This blog is the third and last part about my rants on privacy. If you haven’t already done so, I would recommend reading first and second part before this. There are two aspects as to how we can push for privacy: technical and political. There are several good resources available for the technical part. I will still go through it briefly but my main focus will be on the political aspect as I have not seen many articles that cover it.

It’s too technical!

First and foremost, before changing your digital service providers it is important to understand where they stand on privacy. Simply stating that they are concerned about user’s privacy, does not make them good players. A good way to analyze could be to look at their revenue model and what they are capable of doing with trillions of individual data points. Which products bring in the most amount of money? E.g. the main revenue of Google is from advertisements while that of Apple is from its products.

Changing to a different service provider is no doubt time consuming and sometimes might cause frustration. But I think of it as a habit, over time and with continuous use of patterns, we can form a habit to organize our digital lives so that we are not relying entirely on the whims of few giants. Depending on your purpose, there might not be an alternative available. E.g. there is no good alternative to YouTube. Platforms like YouTube are hard to replace. They thrive on the simple idea that the content is not only consumed but also produced by their users. The more content, the better the platform. On top of that, YouTube has a good incentive mechanism to push more of its users to create the content. An alternative platform can have a better user experience but the amount of content available is simply unmatched. Same applies to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. What do we do about such platforms? Regulate them. Many would perceive this a violation of the principles of capitalism. My argument follows in the subsequent section.

For creating a healthier digital life and consciously investing your time, a good strategy is diversification. It is indeed tempting to use services from one provider because they provide seamless experience across their range of products. But that is how you are bound to them. If you don’t change now, it is going to get difficult over time with your ever increasing data. Below, I will provide some alternatives to the most common services we use on the internet.

  • Browser: Our gateway to the digital world! I cannot express how important it is to use a browser that rather than pushing you towards giving up your data, gives you complete control over it (Oh btw, did you notice Chrome asking to sign in repeatedly?). Change to either of the following browsers on all your devices.

  • Search Engine: A go-to place for anything that we want to look up on the internet. For most people, it is an entry point towards any site. Imagine if your search engine was a human being. They would know everything you do on the internet. And no, incognito window does not help.

    • DuckDuckGo. Make it your default search engine on all your devices. For day to day search activites, it is as good as Google. If you don’t find relevant results for few of the topics, you can always look up on Google. But the default matters.

  • Email/Calendar: Our identity on the internet. A simple yet powerful tool, as old as internet which is the basis of registration on other platforms. While there are several email service providers from Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook for you to diversify; I would recommend you to use a service which provides end-to-end (E2E) encryption (only sender and receiver can see the original content and not even the service provider). Beware that E2E encryption is different than transport layer security (TLS) encryption that most services offer. Often E2E encryption services will be paid. But your email history has so much information about you to tailor personalized ads that I would highly recommend paying for such a serivce. Some good alternatives are:

    • Protonmail: Free till 500MB storage and 150 emails per day, apps available for all platforms
    • MailFence
    • If you are technically sound, start using OpenPGP and expose your public key on platforms like Keybase. This is the most secure form of communication btw, free of cost if paired with another email service provider or if you have your mail server.

  • Phone: Perhaps the most important thing on the list. You have it near you when you sleep, poop (some people, if not all ;)) and everywhere you travel. Mobile phone manufacturing companies have to be trusted in terms of privacy as they are the ones to build your phone hardware and all the firmware. Equally important is the country of manufacturing of these devices as the government can have a substantial influence at this stage and would be difficult to identify infringement. When it comes to phones, options are surprisingly limited and there is no other option than to trust one of these companies. My personal preference is Apple with its firm stance on privacy and the control it gives you for permitting different apps with different level of access. Of course, it is not the only option and there are several manufacturers for Android, choose one based on their stance on privacy.

  • Messaging: The issue with changing your digital service provider for messaging app is that your social circle should also be using them. And that’s tricky. I tried to simply shut off my WhatsApp twice, only to find myself talking to 2-3 people. But I found a working solution to that problem. Use WhatsApp, but also simultaneously use other messaging apps. This way, you talk to the people who are already using non-WhatsApp on non-WhatsApp and slowly allowing the time for your social circle to transition to these platforms. Some really good alternatives are:

    • Signal: E2E by default. (If you are going to change, please change to Signal!)
    • Telegram: Not E2E by default but an option to enable that for every chat.

  • Cloud Storage: Still have your Google Photos auto sync on? The more data you are sharing with one company, more powerful they become. Infact, I sometimes think they are already too big to even bother about your data. Battles are not won by those who admit defeat in the face of adversity. There are several options here like Microsoft, Apple, etc. But I would recommend using Mega because it provides E2E for all your data on the cloud, and that’s amazing!

  • Encryption: The best tool we have to secure your data against adversaries is good encryption. For your laptops, turn on Microsoft’s Bitlocker or Apple’s FileVault. They are very trivial to use.

For more resources on this topic, I would suggest you to read articles from companies like Mozilla and Duckduckgo.

Let’s get political!

Internet, social media, messaging apps, are not merely digital tools anymore. It does seem so superficially, and that was the initial intention but is not valid anymore. Whatever we consume, be it food or digital services, one should pay attention to the intake to know what’s healthy and what’s not. Despite there being millions of websites, why are you repeatedly and regularly limited to a handful of them? Was that your conscious decision or you didn’t realize that until it became an addiction?

I'm not political

Many people with whom I have had conversations with, say this statement. It makes no sense to me. First, to say this means you don’t care enough to act on it. And that is a privilege! Not everyone enjoys that level of privilege. Second, to witness injustice and act blind to it, is taking the side of the oppressor. You may believe that if it does not affect me, it is not my problem. We live in a tightly coupled societal structure with global trade that it is highly unlikely the problem will not affect you in some way. E.g. the caste system in India is so deep rooted that a Dalit being lynched might seem remote and your parents might seem progressive, but when the topic of marriage kicks in, the deep rooted bigotry plays an important role! In the west, it doesn’t matter if you post black picture on Instagram. If you are uncomfortable when your child wants to marry a person of color and make them part of the family, you are part of the problem.

Politics governs the way we want our society to be.

If it does not make any difference to the people of the society where they just stand by watching immoral and unethical things happening, I have a problem with that society. Whether you can or cannot do anything about it is a different thing. Despite being connected to the world and watching everything on your phone, if it does not matter to you or you fail to see that it is inherently wrong in lynching any being, I have a problem with you. I have no compassion towards such a society. I don’t know what to do of such a society, to make them understand and maybe act on it. The change in mindset of people where being communal is identified to be a good thing and being secular a bad thing, tells us a lot about the current scenario. Have we stopped thinking? How can being communal be good?

-Translated excerpts from a speech by Ravish Kumar

Calling themselves democratic is a way out for many people who honestly think they support government of, by, and for the people but are perfectly happy with undemocratic processes that produce the outcomes they want.

And digital platforms are facilitating that. I do recognize that they also facilitate people trying to help each other. The damage they are doing to democracy and restricting the autonomy of the individuals and controlling what each of us should and should’nt see is far worse. And all of this to achieve what goal? So that we buy more products? The problem of consumerism is a huge topic in itself.

Never have our societies been so polarized. The task at hand of any algorithm trying to modify your behaviour is to agree with you in the first place, fuelling your beliefs to capture more of your screen time. The cross-site cookies and fingerprinting techniques are very well developed to track your entire internet activity.

What do we do?

Data regulations are one of the strongest touch points where we can have a voice to keep corporates and the government under check and not allowing them to misuse their power. As already discussed in my last blog post, EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is by far a good start. Compare that to India’s Personal Data Protection bill, which completely excludes the government from any regulations regarding citizen’s data. (Read more) We need to regulate the companies who have built the platform. There have been several anti-trust cases against Google and Facebook in the past year in different countries. This is not a violation of principles of capitalism. Because of their business practices and buying out competition, that is infact, a violation.

A good start for each one of us would be to notice surveillance. When you are on the internet, try noticing what data is being asked for and what are the possibilities if someone has to exploit that information. And then think about the possibilities of having millions of such data points. There are places on the internet where people pay for such data. As an example, there are millions of pictures of Aadhaar Card (India’s unique ID program) available for people willing to pay for that. (Oh, did you use your Aadhaar number to get 20% discount?)

Another point that I cannot stress enough is to understand cross-site tracking and why it matters. Google Analytics is the dominant analytics tools used by websites because…it’s free! Which means that even when you are not using a service from Google, chances are the website you are visiting has Google Analytics and Google still knows. In some geographical areas, where the laws are strict, Google repeatedly asks you to sign in when using Chrome or YouTube, for example. Which gives them the right to your data usage. You can notice when someone asks for credit card to pay, or the more convenient version these days, Google and Apple Pay. This boggles me. We seldom think about the cost of convenience. They already had so much information about us that now we are willingly providing them our spending patterns. Noticing surveillance is important during times like these where people are willing to trade civil liberties for overcoming a crisis. We need to know what are the costs of trading our civil liberties and ascertain that structures are in place to rollback those changes once the crisis is over.

Talk about surveillance. The power of disseminating ideas is unprecedented. The more we talk about it, the more people will know about it and start to care about it. Ultimately, our policy makers would realize that we care about it and that they have to change the regulations accordingly. Just start a conversation with friends and family to let them know that this is also something that you think about. Share them the resources that I have put in my blogs or the blog itself. If you notice some mal-practices, ask questions to the people responsible. Speak up! In my opinion, that’s the biggest contribution of Greta Thurnberg for climate change. We had research papers warning us of climate change before her, we had countries talk about it in diplomat meetings, but she made “us” talk about it. An international issue became a personal issue and that is exemplary! And because we started to talk and care about it, companies now have to adopt and change/draft their sustainability goals.

Support the people and non-profits who are advocating more healthier internet. If you see an issue with your country’s or company’s policies, organize political rallies. I’m certainly a bad advisor on how to do that, but several people knows better about it and have experience in doing so. Ask for their help! A few non-profits off the top of my head are: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet Society, Internet Freedom Foundation, and others.

Last but not the least, don’t give up!

P.S.: This was my last part on the blog series of Privacy. I will write about it as and when I feel necessary to voice more concerns. Feel free to reach out to me and discuss about your thoughts!

What’s next?: I have a bunch of thoughts on human morality which I would like to spill somewhere. Probably in my next post. Till next time!

Reference and further reading

[1] The Antitrust Case Against Big Tech, Shaped by Tech Industry Exiles

[2] FBI Expands Ability To Collect Cellphone Location Data, Monitor Social Media

[3] Behind Cambridge Analytica lay a bigger threat to our democracy: Facebook

[4] Inside India’s booming dark data economy

[5] Internet Freedom Has Taken a Hit During the Covid-19 Pandemic

[6] Civil Liberties in a Pandemic