Over the past few years, one thing has become glaringly obvious to those paying any semblance of attention: our interactions on the internet have becoming increasingly relegated to monolithic entities.

Back in the wild west days of the internet, you could count on both a wide range of opinions and an array of forums for your own voice. While that does still exist to some extent today, the majority of conversations have been pushed to Facebook & Twitter. Most of our photos are archived in Facebook (Instagram) & Google Photos. All of our searches go through Google. Our events, Facebook. Our shopping, Amazon. Our email, Gmail. Our group organization, Facebook. Our videos, YouTube. And on it goes.

Many in the privacy world have been ringing the alarm about this for what seems like an eternity, and over those years, there are folks like me who have heard them but never taken action because it was not convenient. “Everyone else is on Facebook,” “Other search engines suck,” “No one else makes sharing photos as easy as Insta,” are the standard responses of my people.

I’m not here to tell you that all of these are terrible, indefensible positions. That has been covered by many others in far deeper detail than I can provide. My personal favorite reference on this is Bryan Lunduke, and I highly recommend listening to his podcasts or bingeing his YouTube videos.

What I will share, however, is one man’s attempts to decentralize and diversify his internet data portfolio.

Email

Something that has always driven me a bit bonkers is the notion that Google parses every single piece of email you send. I was a relatively early adopter of Gmail, switching over from a Hotmail account I had back in the early 2000’s. It had a better interface than Hotmail at the time, and it was all the rage. Over time, the feature set marginally expanded with calendar integration and such, and I was happy enough.

I had one “what the hell?” moment during Google’s early experiments with targeted advertisements. I was joking around with a friend about squirrels on speed, and by the next time I had opened up Gmail, my browser’s walls were decorated with ads for squirrel traps and pest control professionals. Like any brilliant person, instead of ceasing to use the product, I instead opted to block out the ads with an early ad blocker.

As I never stopped using ad blockers (though the particular extension would change over the years), I would rarely think about that time. Out of sight, out of mind…but Big G was still collecting data on me.

The privacy and personal data protection movement has gained a lot of momentum in the last several years, with enormous data breaches coming to retailers, email providers, and video game repositories alike. No one was invulnerable to hacker attack. And all the while, I was being gently provided with the idea that I was the product to any number of data farms.

In mid-2016, I decided to start separating my more personal email from my day-to-day operations like bills and social media notifications. I experimented with a variety of email providers, and eventually landed on ProtonMail. They offer encryption, tiered services, and a pleasant interface that has all the features I expect from an email client. To be straightforward: I do not require event handling in my personal email service. I need privacy, archiving, and some type of markup (bold/colors/etc) to aid lengthy conversations I often have. In that sense, ProtonMail is everything I need, and I’ve already begun to shift all my personal email traffic over, with my bills and other notifications to follow as I see the need to move them.

Operating Systems

I love messing with new operating systems for my computers. I’d always tweak and tinker with my parents’ computers, doing everything in my power to shuffle them into the newest OS or hardware as finances permitted. When I came into my own, I would keep up with the latest and greatest Windows system, and I eventually got exposed to Linux and open source software.

I tried a whole spread of distributions: Kanotix, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Arch…I’ve had a bunch of them over the years. I’ve settled in with Arch for my HTPC, but with my daily driver PC, I’ve meandered back to Windows 10. I’ve done what I can to mitigate data gathering on it, but I’m fully aware that it is still likely sniffing my transactions to inform some three-letter agency.

I even picked up an older Macbook Pro this weekend, simply to get exposed to the Apple ecosystem, which I’ve never used. I know a lot of folks hate on it, but so far I’m actually impressed with build quality and I’m getting used to the workflow.

While Mac’s High Sierra is built on a Unix core, it’s still quite different from Arch, and altogether different from Windows. I see this as another way to separate and differentiate my data.

The Idea

I think you get the idea now. While there is currently only so much (nothing) we can do to protect our data once it’s in the hands of these large data farms, we can do a few things to spread it about such that we make it that much harder for an individual company to use it all against us. Here are the steps I’ve taken so far, with more to come:

• Divide my personal, professional, and task-oriented email
• Diversified the operating systems I’m currently using
• Deleted Facebook (I’m planning an entire post on this one). The recent news involving Cambridge Analytica was the final nail in the coffin for me.
• Split my quality photos and “quick pics” between Flickr and Instagram. I’d like to leave Insta because it’s a Facebook company now, but I am not aware of another site with equivalent capabilities (fast upload w/phone app, community-oriented commenting) other than Twitter
• Speaking of Twitter, I’m currently evaluating Gab.ai and Mastodon.social. There aren’t a whole ton of folks on the platforms at the moment, but that will change as the services provided increase and anti-censorship sentiments gain momentum.
• Finding YouTube alternatives. If you didn’t know, YouTube is maintained by Google, and there is a growing belief that it is also censoring non-conforming political views by demonetizing those creators. There are a few out there (Vimeo, BitChute, Minds…) but they are all lacking in one area or another. I don’t upload videos, so that’s not a concern of mine, but I do use YouTube extensively for commentary and tutorials. I have found a few content creators have alternate venues for getting out their podcasts/demos, so I’m using those where I’m able. An intriguing new option is lbry.io, but that is just starting to take baby steps.

And that about wraps it up for my data diversity discussion. During this continuing journey, I hope to update you all on the various interesting complications and realizations I encounter along the way.