How can I go back to using Google Drive, Gmail, downloading the WhatsApp application, trusting proprietary software in general?

How can I go back to convenience knowing what I know now? Constantly aware that I’m trading my privacy and my data for convenience? Why must this road be so arduous?

Genuinely struggling with this, how do you all manage? Do you just accept it and use this stuff trying to minimize how much information on yourself you give away? Or have you resigned to self-hosted email and wood cabins (unable to fully interface with payment systems, government bureaucracy, modern technology)?

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    5·
    24 hours ago

    I just do what is easy for me, some things are not worth the hassle of switching to a privacy focused alternative.

    For example replacing google drive with Syncthing was really easy for my use cases. Gmail was easy with my own domain and a good email service.

    Other things like facebook/reddit, banking, telegram, discord, etc… I don’t worry about it because the hassle factor is extreme.

    • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      my own domain and a good email service

      Sorry for being dense, but how does this work exactly? Do you register your own domain as something like mangopenguin.com and then how do you get email to go through that?

      • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Yep, you can register a domain through a company like namecheap or cloudflare. It’s about $10 a year.

        Then you just need an email service that supports custom domains, mailbox.org is a good one. Change your DNS records on your domain control panel to point to the servers given to you by your email service, and that’s it.