Privacy Guide (from my experience and recommendation)

I think we can all agree that the amount of pervasive attempts at collecting our data is disgusting. These companies think they are entitled to our data so they can sell it and train these dogwater ai models on it.

So i'll give you a rundown of what i do to ensure that they have as little info on me as possible. It is worth keeping in mind that they already have lots of data on us, from school records to medical records, the first two decades of your life are prime harvesting for these creeps. Data however, becomes useless over time, so learning how to stop leaking your information still holds value.

The biggest rule of the internet is the one we were taught in its early days, "Don't put your personal info online, cause everyone can see it." And nobody wants to see it more than the ones who can profit off it.

So here's a word to learn like a mantra, 'Aliasing'.

Usernames, Email, phone number, card information, IP address. All these need to be treated with the magic word 'Alias', cause they are the dots they connect to build profiles on you.

• Usernames are pretty easy, just don't get comfortable with using the same ones.

• Email needs to be heavily guarded, nobody should have your real email. SimpleLogin is the only free email alias service i've used, which gives 10 aliases on a free account. Throw away emails such as GuerillaMail and 10 minute mail are great for when an email isn't really needed, but companies won't give the option to opt out.

• phone number can be guarded with a service like textfree, which is what i use. Get a free burner number that can do calling and texting so you don't have to give out your real number. Textfree charges if you want to receive verification codes, which sucks.

• Card information, probably the highest priority in the list. I use Privacy.com, you connect your bank account and spin up a burner card. My honest favorite part of them is you don't have to use your legal name on the cards, so highly recommend to my trans and nonbinary peeps. they give you 10 free select store locked cards a month and unlimited one time use anywhere cards.

• IP address, you know what VPNs are. Only one i can trust is Mullvad, cause they were raided by authorities and had no user data to hand over.

Just my long winded rambling to pass the time, hoping somebody learns something here. There's so much concern online about these companies trying to take our privacy away.

Let me be clear, WE are the ones who decide what data is given to whom. They are faceless conglomerates only focused on profit margins. They should not and do not get to decide what we hand over to access mediocre platforms.