This is my personal guide on ways to have a private life and staying dark in an online world. Keep in mind that Privacy ≠ anonymity. Anonymity is about keeping yourself unidentified or unidentifiable. The important idea about anonymity is that a person be non-identifiable, unreachable, or untrackable.

While privacy on the other hand is about it not being important if they know who you are but hiding what you are doing. In my case, it’s about hiding it from big tech. My data is for sale as much as any one else, I’m just making sure as little of it as possible is out there for sale. If the profuct is free, there’s high chances that you are what they are selling to others.

There’s a good article breakdown between the two here by Douglas Crawford at Proton.

Starting out - Creating accounts

  1. Create a Protonmail account, make the email something random that isn’t related to you. An alternative to Protonmail is Tutanota.
  2. Next would be login to SimpleLogin with your Proton account. You’ll be using this to create emails for individual accounts/services you’ll be using and making. An alternative to SimpleLogin is Anonaddy.
  3. Go to Bitwarden for a Password manager. Make a new email using SimpleLogin for this, and start using this to save all your passwords/logins/and etc.
  4. When making online payments use Privacy.com. This lets you create virtual payment cards for one-time purchases or subscriptions. NOTE: Some services will not let you or will fight you on using these virtual cards.
  5. I also HIGHLY recommend signing up for the other services Proton offers, such as their VPN and Drive. There is usually a bundle package for email and VPN and all in one.
  6. From here, when signing up for anything, use SimpleLogin to make an email for it to have it forwarded to your Proton account, saving the logins in Bitwarden, and making payments with Privacy.

Hardware

  1. I personally recommend a Google Pixel Phone - Unlocked, and installing CalyxOS or GrapheneOS. iPhones are good as well though some of their privacy policies lately kinda of sketchy(Eg. Scanning iCloud pictures and such). Using MintMobile instead of a normal carrier. So you’ll be getting a new phone number.
    When giving out your new phone number to family/friends, make sure you trust them to not give it out to others.
  2. Most machines work but will depend on your use case, but rather than using Windows or Mac OS, go with QuebesOS(for more advanced) or base Debian. I typically use a flavor of Ubuntu for ease as most things just work with it but to make it more privacy based you will want to look into what changes should be made.

Software

  1. Cryptomator can be used to encrypt files/folder to be uploaded to cloud storage for extra security.
  2. Bitwarden for a Password manager.
  3. NextCloud for File hosting.
  4. LibreWolf or Brave Browser.
    1. I myself am a fan of Librewolf as it’s a fork of Firefox, with more out of the box privacy features, and you can use containers, “Each container is isolated from the others, so you can access sites logged into different accounts.”. So this will keep sites isolated from each other as to not share cookies and other info with each other.
  5. Signal, Element, or Session for chat messaging, though you will need other people on the platform as well or your message will not encrypted.
  6. MySudo for creating phone numbers, emails, etc. to use instead of your real personal information. Note: You may need a stock android/iPhone device to sign up for a plan. I was unable to while using CalyxOS.
  7. Self host as much as possible, such as storing your Bitwarden manager and files on your own machines.