🧑‍💻 Why I care about privacy

I use Google Wallet.

That annoys me somewhat, because I’d quite like to stop using Google products. Not because Google is necessarily evil, but because I don’t agree with what they do with my data, whether I knowingly hand it over or not. And so far, I’ve managed pretty well to avoid most of Google’s ecosystem.

That’s why I use Proton for my email and my passwords. I self-host my photos, my documents, on Nextcloud. I replaced Google apps on my phone with more open, more privacy-respecting ones. Honestly? It was kind of fun.

So why is it that, when I go into a shop, and put my phone to the card machine, it’s a little Google logo that turns up and takes my payment?

This got me thinking a lot about what “privacy” actually means to most people, particularly today, when so much of the data companies collect is increasingly being fed into AI systems. I’m not especially interested in perfect privacy, I’m not going to ditch every proprietary app, go live in the woods, and communicate with the world through encrypted pigeons. That’s just ridiculous.

What I am interested in though, is understanding just what’s at stake when I click a cookie banner, or open an app. What am I giving to companies, in exchange for the services they provide me?

There’s a popular saying: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

It doesn’t seem especially relevant to the internet. Some software costs money, some doesn’t, some even allows you to download their code, change and re-upload it for others to enjoy. But “free” doesn’t necessarily mean nothing’s being exchanged. Sometimes you simply aren’t being told what the price actually is. The price could be money, other times it’s data, or control, or being locked in to an ecosystem without even realising it.

Sometimes I’m happy to pay that price.

This isn’t going to be a guide to perfect privacy. Not least because that might actually be impossible, but also because it’s not what I’m interested in. I won’t tell anyone that they shouldn’t use Google, Apple, Microsoft, Proton, Meta, or anyone else. I use plenty of services that a committed privacy enthusiast would probably object to.

The interesting question for me, and the thing that decides what I use day-to-day, is whether I understand the trade I’m making, and whether I’m happy with it.

So this is what I’m going to explore. I’ll look at the software I use, the data it collects, the infrastructure behind it. I’ll talk about the companies that operate it, and the alternatives I’ve tried.

Sometimes I’ll decide that the privacy-friendly option is worth the convenience. Sometimes I’ll decide that it isn’t. Occasionally, I’ll probably discover that I was completely wrong about what I thought.

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The first problem is that before deciding whether a deal is worth making, you need to know what the deal actually is.

So maybe the best place to start is with a deceptively simple question:

What does “private” actually mean?