Never give up,
each eye you poke out is one less they can use for data collection.

It's a slow process and they'll grow more eyes,
but the less they have on you,
the more private you'll be.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" - Aldous Huxley

Short answer, yes, its impossible, even using TOR network ith VPN and other security measures. We can only minimize our digital footprint, but certainly no one should have any illusions about being able to avoid, with a shitty Laptop or PC, large companies and governments with large data centers, IT specialist squads and even Quantumcomputers can profile us. Absolute privacy on the Internet does not exist, if you want privacy, turn off your PC and read a book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_surveillance_projects

It's just more complicated than 0, no privacy or 1 full privacy.

transcribed from video:

I think there are good solutions we can implement to mitigate a lot of the surveillance. And I don't think the solution is to just lay down and die. If everyone thought like privacy doomers, none of this [privacy related issues] would even be a discussion.

They [pessimists] really just making the world worse place by giving up. And that's what a lot of pessimism really is, when you dig down deep, just a coping mechanism for covering up the fact that you're too lazy to take action. All you have to do is take action, instead of doing nothing.

The world needs more people who just care, don't be a doomer.

After so much time of thinking, researching and testing all kinds of technologies and tools, my best recommendation to those who talk to me about privacy is the following: keep your profile public, the one that everyone knows, the one related to work and to all government services, services like Amazon etc. Only use those what you supposedly should and even need to continue moving in society. But, keep a second profile, absolutely isolated and disconnected from the first, and where you have your ENTIRE real private world. The one that you only want to share with those you trust. It's more or less what should be done in society in the real world. And to all this, personally, in that public profile, what I do is block all communication between entities as much as possible, just because I hate that they make free money from me. I also mold it to my convenience.

Long ago I used a system called hushmail that promised a lot of the same as proton. Eventually I set up my own but it still has the problem of having to relay outgoing external mail through another box because of all the restrictions on home based dynamic IPs, so it's largely relegated to system alerts in house rather than general use.

It's a balancing act to be sure. VPNs stop local ISP inspection in exchange for potential viewing by the VPN host. DNS filters can only filter known threats. Things like P2P private nets can be infiltrated by 3rd parties via the '6 degrees of separation' premise or even tracking pixels.

Making the picture muddy is about the best we can do, but it's always worth the effort to not be another data point in the profile machine.

counter-question: Is it impossible to be private offline?

Every time I talk about privacy online, the pessimists always come out. "It's impossible to have any online privacy.

My experience is actually completely opposite. While mainstream "normies" don't seem to care, most of them are using readily available privacy tools in their communication daily. Things like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage. Most websites these days are HTTPS enabled. Governments are so concerned about this loss of monitoring capability, they're trying to craft laws which allow them to backdoor devices before encryption happens. And they're meeting resistance, despite all the lobbying (see Chat Control2.0). We've never had as widely adopted privacy tools as we have today.

Big tech and advertising are two problems that still create trouble. A lot of this stems from completely different, non-privacy related reasons (the lax US policies concerning anti-consumer and monopoly laws) but even here policies around the world are slowly catching up. GDPR gives Europeans quite a bit of control over our data and while this is still just one baby step - it's much better than it used to be. There's a lot of global inequality here though. Facebook/Meta is synonymous to Internet in the developing world, because they've used their monopoly money to exploit the situation. Digital imperialism is still strong.

I'm not going to harp too much on SMTP privacy, Proton has a bunch of nice services. If that's where your MX happens to point at is, then great, but we do also need to slowly move away from these old protocols that offer no privacy choice (yeah I know, SMTP is here to stay).

What I'd like to see more, is talk about threat modeling in this space. Because that's where it all starts and threat models are quite personal. There's no "one size fits all" privacy, because our needs vary. Political dissident living in exile from hostile government has completely different needs for privacy compared to a person who doesn't like YouTube ads. We should try to foster easily digestible discussion around personal threat modeling - right now we (the privacy crowd) come across as loonies since lot of the advice we give starts from the wrong end of the model.

I don't see digital privacy as a pessimistic space. But what do I know, I'm not a content creator.

Fraid so. The very act of connection lays you open to the world even if you have the latest greatest firewall and vpn