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Notes -
A few notes, but mostly marking to think and read more and maybe write more about later:
I have a feeling that like 70% of the privacy ultra-activist stuff is counter-productive in that it mostly serves to draw more attention onto you than would be paid if you acted more like a "perfectly ordinary sheep" type. Like the guy trying to be covert with the obvious trench coat just making sure everyone in the diner is staring at him versus nobody giving him a second glance if he was wearing business casual.
Google gets beat up a lot for non-responsiveness to user inquiries and supposed privacy violations. I actually agree with your point in that I continue to use Google for most things because I trust their security better than just about anyone else. Their Advanced Protection stuff is probably best of breed, and at least I can be sure that no hacker or activist will ever be able to socially engineer their way into my accounts. I accept that they might delete it someday because some wrongthink I posted somewhere gets caught in the wrong filter. And they might give everything they have to the Government some day, but meh, I doubt it's much safer anywhere else.
I do still use Google's location tracking, partly because it is sometimes convenient. I also have a feeling, or at least would not be surprised if it is some day revealed, that the phone UI checkboxes to turn it off actually only turn off the visibility to you, not the collection and storage. If they're gonna collect and store it either way, I might as well get some use from it too. If I ever need to really be covert, I guess I'll have to leave it at home. Though even that might not help much, since it's such an unusual and rare thing to do, if anybody was actually watching that closely, they'd probably have reason to think that, whatever I was actually doing then, I was up to no good.
And yeah, running your own servers and storage has its own risks as well. I doubt I'm a particularly great sysadmin, but as far as I know, I haven't lost any servers yet, so maybe it's not quite that hard, or maybe nobody cares that much about my stuff.
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