Those of you who are married, how do you go about privacy if your wife or husband does not care?
I have always been curious about
this. Did you get them to use other services or did they stubbornly refuse and you just accepted it? I am talking using Chrome, using Windows, using social media like Tiktok or Facebook or Instagram, etc. Bonus points if you have kids because that is even more work in the privacy realm
I don't try and push my weird opinions on my wife lmao. She knows how I feel and understands and does what she wants and that's okay. My advice is to communicate and respect each other even if you don't agree and don't be a controlling dork.
She got sick of pihole and my firewall blocking her Facebook memes, so she has her own segregated WiFi network, then she's less of an attack vector for me.
Aslong as she uses 2fa on her main accounts and has a password manager I'm happier than most.
on the contrary, I think it's a weird opinion to think that uploading personal photos and videos on surveillance capitalisme hubs is no big deal. It's a weird opinion to think that you've got nothing to hide from perverted companies and states.
Part of relationships is accepting people. They behave the way they do because they have values and preferences and don't always align with ours. Respect that. Make your case, but respect that they may not come to the same conclusions you do.
100% with you on this regarding relations with adults. But children is where it gets spicy. Like, for me, I genuinely believe I'm not doing my job as a father if I don't protect my children from google, meta, etc... My wife genuinely thinks she needs to protect them from me so that I don't ostrasize them from their peers. It's a real issue...
My spouse is almost the opposite of me in the privacy/FOSS realm.
They use TikTok and other social media, don't mind ads, use Windows, love Chrome and their Macbook, etc.
We've talked about privacy and FOSS a lot. They have the "I don't care if China/corpos/NSA mine my data, I have nothing to hide." Plus they like targeted ads and algorithmic content suggestions.
We have a lot of mutual respect for each other and I don't force my views on them, and they know I won't use certain apps. I gently suggest FOSS apps to them and sometimes they use them, sometimes not.
They also don't object to watching shows and movies with me that I "aquire totally legally" because I don't use streaming services.
I have told them that any children we have, I want to raise with a "FOSS first" philosophy, and they are cool with that.
Ultimately, I want my kids to have the choice of what software they use, FOSS or not. But for my part, they will know that I will only support the FOSS stuff, if they want to go proprietary, that's on them.
I've also discussed with my partner that they're welcome to use Facebook but I strongly object to putting photos of children on there until they're old enough to make their own decisions.
I've pointed out that posting publicly is purely for vanity reasons unless they've made a conscious decision to have exclusively friends and family. In other words, you don't need to please people who don't matter.
I make the private option easier than the locked in version.
Homeassistant will let us see our locations, run lights, run media centers, control AC, etc. So why do you need Google Home or Google Maps Location Sharing?
Signal will let us chat over WIFI unlike texts, and I will answer it unlike a Google chat account. Before the SMS death it was easier since it did SMS and signal in one app, easier to convince someone if it can replace the old one and add new features.
I configure two SSIDs, one for things I trust and one for those I don't. I can run firewall rules and add security on the backend where they can't see it.
Tiktok you can run a campaign against it by saying it damages cognition, is harmful to youth, supports the CCP.
You can run a pi hole style filter list,ehich might break some stuff so you have to be willing to play tech support.
I don't know anything about kids but it couldn't hurt to teach them some simple skills like html so they get a taste for what's happening behind the scenes.
Signal removing SMS support was the final straw that made me stop recommending it to friends. I had 100% of my contacts on Signal before that, and very few have left, but my new friends all use Instagram/Kakao/whatever.
I know that wasn't very related to your comment, but UGGHHH
The worst part is how confusing it was for older people, who were worried the whole app was going to not work.
Signal was upset that "oh well some people can't figure out what's SMS and what's encrypted", but that was kind of... good? You could give parents, grandparents, etc an SMS app that was easy as the old one, and secure with the right people.
Don't get me started on the chat color fiasco. No signal, I SHOULD NOT CHANGE COLOR. I assign colors to people to distinguish them, I don't change who I am based on who I talk to.
Home assistant really is a game changer. Not having ten different apps is great, finally got our roomba fully offlined with rest980 and it works better than the official app and doesn't take forever to load or abrupty stop when there's an aws outage
Robot vacuums are something non-tech people love, then they use the app and they don't love it anymore haha.
Shout out to Valetudo, which saved the day on our chinese roombas.
I am not quite happy with how the current iteration of the documentation no longer supports DIYing the firmware, it is actually still possible and you don't have to use dustbuilder.
I wouldn't say that my partner "doesn't care", but they take a much more pragmatic view than I which results in more exposure. In general, we do the following:
To a first approximation, they decide what apps and services they use. It's not a monarchy. They'll ask for feedback when comparison shopping, but often the answer is "every dominant ecosystem in this space is terrible, the privacy respecting options don't meet your requirements, this option is 5% worse and this one is 5% better... glhf".
For social media accounts that share posts about our nuclear family, we come to broad consensus on the privacy settings and practices. There's give and take here, but I make space to use dominant sharing apps and they make space to limit our collective exposure within reason. If I have a desire to "harden" the privacy settings on a service, it's on me to put in the effort to craft the proposed settings changes and get their buy in on the implications.
I have many fewer privacy raiding accounts than they do. I both benefit from transitive access to the junk they sign up for, and pay a cost in my own privacy by association. This just is what it is. The market for partners that align with my own views perfectly is basically zero though, and honestly I probably wouldn't put up with my shit even if I could find one.
If I can self-host a competitive option for a use-case that I'm happier with... they'll give it the old college try. But it has to actually be competitive or they'll fail out of the system and fall back to whatever works for them. If we can figure out what's not working we'll sometimes iterate together, but sometimes it's just not good enough and we go back to something I like worse.
It's basically like navigating any other conflict in values. You each have to articulate what your goals are, and make meaningful compromise on how to achieve something that preserves the essentials on both sides. As a privacy outlier, sometimes one also needs to be able to hear "I want to do normal shit and not feel bad about it" and accept it. But if we do want to reach for outlier privacy practices in some specific area, it's on us to break that desire down into actionable steps in realistic directions at a sustainable pace and to not ignore the impacts to our partners of the various tradeoffs we're proposing. Privacy is often uncomfortable and we need to acknowledge the totality of what we're asking for when we ask our partners to accommodate our goals there.
It's a bigger sacrifice for her to come to my side on these issues, or even just meet me in the middle, then it is for me to do the opposite. Also, at the beginning of our relationship I was nowhere near as privacy-conscious as I am now, so I feel it is very unfair for me to turn around years into a relationship and start making demands of the other person. At the same time, she is respectful of my individual choices and doesn't mock them even though she doesn't see the value in them herself (which is the same for many aspects of our lives). We come from significantly different backgrounds and have very different perspectives on a whole range of things (politics, religion, lifestyle, etc), but we both see beyond those superficial differences to the person at the core. That's what we fell in love with, not all the other stuff which we are repeatedly told is so very important in our increasingly polarised society.
Please detail the arcane wizardry which allowed you to achieve the respectful of your choices part you described, because it is the only way your story differs from my own situation.
It's hard to say why we are like that with each other. Sometimes I think the fact that we faced so many unusual and difficult challenges early on in our relationship has made us less susceptible to these relatively normal problems that every couple experiences. Even the first few months (which are carefree for most couples) were filled with big commitments and sacrifices for us, so compared to that stuff everything else is so minor that it barely registers as an issue. Also, I think she is an unusually kind person and I am an unusually laid-back person and that is a combination that rarely leads to conflict.
I'm sorry I can't be more helpful, but it's not really something we actively worked at. Are you saying that you and your partner are also from opposite worlds but haven't found a way to reconcile some of your differences?
What good is your privacy of those closest to you can be used to track you.
In short. I won't force them, my spouse, to use privacy apps if she does not want it. I've accepted that absolute privacy in my case is impossible. So I use privacy apps because I like them not because I don't want to be tracked. Heck, even my credit card tracks me, a service i cannot continue living without.
I'm annoying my girlfriend by installing a dns ad blocker that sometimes interferes with her work, and I have to whitelist things when her work links doesn't work (Microsoft stuff).
It's a bit of an annoyance but I feel strongly about not letting these companies get data about what we are doing.
Just yesterday I installed a kodi plugin (called "up next" ), and turns out it's reporting back what shows I'm watching! The only reason I became aware of this is because it was blocked by the dns ad blocker.
I care about my apps not calling home and reporting what im doing. It should be illegal.
Im in that situation but instead of stubbornly refusing she just does not want to invest the times or effort into privacy. But she was cool with me doing a few things like changing her to different mail providers, changing her browser to firefox and installing a few add-ons that help without being intrusive. But other than that she doesn't really care enough. She uses Instagram and all those apps and I won't try convince her. It is her life and her decision.
However the topic has a different tone when it comes to our kids. We discussed this before having kids and agreed on rules we both are okay with. Things like no pics on social media or WhatsApp of any of them. Or which apps they get to use at what age etc. Luckily when it comes to them my wife is more willing to invest time and effort into privacy.
even if you are someone who subscribes to the mindset "nothing to hire, nothing to fear", kids can't make that decision yet, themselves so I've always found it nice when people don't include their kids on socials until they're at least a teenager or so, granted I don't have kids, this is just from a bystanders pov.
family vlog channels back in the day always left a bad taste in my mouth.
Yeah that's how I feel about ads targeting children (even when the products are intended for children): they are not yet equipped to look at the ads critically and recognize when they're being manipulated.
What I've done is set up a default DNS block list for the whole home internet, and given others their own. I'm using NextDNS, so profiles are easy to set up for individual people with different tastes. I have my own that is relatively strict, and I have lighter configurations for others so that less things are blocked for them. I think you can do a similar thing with a PiHole, but I'm not entirely sure on that.
I’d like to look into that further for PiHole which is what I use. I get a lot of complaints from the mrs so she usually just defaults to turning off Wi-Fi on her phone.
IME something like Signal is an easy sell since it's simple and works well. For all the fair criticism about relying on phone numbers it makes the onboarding easy. For other things compartmentalising helps, e.g., "okay we'll collaborate using this cloud file storage but I personally will be accessing it through the browser while keeping most of my files in a SyncThing over here". While I self-host certain things I don't volunteer to do that for family/friends because it will be too frustrating for everyone if/when I let them down.
In this kind of situation there's a fine line between someone who maximises their privacy through tech decisions and someone who makes their "correct" tech choices their self identity. If you drift into the latter, being asked to compromise can feel like an attack, leading to overreacting and coming across as insecure and annoying. Not to psychoanalyse anyone in particular but sometimes I think people need a reminder.
An agressive DNS and packet inspection based adblocker (to block CNAME cloaking attempts to bypass blocklists and share cookies when blocked), and teaching my SO how to bypass it to play her mobile games, or load websites that are blocked unintentionally.
Despite being a Chrome user, she shows an interest in Firefox due to the effectiveness of its addons, pop-up blocking, and our steamlinks actually shows the Netflix/APV stream when watching from Firefox, whereas Chrome shows a black screen.
TikTok and Instagram are accessed very, very sparingly in the household.
My parents on the other hand, keep trying to convince me to come back onto WhatsApp, which is a hard no for me personally. Ever since it stopped working on one of my devices a while back, I haven't exactly missed it, and I don't want Facebook-owned apps on my mobile anymore out of principle.
I imagine it being quite difficult to explain the many, many reasons to them behind my reasoning for caring about who stores my personal data, tracks my personal activity for purposes that don't benefit myself, and what apps go on my device.
I semi forced my partner to move to Telegram instead of Facebook Messenger to chat with me, but aside from that I kinda just accepted their own decisions
More for security than privacy, I also set up a Bitwarden account for them so they stopped ussing the same password on everything lol
@NENathaniel@MagneticFusion lucky! i tried to get my partner to use a password manager at LEAST and they refused with every inch of their life. maybe one of these days....
First of all, I try to offer her alternative and better ways of doing things. I selfhost a number of services that we both use and she also knows that she can come to me for advice and technical help.
I also got her a hardware key that is used together with a software password manager, to keep her passwords safe.
We also have a rule when it comes to social media. If she wants to post a picture of me, she needs to ask permission first.