Privacy was my breaking point, and it happened recently.

Been using the internet for 26 years now. Never particularly had a problem with spam, despite never really caring about what happens with my data. I just never got any. Shared everything with google, signed up to all sorts with the same e-mail and same phone number and card, no VPNs or anything, same few passwords.

A couple months ago, that all changed when something somewhere leaked my phone number and e-mail, and it’s all turned to quite a mess.

So I’ve reset, opened a new e-mail, attached that to my own domain name, and further attached that to self-hosted email masks. If I don’t like the e-mail provider… plug my domain elsewhere. If I don’t like the domain registrar… take my domain elsewhere. And the e-mail masks are infinite. I can spin up unique ones for every service.

I’ve got a solid password manager that integrates with that so every service gets a unique email and password.

I’ve got a few really cheap $2 sim cards, and when I need to sign up to certain things, it gets one of them. I’m planning on finding a decent VoIP provider because I can just transfer the numbers to the provider, and will only need to buy a cheap sim on the odd occasion a service doesn’t accept it, and then my actual phone will just have a number that absolutely no one is given. Not connected to anything.

I’m struggling to find something like privacy.com for non-US citizens. But once I’ve found a decent and affordable one, I’ll be on that in a moment. This has the added benefit of helping with my budgeting.

And pretty much anything that doesn’t need my real name, gets a pseudonym.

For home I’ve got a decent VPN setup, I’ve got all sorts of adblocking through pihole and ublock origin.

When I’m done with all this, anything I sign up to should have a unique name, email, password, phone number, and payment card. Nothing to link together in their datasets. Any spam call or email or txt I receive will be very obvious where it came from.

Is it perfect? Nah. Could a bad actor still put 2 and 2 together or are there gaps because I’m still learning? Absolutely. But honestly I’m enjoying the process of learning, so it’s worth it.

Interesting! Been using Playnite for a while, good to see another player in the personal game library… game.

I pay my ISP for internet, and a domain registrar for my domain name, and backblaze for cloud backup.

That’s really it.