See also β Security tips.
Accounts creation / registration
- Don't share your personal details at first, be cautious. Especially as those details can be used to scam or trap you in phishing later. Also what if you input your personal details then mess up with the email address ? Someone else will have your data.
- Don't use your own email when registering any fidelity account. Use private emails, like https://duckduckgo.com/email/.
- Whenever you receive a new account confirmation by email, immediately look for footer links for unsubscribing from marketing, communications, ...
RSS and Email services.
Are you new to RSS feeds ? Read about them.
- Kill the Newsletter! a good email-to-RSS service which I use for every newsletter I subscribe to.
- Blogtrottr - a good Atom/RSS to email service. Powerful with temporary emails like DuckDuckGo provides. It was super useful for me when my RSS service was down but yet I wanted to track a RSS feed in realtime.
Social Media
- Everyone desires to not be left behind the curve. I understand the appeal for social media. I was opting in for every possible social media in the past. But they don't hold the bar. They sell your data, they constrain your freedom of speech, they abuse your time, and turn you as a slave of their algorithm. They also push more and more ads to your feeds, and create a disconnection between your and your friends and the real world. In the end, they also lock you in their platform, making it harder to leave. Even if you leave, they will keep your data. Everything you had posted belongs to the platform. You rights ? Gone. Your content once your account is banned or closed ? Gone. Yeah of course you can "export the data", but it will be hard to import it anywhere else.
- Think about all what the web used to be. Crafted and independent web pages, resembling piece of arts, resembling their unique and creative authors. Look at what social media profile look like ? All the same. All posting the same stories/shorts/pics, very polished and SEO-oriented, with comments made by bots. Think of all you could have done on your own web page if you hadn't dedicated all your time to create value for some commercial platform whose founders and investors do not hesitate to transform completely for the appeal of money, to the point they even stop investing in their employees and fire them instead.
- Now, go build your digital presence, online, or offline, but at least make it yours, own it, learning HTML and CSS is not that hard.
Tools
- PrivacyGuides - A list that covers most of the good privacy tools.