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Extreme Privacy, or stay like everyone else?

2026.07.29

Disclaimer: I am an amauter and a beginner when it comes to cybersecurity and privacy. Most of what I know was acquired through reading books, watching YouTube videos, and talking to people way smarter than I am. If you have any suggestions, please email me.

This post was originally written for Sylvan's Discord server forum page. Please consider joining it: invite. The original text has been slightly changed grammatically and structurally.

No AI was used to write this post.

I have been thinking about privacy for quite some time, not only the basics, such as not using usb ports in public places, without a data blocker, or having ad blockers in your browser, (because these things are already expected of you) but in a more extreme sense. I have held everything in for a while now. Scrolling r/degoogle, or watching YouTube videos has taught me a lot. But nothing has been as convincing as this video. We should have digital freedom, which should serve as the foundation for freedom in general.

Generally speaking, it made me rethink my life choices. What I use, where I stay, with whom I talk, etc. There is so much more to consider than just privacy. In this context privacy is just the top of iceberg, or better to say the holding stone of the freedom of speech. Without privacy, it would be quite impossible to say something in the modern world. We have come a long way :/

One should have a way to express oneself, even if it is wrong or incorrect to someone else. Every opinion SHOULD have a place to exist. Only in such a manner can we, as a society, continue to develop. No politician should dictate people's life, and no person should be arrested, or blacklisted for saying something that those in power do not understand or do not like.

It seems as though governments have collectively decided to implement controls everywhere in a short amount of time. (Maybe they are just afraid of the first generation that is ready to change the world?) There have been all these recent bans on Social Media for underage kids/teenagers, chat control initiatives, and reading everything you say on messengers. With which I've started to become more paranoid about the current state of the world and my own security. Tech giants want you to listen to every word they say no matter what it is. And even if you don't listen, they still want to know it.

It's all just one part of a bigger problem.

The modern world is already full of spyware that you cannot delete, even if you wanted to. In my opinion, it's almost impossible to stay private in this day and age: cameras everywhere, your boss is selling the data you have been protecting so carefully and the friends you trusted so much have posted a picture with you in it on Instagram... What can you do?

The very least a person could do is to have a mobile phone with a secure OS preinstalled like GrapheneOS, change the search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo, self-host everything, encrypt important data, and not use Windows. However, if someone is looking to make a change, they should reconsider their internet usage: what they use it for and how long. GrapheneOS won't save anybody if they constantly continue to leak information to Google's spyware ecosystem, or Meta's, or whover owns the product a person relied on in the previous internet life.

A while ago Proton made this pretty interesting video about protecting personal data, which I would say is mostly correct. If you want to do more than just stay private and actually disapper, then you should almost never travel between countries, not share any pictures of yourself, and preferably live by yourself.

However, here comes my other point: everyone has their own lives, with own priorities, and therefore it is for everyone to decide how much trace they want to leave behind, or, to put it better, how much they want to stay hidden from the Internet machine.

If you're a student then you probably got a lot of Olympiads, projects, or just activities going on in your life that you want to document so that, in the future a potential admissions officer or employer can read about you without any difficulty, am I right? Or maybe you want to chat with your family securely without fearing that personal messages read by others.

Privacy starts online, but it doesn't stop there. If you want to go all the way, then be prepared for constant paranoia about being followed, people questioniong your methods, using burner hardware, living in a house not registered in your name, and almost to total isolation. Be prepared. Decide for yourself.

Stay safe. And do not trust anyone on the Internet.

Extreme Privacy, or stay like everyone else?

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