My Privacy Journey
Posted on August 21, 2025
For the past few years I’ve had a slight interest in privacy. I’ve always been interested in it because of my background in crypto. But it doesn’t stop there for me. There is something that makes me sick about the idea that so many people are paid so well to extract the maximum amount of information out of us at any one moment.
I know there’s something ironic about writing this in a public format, but I want to be clear: I’m not against willingly sharing yourself with the world. I am against not having a choice.
I created this website to serve as my own personal social media. If someone actually cares what’s going on with me, they can check here. If not, I’m not going to beg for their attention by trying to manipulate an algorithm to push my thoughts. Still, it’s not the fault of the people that the platforms are set up to reward sensational, derivative nonsense.
Internet Sovereignty
I think going forward more people should prioritize their own internet sovereignty. I’m a Gen Z’er, which means I don’t really remember the internet when it was full of p2p services and when common people knew how to host their own site. I don’t think a lot of people outside of tech even know that’s possible anymore.
So, ramblings aside, I wanted to share my journey (so far) with reducing my digital footprint — the non-consensual one at least. (this is me a human, reclaiming the emdash as a valid syntactical decision for human writers to make)
The Beginning
It all started with my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) old Google Pixel 3 and a Mental Outlaw YouTube video about GrapheneOS. Naturally, I immediately set to flashing it, played with the OS for a few days, and then put it back in a drawer. Nonetheless, my interest was piqued.
I began to play around with Tails and some other more extreme privacy tech. For me, those are too extreme. I don’t have serious opsec needs. But learning about how much telemetry was being locked down by those tools made me realize how bad it really is for the average consumer.
As a web developer with prior marketing experience, I already knew that a lot of data was shared from the web experience. But I had no idea how bad it was on an OS level until I saw this stuff. That was my proverbial “oh shit” moment.
Unwinding
For the past two years I’ve been slowly unwinding my complex relationships with the life parasites that are SaaS, big tech, and other data mongers. I plan to break each of the main steps I took into future blog posts, but for now this one is just for the story.
It took me way longer than I thought, and I’m still not quite there. My business is still stuck on Google Workspace and I still have some other leeches around. But I’m writing this to say that’s okay. This is about taking steps to reduce what they take from you. You cannot stop it all unless you go fully off grid.
What Privacy Really Means
The big personalities in the “personal privacy” space are still public figures, and they still share all sorts of personal info. To me, privacy is just about taking steps toward a future where we host more things ourselves and give away data a little bit less freely.
Next Steps
The next part of my journey is going to be Matrix.
Until then…