Your Weekly Privacy & Security Wins 🏆 (Week 46 - Mar 13 2025)

Privacy and Security Weekly Privacy Wins
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A dedicated place to share all of our wins! :trophy: Welcome to our 46th week of privacy & security wins :slight_smile:

Now, this only works if you all want it to work. That means:

  • Don’t be shy! Even the smallest win is something you can share. The more of you who contribute the better it is for everyone :slight_smile:
  • Be positive. Remember we’re all in different places of our journey. Someone enabling 2FA on their first account can be just as excited as someone who figured out how to install Qubes on their new system. Give each other some love!

Join The Weekly Stream
Each 2025-03-07T22:00:00Z @Henry will be streaming on YouTube to share your wins on the Techlore channels. Don’t miss the stream, it’s a great way to live-engage with others and see your comments be featured :fire:

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  1. I have officially started to hop on the RSS train to avoid algorithms. YouTube and Reddit are the only billionaire controlled social media I still find myself trapped in and luckily as right now they both support RSS

I wanted something web-based and opensource so I went with NewsBlur.
If a website you go to frequently doesn’t support RSS I’d recommend using openrss.org to convert them.

  1. After much pestering on my part my best friend has finally deleted twitter which means she is no longer on big tech social platforms
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Thanks for the tips. I didn’t know about these options.

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(This post is a horrible description of the typical Linux phone experience. I just happened to get a barely-compatible device)

My phone runs Linux now. You might’ve seen in my Longe posts that I had touchscreen issues in PostmarketOS, well… I gave up and installed 5-year-old version of Ubuntu Touch on it.

The initial experience was horrible. There’re basically no apps in OpenStore, and it does not have a built-in way to install apps from other sources.

But it’s Linux! It doesn’t have free will, it can’t stop me. So I made the root partition writable, installed

nix (a programming language, and also a package manager that can run on any OS, including Linux, MacOS and Windows, through WSL)

and home-mamager (a configuration tool that uses nix), and am currently in the process of setting up [SXMO | sxmo.org] on this cursed abomination.

Linux has an amazing property: I do everything myself! Linux also has a gigantic downside: I do everything myself.

It doesn’t currently phone. Or… work. But I’m working on it

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I would like to research this more. I consume a lot of YT

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Got some friends on Signal by using getting away from social media as the reason. My friend group and I all respect anyone who wants to use social media less.

Requested on r/fossdroid and r/filen a gallery using filen’s api, which I am willing to help with if any non code stuff is needed. Hopefully, I can help some people make it, even if it is just inspiration. Anyone here checking out my post to let me know if its possible would be very helpful. https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1jd69z1/gallery_using_filenio_api/
https://www.reddit.com/r/filen_io/comments/1jeg1tn/gallery_using_filenio_api/

I believe that could help filen gain some usability for people like myself wanting a non subscription, cloud based, and e2ee photo storage.

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I finally made the jump and initiated the deletion of my Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts. I downloaded my account data and uploaded it to Proton Drive for safekeeping. At some point, I’ll probably go through and add the photos from those accounts to Ente. While I still have LinkedIn, my personal social media is just Mastodon and Pixelfed now.

I factory reset my MacBook Pro to do a clean install of only the apps that I use. I have used Homebrew before, but didn’t realize how well it supports GUI applications. Besides FreeFileSync, I was able to download everything via Homebrew. While I am planning to move to Linux at some point, installing all of my applications via Homebrew makes it really easy to reinstall applications if I decide to stick with a MacBook or want/need to do a factory reset in the future.

I am going to try switching from JetBrains IDEs to VSCodium, which is a free and open source version of Visual Studio Code. Besides being FOSS, VSCodium does it’s best to opt out of Microsoft’s telemetry that comes pre-enabled and baked into VSC. IntelliJ keybindings and extensions for main programming languages are all available in the Open VSX Registry, which has made the switch pretty easy. I’m hoping to have luck with Twinny and Ollama for getting local AI code completion.

Finally, I got my Dad to switch over to Signal since he doesn’t have an iPhone.

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  • Started moving from 1Password to Bitwarden. Have tried Bitwarden in the past as it is open source. Bitwarden’s new UI finally got me to switch.
  • I used to keep, recovery keys/codes locally on my PC. Finally moved them into KeePass. KeePass works as I do not need to sync them often and the recovery codes separated from my main password manager.
  • WhatsApp is a very critical in my country as it is used for a lot of official communication here including things like metro tickets (you can still get offline tickets but online booking requires whatsapp). Hence I was looking at ways to make WhatsApp more private & secure.
    • Removed Photo permission for Whatsapp. Now anytime I want to share photos I am selecting them in Gallery and sharing them to WhatsApp.
    • Disabled Link previews within WhatsApp settings.
    • Turned off background app refresh for Whatsapp.
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I now have no Google or Microsoft accounts. Only connected to Google through the extensions for Brave, and to Microsoft through DuckDuckGo.

Wish I could happily put a No Google blocklist on my Little Snitch, but alas, still need some of those connections to go through for reCaptchas and stuff. But hopefully soon :crossed_fingers:

Made a shortcut on iOS to switch quickly between ProtonVPN (Netshield) and AdGuard DNS, so that untoward connections are blocked most of the time.

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I haven’t used social networks for a long time, except for LinkedIn. I only read professional blogs on LinkedIn and follow groups of interesting people on Telegram. I try to consume important and necessary content and subscribe to those who share my values and can benefit me, where I can also be an active participant in the community and discuss things with people. Yesterday, I started thinking about how much AI I use, albeit thoughtfully and with critical thinking. I want to study the impact of AI on the brain and human development more deeply, and whether it’s possible to use AI without making myself less intelligent. Although I’m clearly better than I’ve ever been, I don’t know how well I’m developing my skills thanks to AI - I need to read research on this.

In my environment, everyone uses AI actively, even more than I do. Plus, I work in IT, where it’s impossible to manage without AI, and I have life tasks where I let AI automate things. I go to AI for questions most often as my first resource - it has become my main source of information, whereas before it was search engines, YouTube, and people. I still ask people questions too, but I ask AI much more frequently.

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I’m not sure how this is a privacy or security win.

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I’m really starting to work on moving my main laptop to Linux Mint. Gathering all of the items I need to know before hand sucks. I’d like to have a dual boot of Win11 (stripped of telemetry,) for the few things that might need it, so that further complicates things.

While I’ve stalled out on it, I’ve been working on my own website to use instead of linktree or whatever. It’s all just HTML and CSS. No JS or anything else. It’s also a free host in the UK. While better than the US atm, the OSA makes me leery of keeping it there.
Especially with a section titled “villainy” with links to LGBT resources and legally gray ways to obtain books etc. It’s for USains, not UKers but yeah.

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Well, what do you have in mind?

If you’re on a desktop I recommend having a dedicated profile in your browser for YouTube specifically, and then install extensions that will not expose you to the algorithms, According to your needs. Such as untrap, sponsorblock and depending on your stance on thumbnails, dearrow.

You have to decide what degree you want to do that
I end up using YouTube as the dedicated search engine for that profile. That way, I’m not even coerced through search suggestions.

Then think about your values and see which channels align with that and which you can honestly live without because I think it’s very easy to turn something on to have background noise while you’re playing a video game or cleaning or whatever the case.

Then once you’ve decided what amount of channels you want to be subscribed to, the best thing I would suggest is keep that in your RSS feed and then get in the habit of checking your RSS feed first Or if you are looking for something specific in mind, that’s when you would open that profile and make that search.

If you’re on Android, I would just recommend using NewPipe or Tubular or LibreTube And making the homepage just completely blank. And once again, relying on the RSS feed to open your subscribef stuff within either of those apps.

If you’re on iOS, it’s a bit more complicated depending on your goals, but Brave is really the way to go if you don’t mind giving up all of its other features to make it a dedicated YouTube browser, It’s solid because it plays in the background, you can listen to it offline. And within Brave’s block lists, there is options to remove the recommended stuff.

You would have to copy and paste the links each time with this approach which is a bit annoying, but if you’re trying to stop a bad habit that annoyances may be what you want

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Why do you recommend using RSS instead of FreeTube on Linux, for example? On android NewPipe and make subscriptions there instead of RSS. It is very interesting why people often use RSS technology

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I mean, that’s a good solution too, but it’s more so to just keep subscriptions synchronized across devices without compromising on privacy. That way, for instance, you don’t have to subscribe both on FreeTube and Newipe manually.

Also, I just kind of like to open the RSS feed first because it’s supposed to be like my personal digital newspaper of what I would prefer to see rather than whatever the website or app wants me to see.
Because it’s my time I should decide what I want to do with it. Also, I’m trying to break the habit of compulsively searching something when I’m bored, and this approach has been working for me so far

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Thank you so much. Which RSS Do you use?

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  • Convinced my mom to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google as her search engine.

She is kind of computer illiterate and not into privacy, and during lunch, by a coincidence where the phone had to do an automatic update of the Google search app, I quickly helped her use Safari with DuckDuckGo as the search engine, so she could search about mustard sauce witbout having to wait (lol). I told her after her search that she was actually using DuckDuckGo, not Google, and she was pleasantly surprised. But then in a vaguely worded way she asked me if it has any compatibility issue with something else. When I told her that it does exactly the same thing as Google, nothing will break, she agreed to me wanting to remove the Google search alltogheter for her. Kind of shocking was that she said she never knew there was something else to use for searching stuff. Later on I told her what the benefits are of DuckDuckGo, like how everyone sees the same result when the prompt is the same, but not sure how much of that landed. While I was at it, I removed both Google Chrome (she didn’t store any bookmarks in there) and the Google (search) app, leaving her with Safari and DuckDuckGo browser.

  • Got Ente Auth after getting positive info on it through the Techlore content. Glad to have left Aegis behind, not because it’s bad, but I think Ente Auth is a bit more resilient all things considered. No need for manual backups of the codes anymore (which I sometimes forget).

  • After some trial and error and a getting used to the controls for a little while, I’m now able to use OpenSnitch on Linux (Zorin OS) as a “prompt based” firewall for my applications, denying all connections of a new application unless I click allow on the prompt.

  • Learning to use more FOSS software for my digital media artist college education, which is more of an indirect privacywin because it allows me to reside in Linux more and usually there is less telemetry in FOSS. These are the programs I slooowly ( :sweat_smile: ) started transitioning into:
    – Substance Designer → Material Maker
    – Ableton Live → Ardour
    And I’ve been mapping out future transitions/learning about what these alternatives are:
    – Maya → Blender
    – Substance Painter → ArmorPaint

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I personally use Newsblur

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Week 47 is live!

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