{"id":3680,"date":"2021-03-01T16:26:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T21:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/?p=3680"},"modified":"2024-08-07T16:07:06","modified_gmt":"2024-08-07T20:07:06","slug":"refocusing-on-privacy-and-data-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/?p=3680","title":{"rendered":"Refocusing on privacy, data control, and being in control"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;ve recently refocused my attention on privacy and my online life. Spurred on by issues such as the What&#8217;s App change of terms of service, I&#8217;ve since taken the following actions to improve privacy, increase my control over my data and how it is stored, and to improve my working life. I&#8217;m not planning to go to extremes with privacy, but rather a balanced approach while consciously deciding what to share online. I&#8217;ve discussed my workflow elsewhere, and parts of that have been inspired by the concepts of deep work and being &#8220;indistractable&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Upgraded computers to Windows 10 from Windows 7 (I know, I had a hard time letting go)<\/li><li>Switched from Chrome to Firefox on all computers<\/li><li>Turned off notifications for almost every app<\/li><li>Turned off auto-sync on email (must manually check it)<\/li><li>Enabled do not disturb mode every night until morning, only close family members can get through<\/li><li>Audited my email for 2 weeks and unsubscribed from anything that wasn&#8217;t useful or a priority<\/li><li>Installed a hardware firewall and disabled all port forwarding and UPnP<\/li><li>Installed KeePass to generate and store stronger passwords<\/li><li>Set up a Yubikey for 2FA on any site that supports it<\/li><li>Set up 2FA wherever it was an option<\/li><li>Installed uBlock and DuckDuckGo privacy extensions on Firefox<\/li><li>Switched to DuckDuckGo as search provider<\/li><li>Switched to DuckDuckGo browser on mobile devices<\/li><li>Installed piHole for local DNS resolution and ad-blocking at home<\/li><li>Switched to OpenDNS for upstream DNS resolution<\/li><li>Deleted Facebook account (was only used to manage pages, but still&#8230;). My only social media accounts now are related to professional activities (LinkedIn etc.)<\/li><li>Uninstalled most apps from my phone and tablets and switched to using web versions where needed (rarely, signed in to almost nothing on these devices now)<\/li><li>Uninstalled What&#8217;s App, switched to Signal<\/li><li>Update 9\/3: Uninstalled Mendeley, switched to Zotero<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m still victim to Gmail (personal and institutional accounts) &#8211; I switched to my own private email server a few years back (but, his emails!) and kept missing calendar invites etc., so switched back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My home automation system is locally controlled via Hubitat, and the only cloud device is the Roomba &#8211; I have plans to switch over to local control of that too with dorita and rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is there anything else I can improve?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently refocused my attention on privacy and my online life. Spurred on by issues such as the What&#8217;s App change of terms of service, I&#8217;ve since taken the following actions to improve privacy, increase my control over my data and how it is stored, and to improve my working life. I&#8217;m not planning to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"saved_in_kubio":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[76,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-technology"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"kubio-fullhd":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Alan","author_link":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"I&#8217;ve recently refocused my attention on privacy and my online life. Spurred on by issues such as the What&#8217;s App change of terms of service, I&#8217;ve since taken the following actions to improve privacy, increase my control over my data and how it is stored, and to improve my working life. I&#8217;m not planning to&hellip;","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3680"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3698,"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3680\/revisions\/3698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanbatt.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}