Digital Privacy is Impossible

I think digital privacy is almost impossible, unless you quit the internet all together. Most pieces of software or technology, spy on you in some kind of way. Privacy-invasive things include things like telemetry, be it opt in or opt out, regardless it is still telemetry. Operating systems are still not private enough, since a lot of them are proprietary software, and may include proprietary drivers for certain devices, which means you do not know what those drivers are actually doing, because they are not open source. Even the firmware on motherboards; UEFI is not fully open source, the various built-in software like the Intel Management Engine for Intel processors is not open source, CPU microcodes needed for updates, are not open source for most processor as well. A lot of things are not open source, but that does not mean they might not be private, you just have to trust that it is not doing anything malicious or privacy-invasive.

On the internet side, it is a really huge mess. People falsely believe that a VPN will grant them all of the privacy they need, which is completely false. The browser you are using, does it have WebRTC enabled? If yes, then that means your IP address was already leaked throught WebRTC. The cookies stored in your browser? That also could contain identifiers, website fingerprints, meaning basically your VPN is completely useless without a privacy respecting browser, that clears cookies by default, improves upon privacy overall, and disables WebRTC. Even after all of that, you still have one problem: JavaScript, which can sometimes include tracking, or some sort of telemetry, meaning there are still some privacy-invasive things around. Nearly all websites on the internet that are fairly popular, use JavaScript.

Data, everyone wants your data. The average piece of data from a U.S. citizen is worth a lot of money, which is why people target the U.S. for data collection of any kind. Large tech companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and many more collect a lot of data about you. If someone made a Google account, and gave Google a lot of data from their life, and then deleted their account. Do you really think Google deleted that data? Or at least anonymised that data? You would have to trust that company, that was sued multiple times over monopolistic practices, and overall a terrible court record.

In summary, while we cannot achieve complete privacy. We can increase the amount of privacy we have, by at least minimizing some data collection or trying to stop it, in any way that we can.