• I used to have an Xperia SP. One day, I decided to swap out all of the AOSP apps that came preinstalled for Google’s own offerings.
• I also used to use Yandex as my main search engine. I thought it was better than DuckDuckGo…
• I also used to use Yandex.Browser, Yandex.Mail, and Yandex.Disk. I’m also not sure I deleted my account…
• Just three years ago, I was using Opera. I had no idea it had become a Chinese Chromium fork. I also used to use Maxthon, on occasion.
• I used to use Opera VPN.
• When I was about 7, I ended up with a bunch of malware on my laptop (turns out McAfee is shit). I recently discovered that my IP range briefly ended up on some blacklist around that time, so I assume I had become part of a botnet.
• Around this time, I used Hola VPN.
• Until fairly recently, I had multiple ad and tracker blockers installed at the same time. This is obviously overkill, and increases your fingerprintability.
• I also used to manually change my user agent to Chrome on Windows 10, despite the fact I was using Firefox on Linux. The mismatch also made me more fingerprintable.
• I used to have Do Not Track enabled, which can be used to fingerprint users.
• I used to use my browser fullscreen, meaning my screen resolution could be calculated and used for fingerprinting.
• I used to use Outlook.com as a client for my email, which was privately self-hosted by my dad.

Yeah, I used to be pretty insecure, huh. My privacy journey was quite fast, and began around 2020. My uncle had given me a ThinkPad and a DVD of Linux Mint. I was stuck at home for most of the year, I started watching a lot of sociopolitical comedy videos, and eventually one thing led to another and before you knew it I was wearing the metaphorical tinfoil hat.

Nowadays, I’m doing much better.

Glad I changed my stack over a few months ago:

• Proton Mail → Posteo
• Proton VPN → Mullvad VPN
• Proton Drive → Syncthing

I’d also recommend KeePassXC in place of Proton Pass, and Cake Wallet in place of Proton Wallet. However, these were both Proton services I never used anyway.

*laughs in LineageOS