heard good things about SimpleX and Briar, each of which have websites up at https://simplex.chat/ and https://briarproject.org/, respectively.
Reddit: The biggest open solution for a Reddit-like forum is Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org
Twitter-like Social Media: Keep in mind that blog-style social media is almost always simply an excuse to self-surveil. With that in mind, the Fediverse is an open source and federated social media platform. The biggest fedi project is Mastodon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)
Viewing YouTube: The invidious project is best for this: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious


For a complete list of alternatives, take a look at this git repository: https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy.git
For a list of FOSS, read-only frontends to proprietary backends, take a look at: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

Step 3: Anonymise your Network Traffic
For this, you should use a VPN or Tor. Consider:

Tor's official website is up at https://www.torproject.org/
Arguably, the best VPN is Mullvad - they've stood the test of getting raided by the feds and giving up zero information. However, it is paid, so if you need a free option: consider ProtonVPN. Otherwise, free VPNs are usually too good to be true (and some people here would argue that Proton is a honeypot, but I tend to disagree).


You should also use an anonymised browser. The best options for this are:

Mullvad Browser: a FOSS Firefox fork developed by both the Tor Browser and Mullvad teams -> https://mullvad.net/en/browser
Librewolf: An independent fork of Firefox, basically a Firefox instance that comes prepackaged with Arkenfox user.js-level defaults -> https://librewolf.net


Advertisements are also a large contributor in internet fingerprinting, so it's best to avoid them. I make it a point to use uBlock Origin on all my browsers, and you should as well. It works best on Firefox-based browsers, and is included in the default Librewolf installation.

Step 4: Anonymise your Writing Style
Recently, I've come to realise that stylometry (writing style analysis) does pose at least somewhat of a risk to anonymity. My preliminary findings can be seen in my comment here: /post/689f6264db72bbb46da8/#c-c0f4bcfa677098773f.

To anonymise the way you write and shield it from compromising you, there are a couple of things you can try (ranked by ease):

Rewrite your text manually, in the style of someone completely unlike you. An easy way to do this is to make it your bit, but only on accounts not tied directly to your identity: for example, if you're extremely old, use stereotypical Gen Z American linguistic styles. You could also write in a way that leads to comedic effect as well as anonymity: for example, if someone spoke like Shakespeare, it would work pretty well to anonymise them.
Pass your text through multiple layers of a translator. This can be online or offline, but it's best to use a self-hosted FOSS solution like LibreTranslate.
Get a local language model (LLM) to rewrite your input. You should only use a local solution for this - local LLM apps with good UX include: gpt4all or Jan


If using an automated solution, please ensure the meaning behind its output matches the meaning behind your input. Otherwise, it could cause it to mean something completely different... that would be bad :P

Step 5: Switch to Linux
Windows is horrible for privacy, for a number of reasons, but mostly boiling down to the fact that it's a proprietary product authored by a large corporation.

"But I need to play games!": Since the debut of Valve's Steam Deck, based on Arch Linux, support for Linux has been through the roof. You can check https://www.protondb.com/ to be sure that your favorite game runs, but I can almost guarantee that the majority of your library is supported through Valve's Proton. Now, this topic of discussion may seem a little counterintuitive, given my disdain for proprietary applications developed by large corpos - but I believe it's very important to support developers, at the very least indie ones. If you don't want to, the best alternative is to use Lutris as your gaming client and to pirate all your games instead.

For office applications, LibreOffice is arguably the best solution.

If you're wondering whether or not you should really take the plunge and switch to Linux, my recommendation is that you do :)

For your first Linux-based OS, I recommend EndeavourOS. It's Arch-based, so your apps are updated frequently, but it's also very user friendly and has a GUI for 99% of the Linux things. It also has a pretty helpful userbase, and if its userbase isn't helpful, you can also post in Arch-specific forums, because it's based on Arch :)

The Takeaway
Above all else, you should:

Avoid proprietary services
Use FOSS solutions if needed
Change your writing style to avoid stylometric analysis
Anonymise your network traffic with a VPN or Tor
Use Linux


Remember, the big corpos are not your friends, and neither is the government. Stay safe :)