Privacy Guides

16796 readers

1 users here now

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.

You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more...

Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!

This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.

Moderation Rules:

We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Self-host This, Subscribe to That (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'll go first with an example below.

What are y'all opinions as to what to self-host (on a computer, instance, or local computer) vs what is better to pay for through subscription or purchase?

The goal is to increase

privacy from databrokers, ad brokers, corporate overlords, and from family and friends.
security from threats below targeted nation state attacks, below zero-day vulns.

Example:

Self-host your calendar, contacts, and tasks Subscribe to email via protonmail to avoid all the issues with self-hosting mail servers

top 12 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I self-host basically everything I can, aside from email. Self-host Calendar, contacts, streaming, budgeting, documents and storage, passwords, private chat, etc.

Email I'd love to self-host, but consensus seems to be that it's between moderately difficult to impossible to get outbound deliverability depending on quite a few factors, some of which are out of one's control.

As for reasons why I self-host, basically everything you've listed in your post. I want to be the owner of my data, not some corp making profit by mining it for ad revenue or selling it to data brokers. Also I love digging into the guts of standing up my own services and keeping them maintained, I've learned so much over the years from it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I do as you, and run my own services for everything I use frequently except for email. keeping it all behind a vpn prevents unwanted access. I pay for protonmail but operate my own mail server for internal use. I have machinery to download messages from protonmail upon receipt and make them available to me, and to send through protonmail. so I'm doing both and using protonmail as the interface with outside servers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I'm going to go against the grain a small bit.

The only things I don't self-host that I use on a daily basis are lemmy instance, password manager (bitwarden), backup storage and a Proton drive box for really sensitive documents.

Email is not that bad to self-host, you just need to pick a reliable provider and hope for clean IPs. Then take care of keeping it secure with standard best practices.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Self-host

Notes: Joplin server is great, the sync is way more efficient (and private) than using a 3rd party storage service like OneDrive or Dropbox.
Photo Library: Immich photo management server. No clandestine scanning of your images or using them for AI training.

Offsite backup location: Backblaze has super cheap prices on data storage. You can encrypt the buckets with a toggle on BB, but TrueNAS has a sweet automatic backup option that encrypts data before sending to your backblaze bucket.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For backup you can look into rclone. It's what TrueNAS is using. You can set rclone up to only upload your data encrypted to a lot of storage providers like BackBlaze, Google, Dropbox, S3 etc. So you don't have to trust the provider with the ~~privacy~~ confidentiality of your data.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well I don't even rent an apartment but a room. I don't have space to self host anything cuz I'm about to move out who knows when. Not sure what privacy strategy I can follow other than just use so called "privacy services" and obfuscate as much as possible.