I joined here following Henry’s recent live about “Ditching Discord for Signal - Privacy Wins Of The Week!”. I was looking for advice after he briefly mentioned privacy at work, and told me my questions in chat were better suited for a forum discussion. So here I am !
I’ll make a thread in “Get Advice” as it will probably be the better place to do so.
Meanwhile, to tell a little bit about myself and my journey on privacy, it all started last year, when I got banned from Discord. Back then I didn’t know there was some kind of bot reading everything you said (even in DMs), and that it was overzealous… anyway, having my private conversation read by a third party wasn’t to my liking, so I started taking privacy seriously and since then I have :
Ditched Discord entirely (I had other accounts) ;
Moved to Signal (and WhatsApp for some of my friends) ;
Deleted all my useless accounts (Facebook, games and services I didn’t use anymore), especially those tied to my Microsoft and Google accounts ;
Got into Proton (and I’m slowly migrating the services I still use to my Proton account using aliases) ;
The next for me would be :
Moving from Windows to Linux (I’ll probably move to LMDE6 during the year) ;
Delete my Microsoft and Google accounts (although I’m not sure how to do so since I have 2 games requiring a Microsoft account, and I’m not sure I want to ditch my YT account…).
And from there we’ll see
Thanks for reading me, and I hope you have a good day ! Cheers.
Welcome to the community! Always nice to see people that start their privacy journey.
Maybe keeping those accounts is not a bad option. You should think about it and evaluate pros and cons. It is not necessary to nuke everything related to big tech.
For example, I would strongly suggest keeping your email accounts. I would clean them up, configure the settings to increase privacy as much as possible and let them sit there for a year or two before deciding to delete them (or deciding not to delete them). You never know what important service might be connected to that email unless you had a really good record of every account you have ever created there.
You could check out the comments I wrote about an example where I listed a couple of scenarios of using Facebook and different ways to minimise the tracking:
Well regarding Facebook, it was easy to take the decision of deleting it : I wasn’t using Facebook at all, not even Messenger. I did have an Instagram account tied to my Facebook account, but I was using it less and less. I think ultimately this is what drove my decision : aside from WhatsApp, I wasn’t using any other Meta service.
I feel like part of increasing one’s security is properly discarding one’s account when they’re not using it anymore.
Regarding Microsoft and Google on the other end : you’re right. Actually, I was planning to wait a little to make sure I didn’t forget anything. I have tweaked all options for both to increase privacy, and archived all emails locally so I can delete them from their web service.
The only thing that bothers me is you can only download a .pst archive with Microsoft. I think I saw a script on github to convert .pst to .eml but I haven’t looked into it further for now.
Once all of this is done, perhaps I’ll just keep these two accounts around for the few services that need them, although nuking them would feel cleaner. Peace of mind I guess.
That’s a good habit to have. I did a similar thing with most of the accounts when I started the privacy journey. Well, with a few exceptions like Facebook and Gmail. I couldn’t switch away from them completely because of friends and family. I use them minimally and there’s not much data of value left on those platform, so I didn’t mind keeping them.
What if you log in to Thunderbird using Microsoft email, configure the settings to fetch every email (I think the default is only taking the last 6 months or something), then when the sync is complete, move those emails to another mailbox configured in Thunderbird?
I don’t use Thunderbird, but this is an option I have considered, but I wanted to see if I could do it in an easier manner first.
But if I don’t find any other way, I’ll probably do that yes. I also happen to have the unlimited Proton plan. Perhaps there is something to dig in that direction as well.
Hey @Praline welcome in!! Definitely don’t feel like you’re spamming, when you’re ready with your question just make a new post under Privacy and Security > Get Advice Great to have you!
If you are planning to game I’d recommend Bazzite. It build with rollback support so no reason to to worry about update regression. If not you can also use Aurorra for everyday productivity it is also made by the people from the Bazzite team.
