• I used to have an Xperia SP. One day, I decided to swap out all of the AOSP apps that came preinstalled for Google's own offerings.
• I also used to use Yandex as my main search engine. I thought it was better than DuckDuckGo...
• I also used to use Yandex.Browser, Yandex.Mail, and Yandex.Disk. I'm also not sure I deleted my account...
• Just three years ago, I was using Opera. I had no idea it had become a Chinese Chromium fork. I also used to use Maxthon, on occasion.
• I used to use Opera VPN.
• When I was about 7, I ended up with a bunch of malware on my laptop (turns out McAfee is shit). I recently discovered that my IP range briefly ended up on some blacklist around that time, so I assume I had become part of a botnet.
• Around this time, I used Hola VPN.
• Until fairly recently, I had multiple ad and tracker blockers installed at the same time. This is obviously overkill, and increases your fingerprintability.
• I also used to manually change my user agent to Chrome on Windows 10, despite the fact I was using Firefox on Linux. The mismatch also made me more fingerprintable.
• I used to have Do Not Track enabled, which can be used to fingerprint users.
• I used to use my browser fullscreen, meaning my screen resolution could be calculated and used for fingerprinting.
• I used to use Outlook.com as a client for my email, which was privately self-hosted by my dad.

Yeah, I used to be pretty insecure, huh. My privacy journey was quite fast, and began around 2020. My uncle had given me a ThinkPad and a DVD of Linux Mint. I was stuck at home for most of the year, I started watching a lot of sociopolitical comedy videos, and eventually one thing led to another and before you knew it I was wearing the metaphorical tinfoil hat.

Nowadays, I'm doing much better.

Last year I purchased a domain name for our farm business as a place holder knowing I'll eventually get around to putting together a website when life allows.

Well the domain registration site had a "privitize my infomation" button...which I forgot to check...for the first 12 hours.

EVERY web and app developer from here to Pakistan now has my phone number and I get about 4-6 calls a day asking if I want help developing an app for our website.

I've had to block entire area codes with an installed spam blocker just to slow them down and get some small bit of peace back.

Moral of the story, Never forget to hit that privitize button.

I forgot to tap the "location" button on my phone to set it to "off" for about ten years.

Using the same username ober multiple platforms

I changed the user-agent of my browser to "Error: No browser installed". Can't be more unique than that, I guess. That was 30 years ago, though, I don't think it will hurt me today 😆

Using a VPN for torrents and forgetting to set it up to kill the network connection when VPN is lost. Got a couple "love letters" from my ISP that way.

Before really learning about the implications, I had used the same alias on dozens of sites. I had hoped for serendipitous interactions.

Its taken forever to track down and clean up all of those old accounts.

stood in my balcony with my pp out and someone saw me

Wouldnt you like to know

Advice my parents to use outlook. They were using an ISP email service which we had to get rid of. I wasn't sure if tutanota was ready for them yet and they already were a bit familiar with outlook. It was a bit of a trade off back then.

Used Facebook for years.

True story:

When I was a kid I wrote a review for Dexter's Laboratory on the internet. I wrote "I think the show fuckin sucks!". I don't know why. Again, I was like 10. AOL ratted me out to my parents somehow and I got banned from the dial-up for a week.

I use Discord, though only in a web browser and only for semi-public chats. I might be using Discord less if I had gotten some friend groups onto something like Matrix.

I still have digiaids from Limewire back in the day. I also regularly type "magic" between a certain you and a tube and I have no idea who operates that site.