TL;DR

Those around me will know I keep flipping and flopping between privacy and convenience. This article is not meant to pursuade you in any way but rather a documentation of my experience. Apparently Google pops up multiple times here but it’s not on purpose at all (trust me 😉).

The beginning

I believe every privacy advocate started somewhere, along the lines of a tech enthusiast. This was similar for myself, I remembered a time where I downloaded every Google product there was on the playstore even with no real reason at all. It wasn’t that I used the product, it just felt awesome to see all the tools that were available from these big companies. I also remembered a time where we were on the internet solely for games, and that Facebook was our door to this wonderland. I mean, the best way to understand something is to use it yourself. I usually see advocates coming from the programming community. I don’t think this is a coincidence, I for one had seen a fair share of code that pays no respect to privacy at all. Not saying that everyone who believes in privacy are programmers, but it’s the knowledge that these are happening which sets of the alarm.

Where all my headaches come from

I am sure at some point, one will come across videos on YouTube sharing the importance of privacy. I don’t exactly remember what was my trigger, but I faintly remember it had something to do with the Google Account privacy center. If you recall, there was a time where I was on every Google product, so I think you can picture my astonishment at how much information was logged about me, even details that I don’t remember accessing. From the instance I signed up for the account until that point, everything was captured. Do keep in mind that I wasn’t so much of a programmer back then.

My stand

I for one don’t care about my privacy in a way that if I know and of course trust you enough, I will pass you access to all my accounts without second thoughts. However, Google and every other company that I have accounts with isn’t even someone or a group of people I’ve met in person. This is where I draw the line which is also why I am 100% fine with using Instagram and creating this blog. These are things that I am more than willing to share with everyone, information that passes my test. In the case of Instagram, I do not usually browse the feed and it’s not running in the background all the time which I will share later.

Well, as someone that also work in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it does seem a little contradicting that I am going against the one thing that made it possible in the first place, data. It’s true that these data are very powerful when used appropriately, but I do not think that all sorts of data needs to be collected. At the same time, I do believe in open source. Like all the wonderful things that had been created by this open source community (Blender, Android, Linux, etc…). If your code is open source and you are transparent about what goes in and out, by all means, have a bit of me. But until then, I will probably limit my use of these tools.

What’s the use of knowing every single app a user opens with the precision in the seconds? The most and only function I can think of is to suggest the app that a user will open next. But like in an entire gallery of 30+ apps that users have, the probability that what you suggest is what they want would be like a hit of miss. It’s a little spooky and almost as if Google just collects data for the sake of it, like who knows whether in the future it might come in handy for some feature that they are building.

I believe that’s enough on my take, do also share your views with me.

Limiting data about myself

One of the first steps that I took, naturally was to curb the influx of my information hitting the servers of these companies. I stop analytics and logs as far as possible. When not necessary, I also steer alway from the use of certain products that I don’t need at all or there are privacy alternatives to.

Obstacles

Stopping the use of such products is actually quite a challenge and I can see why people get stuck in the ecosystem. The thing that hit me hard was on the topic of convenience. For Google, there are just so many services tied to one account. What you do on one service can easily be transfered and continued in other places. Another thing also comes down to design choices. Google is famous for their Material Design. I can’t say the same thing for many other open source products, to quite an extend, aesthetics is quite an attractive plus point (I mean we have UI and UX as an entire module). However, I do understand the amount of work that needs to be put in to make it possible. I am sure if these two challenges are tackled, the transition for many people will be much less of a decision.

In my case, these obstacles weren’t that big for me. I could easily do alway with convenience (maybe) and aesthetics. Aesthetics isn’t a major consideration and I place functionality over it, but convenience has proven once and again to be the achilles heel. It had resulted in the many times where I recreated an Instagram account and going back to the services that I left behind. Take two examples that we take Google for granted, it’s YouTube and Maps service. Until you leave it, you wouldn’t know how useful they were. Like, my early days of programming were all from YouTube. Convenience also comes in things like calendar where everything is recorded down for you. I feel rather that this helps me improve on my memory and also decrease my phone usage so as much as I don’t favour it, I know it’s good for me.

Relapse

For myself, I see it as two ends of a spectrum, the relation between privacy and convenience. I usually go to both extreme ends at any point in time and seldom linger in the middle. To me it doesn’t make much sense to give up halfway. If I were to choose privacy, I would do that, and vice versa. So these are the times where my friends will ask what happened. I would usually go with “Mood Swing” and “Magic” to explain what happen to my Instagram. I am using Instagram here because apparently not many people my age use Facebook at all. I have no idea why 🤔.

Next step forward

So having limit my information from companies for a long enough, I’ve reached a point where I don’t or rarely use them at all. As such, the next logical step is to close these accounts which are now redundant.