"Corporate spying, at the level it's now reached, is creepy, stalkerish, manipulative, predatory, warped, perverted, and abusive of human rights. Even if it carries no demonstrable collateral harm, you don't need to feel it's something you should willingly and happily accept."
The easy way to write a post about online privacy would be to list a range of so-called “privacy respecting” alternatives to Big Tech. But it's become increasingly obvious that at least some of these alternatives are a far cry from what they claim to be, and are actually part of the very system they profess to oppose.
At best, simply trusting services because their marketing says “we're all about your privacy”, when some of the worst privacy policies in the world open with “Your privacy is important to us”, is a wildly superficial and somewhat naïve approach.
The true key to optimising online privacy lies in disrupting the core tenets of tracking. Tenets as simple as product allegiance, for example. By sticking with one brand, one browser, one login, we make ourselves frightfully easy to monitor. Whilst, say, a VPN is touted as a route to better privacy, it allows a single provider to log the entirety of a user's online activity. And there's nothing other than that provider's word to say that the available information will not be packaged and sold to the Great Inscrutables.
