We are already naked, to some of the tech giants. Now before you signup with another new service or install another new app on your phone that asks for a lot of unreasonable access, you must think twice, before you undo your pants to yet another company.
There are two approaches for amateurs for hiding their asses across online ecosystems.
1.You sell yourself to a maximum two tech companies and their ecosystems. Give them everything, drop your pants. And never use these services to login to other websites.
Personally I somewhat trust two companies, Google and Apple. I’m naked to them. And I’ve learned to accept it, for the ease and services they provide. But I am very careful about giving access to certain things to any other service. Those are my contacts book, my live-location, shopping and search habits.
I still hide two things from Google in particular. 1. my search habit, I always use incognito VPN enabled windows for searching, and I often avoid Google for searching altogether. I try to use DuckDuckGo (they suck) or Bing (they suck a little less). When I must use Google, I take precautions. 2. My voice. I recently have completely shut down microphone access to all Google owned services. I don’t trust Google with my voice.
2. Divide and rule: Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. If you are giving away your location to one company, don’t give them your voice. If you are giving away your camera and photos to one, don’t give the same one your location. So that there is always less than enough meta information and data points about you, if one system is compromised. Similarly, when you are communicating individual set of sensitive information, split the communication, i.e: send the username via iMessage and give the password over a phone call or a Signal text, without giving much context to any of the individual communications.
