What online services do you use?

Over the years, I have used all of the major email services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, and Gmail. Without really giving it much thought, Gmail has held my primary email for many years. I used it probably for the same reasons everyone else does – it’s “free”, it works perfectly, and I can access it anywhere from virtually any device.

As the internet and technology have progressed, we’ve also gained access to “free” storage in the cloud with Google Drive, OneDrive, etc… Again, one of the main reasons being ultimate convenience, by having access to our data from anywhere at any time.

Another aspect of this total integration, is our phone contacts. Personally, I have phone numbers from about 20 years ago that have stayed with me and transferred from phone to phone. Once Google was on my phone, the contacts sync’d to my Google account and I never looked back.

What’s the real cost of these ‘free’ services?

We (our data) are actually the product.

Over the last few years, stories about security incidents with various companies, and privacy issues with the companies that hold our data have increased my concerns. The companies such as Microsoft, Google, and God knows who else, have access to every step I take, finances, and essentially my whole life. More than likely it’s just paranoia, and it is of no consequence to a lemming/peon/nobody such as myself. Nevertheless, I don’t want to hand my information over on a silver [hard drive] platter to these companies anymore.

So, aside from what information we explicitly provide these companies in the way of social media connections, social media posts, etc…, they also hold our most valuable and “private” information on their servers… We’re talking about contacts, emails, bills, purchases, conversations, relationships, family photos, and more… So regardless of their terms of service and privacy policies which I’ve never read, you really don’t know who is viewing your information on the back-end… and that’s not even to mention algorithms and AI processing all of that data for any number of reasons.

How can we change course?

The idea of of controlling all of my own data and photos has been rolling around in my dome for a while. A couple of years ago, I beefed up the storage on my old computer, which I’m now using as a headless server (no monitor, no mouse/keyboard). This was pretty fun to set up, and it holds my personal documents, photos, and media. However, the main drawback was that I couldn’t access it outside of my home, and that’s a pretty huge drawback. Given that limitation, for things that I still need to access remotely, I have continued relying on Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Keep.

However, recently I was introduced to an episode of the Tim Ferris podcast that you can find here: https://tim.blog/derek-sivers-reloaded-on-the-tim-ferriss-show-transcript/. The guest on that episode is Derek Sivers, who’s mission it is to promote tech independence. Needless to say, this renewed my interest and motivation to take another step toward reclaiming my privacy without losing out on convenience. Derek’s website details a complete process for setting up a server for your data and contacts. You can find his site here: https://sive.rs/

So what’s the next step?

Because there are so many ways to skin a cat, I know this will be somewhat of a process to cut the cord between the big tech companies and my private data, and I won’t be surprised if I adjust the strategy along the way. For my initial approach, I’m looking at services offered by Cloudflare and Proton.

Please stay in touch and sign up for notifications – I will be creating guides on how to setup the service in case you want to do the same, or maybe just to inspire some better ideas that you may have.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!