Tag: privacy

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The internet and computers are great. I love them and I want to share this digital world with my two kids. But it’s not all wonderful. Here are things I am trying to avoid with technology:

  • Ads
  • Tracking of my activity online
  • Click-bait
  • AI slop
  • App stores that 30% cuts or more of profits
  • Walled-gardens (for example Apple)
  • Not being able to own anything (digital rights management software allows Amazon to revoke access to books that were bought on the Kindle)
  • Apps that are designed to be addictive
  • Opaque recommender algorithms
  • Proprietary code and black box apps that make it difficult to learn how it works
  • Powerful platforms where regular people have little say
  • Banning and shadow-banning when people have different political views than ownership of platform
  • Secret business models (usually meaning start free and then enshittify later)

Things that I want more of with technology:

  • Consent
  • Privacy
  • Ownership of my data
  • Software where you are encouraged to learn how it works
  • Freedom to mess around with software and media and to share it with others
  • Software organizations built by and for the community
  • Open, sustainable business models
  • Community
  • Decentralization (no monopolies that can over power a market)

In 2025, these aspirations can seem like a pipe dream. But I’m optimistic that there is another way. At the very least, I can move in the direction of this dream even if I can not fully achieve it. My plan is to follow The Opt-Out Project’s guide which has a 21 day plan (LOL, it will take me much longer) to switch my whole digital life toward services that respect this dream.

This will not be easy. The guide shows how to completely get rid of Gmail, Google docs, and even Google Maps which are all services that I rely on heavily. It won’t just affect me too. It recommends switching away from Big Tech messaging apps like Whatsapp and from proprietary social networks such as LinkedIn as well. I will need to navigate how to distance myself from these exploitative services while hopefully finding ways to stay connected to my friends and family that still use them.

But I’m excited about this effort. I’ve already switched to an open source social network, Mastodon, which is part of a wider social network called the Fediverse. I love it! I find really interesting people, and I am encouraged by them. It’s nice to have more control over who shows up in my feeds, and feels more like how you meet people in real life. It’s more work, but has a chance for deeper connections. I’m expecting that as I transition more of my other services away from big, profit-seeking companies that I will learn a lot. I hope I will experience more freedom and connect with a positive community.

I plan on sharing my journey about it. So far I have finished Day 1 and Day 2. For Day 1, I bought an external hard-drive to save all the data that will potentially be on all my accounts on these Big Tech services. I got a 4 TB WD My Passport. Day 2 was more involved and was about moving away from Big Tech browsers and search engines to more open source and privacy protecting options. I already used Firefox, a popular open source browser, and DuckDuckGo, a privacy conscious search engine. But I wanted to diversify options since browsers and search engines are critical to accessing the internet. So here are the things I explored :

  • Firefox privacy improvements
  • Installed and tested additional search engines
    • StartPage, a private meta-search engine that uses Google results but protect your information from Google tracking
    • Quant, is a French search engine with its own search index
  • I installed and tested out a couple other browsers
    • The super private Tor browser following this guide (I installed it by downloading the Tor browser installation files as a tar file)
    • Vivaldi is an open source browser built on top of Chromium which is the foundation of the popular Chrome browser

They have been working fine so far. I’ve been using Quant as my main search engine on my desktop computer with no issues. I’ve used Vivaldi some and Tor occasionally and they both are fine too. I just switched my default search engine on mobile to Startpage so I will begin testing that out more too.

That’s it for now. I hope to work on Day 3 soon where I will take stock of all my digital accounts. Sounds like it will be a lot!

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I have decided that it is time for me to leave Facebook. It has a negative influence on me, my friends, and our larger society. This decision has not been easy since Facebook provides many useful services and most importantly lets me connect with so many of you. I want to explain some of the top reasons, and to share with you where I am going.

Facebook has lost my trust by:

  • Encouraging addictive behavior (infinite scrolls among other things).
  • Sharing our private information with whoever will buy it.
  • Not playing nicely with other applications. Instead of including the contents of a post in an email notification, Facebook forces you to pull up Facebook (and risk getting sucked into the news feed time sink).
  • Contributing to the fragmentation of our society by selecting posts full of outrage and provocation for our news feeds.

Facebook is “free”, but we pay in so many ways. I’m not buying it anymore. And I’m taking my data with me.

Before I go, I want to thank you, Facebook, for helping me to remember people’s names, for providing a way to share my thoughts and pictures, for giving me a sense of who got married or had a baby or took a cool vacation. 

My new home on the internet will be my website davidbruffner.com. Feel free to visit and say hi. I write little posts from time to time about what I am interested in. I’m still sorting out whether to spend time on other social networks. My favorite ways to connect are talking on the phone and meeting in person.