Reached My Limits of Being Tracked Part 2

I’ve Reached My Limit of Tracking

This is Part 2 of a Series. Part 1 | Part 2

Part 2

So when is enough? It is very difficult to remove yourself entirely from all services without retreating to a cabin in the woods. But I am consciously looking for ways to reduce my “signals” to the large and smaller tech companies. It requires effort and costs money, which makes it difficult for most people to follow suit, especially when the services that utilize tracking have reduced user effort and cost to near zero. Are you willing to justify additional costs primarily to sustain privacy?

Here are a handful of activities I’ve used to reduce my profile with tech and data brokers. The list is helpful in two ways: 1) increase awareness on how ingrained surveillance has become, and 2) give ideas for you to start reducing your own signals. The list may appear a little overwhelming–understand that I have been building this up incrementally for many years.

Pay for a VPN, and use it even on my home network. Why use a VPN at home? It reduces information for ISPs and telcos to sell about your browsing activities. ISPs and cell phone companies are notorious for selling data: minute-by-minute location data, internet browsing, and content you view.
Pay for an email service. I have purchased email services for both personal (Mailfront in Belgium) and business (Hover). I haven’t removed my gmail/outlook accounts entirely, but my trackable free-email traffic is reduced significantly, particularly important email. Why pay for email? Think back to my last post where Microsoft revealed they share/sell Outlook data with 772 partners (Saxena, 2024).
Pay for a search engine, in this case kagi.com. Why pay for search? Google search has deteriorated to the point where they have you searching through useless junk listings that Google pushes to increase their revenues (Zitron, 2024). I pay for a search engine that doesn’t make money on ads. What a difference! It reminds me of what Google search used to be before they denigrated the service (Warzel, 2023).
Pay for a weather app that doesn’t track or sell your information (Weather Strip). Weather apps are notorious for selling your every-moment-location to data brokers. It costs weather apps money to get the weather service data for forecasts–if you are not helping pay for it, well…
Reduce Amazon interactions to only a few items a year that cannot be found locally. It takes a lot more time but I think it is important to support companies with a local presence, with local jobs, supporting the local economy. Every Amazon purchase sucks local money out of the local economy. And when I can’t find local, I divvy out purchases to several online companies, not just Amazon. It is amazing how much you can reduce your Amazon transactions when you work at it.
Avoid Chrome and Edge browsers. I only use those for specific, onesie tasks. I primarily use Firefox and Brave; DuckDuckGo also has a privacy oriented browser. Use the minimum number of extensions possible–they also can gather an enormous amount of your browsing activity.
Use surveillance cameras on my house (Reolink) that are controlled at locally with no internet account to manage and store video. I can run them from my house on my local network without any data leaving the premises.
Set smart televisions with bogus wireless password so they cannot connect. I occasionally put in the correct password so it can update and then reset to the bogus password. This limits the outside tracking to just the Roku boxes. I have been long-time Roku user, but Roku is getting so much worse about data collection and forcing things I don’t want, I will have to find an alternative soon (Side note FYI: I am amazed at how many people don’t even know you can get television over the air for free and no tracking). My brother has a smart TV that will temporarily connect to over-air channels, but it will lose them after a few minutes to force you back to streamed content where they make their money. So frustrating!
Sometimes when I run errands, I use a faraday pouch to block my cell phone and GPS. It is always close by for emergencies, but thousands of data brokers do not need to know my every movement. I am considering the purchase of a Librem PureOS phone that has physical switches to turn off GPS, cell, and microphone quickly and easily. This wouldn’t be without tradeoffs on capabilities, though.
Reduce/eliminate devices activated by voice (Echo/Alexa, Google, Meta devices). I do still have a problem with Roku built-in microphones in the remotes and Nest thermostat microphone being in the rooms even though I don’t use that capability. Of course, cell phones have 24-hour ready microphones, hence the need for phones with physical on/off buttons mentioned above.
Nearly all of our internet-of-things devices are on their own wifi separate from the wifi we use for our computers, tablets, and phones
Avoid news on social media (Keegan, 2024). I have set up RSS feed software (NetNewsWire MacOS, iOS and Android Flym and Inoreader) pointed to many websites to gather the news I ask for, not algorithm-pushed content driven by how much money they can make on me. I find the algorithms keep trying to push follow-down-the-rabbit-hole content to suck me in. I am so much more satisfied with content I control. If you must use social media, find the well-buried settings to only get content from the people you follow, not algorithm content. Quite frankly, I also avoid television news.
Youtube can be an important tool, but only with tools like UBlock Origin to block all the algorithm-suggested content on the right side of the Youtube screen (Arc browser also blocks that content). I now watch only what I want without getting taunted or driven to content they push. If your school isn’t doing something similar with students, you should get the right tools to eliminate all suggested content.
Drive old cars without GPS. I have looked for ways to limit the GPS in our newer car, but not successfully yet. It used to be you could pull a fuse, but now the car companies have moved the gps electrical circuit with other necessary devices so you can’t do that anymore (which tells you how much that data means to the car companies). Audio via microphones, video via cameras, and GPS location data are all collected (Caltrider et al., 2023).

Next steps I am gradually getting to?

Start using services like Signal or Threema to communicate more “sensitive” info with family members rather than messaging or social media. I also use online storage with encryption to exchange sensitive files rather than attachments via email.
Apple’s iCloud is encrypted but still accessible to Apple; there is a process to set all the content with your own encryption password, which I have not taken the time to get to yet.

So does it sound like I am the paranoid neighborhood “crazy” wearing a tin-foil hat? Yes. But I have reduced my “signals” to these companies significantly and will continue to look for more ways. Does it appear to people that don’t know me that I am hiding something nefarious? Yes. It is sad that a straight-arrow individual like myself could now be viewed with suspicion because I work to preserve privacy and reduce tracking. That’s how far we have come to accepting the tracking of everything we do as the “necessary” norm.

I suspect all the items I mentioned requires more effort than most are willing to exert. As a technology consultant, not only does it help protect my privacy but also allows me to investigate and better understand how these technologies work. When I explain to others the level of tracking you can find by just by paying attention, people’s eyes start to glaze. Many prefer NOT to know how they are being tracked on so many fronts or feel it is unavoidable. We can’t afford to keep thinking that privacy is hopeless. It is easy to get caught up believing tracking as inevitable and therefore the norm.

I have always embraced the importance of our Constitutional 4th Amendment. While many people in our nation obsess with encroachments on the 2nd Amendment, I think we would be better served worrying about our 4th Amendment rights. These same principles directed to our government need to be applied to tech companies and data brokers. Our nation’s founders understood how powerful people control others via the threat of search and data collection to force compliance for their own self-serving causes. Hence why it was so high on their list as the 4th amendment. We can embrace their wisdom and foresight by making individual and collective effort to say no. We can all start by implementing just a couple of the ideas I posed above. Demanding a stop to intrusive tracking and embracing our needs to privacy, both from tech companies and governments, should be the norm not the exception.

This is Part 2 of a Series. Part 1 | Part 2