Hans Hasselberg

I am concerned about the privacy a lot lately and I would like to share what I am doing in order to protect mine better.

TLDR; I pay cash and have as little data on other peoples computers aka the cloud as possible.

Offline

There is only one thing I did in my offline life but I am mentioning it first because it feels like most important thing to me: paying cash. As a result I am visiting ATMs way more often now and I am also keeping track of my expenses in a Moleskine notebook.

Online

At first I deleted lots and lots accounts from services I don’t use any more including Facebook, Dropbox and Yahoo. I moved to one time passwords for the rest. Then I told everybody to use an email address from a domain I own: me@hans.io instead my previous GMail address. Because ultimately I don’t want to use Google anymore. I migrated my emails to Fastmail and when enough people knew about my new email I deleted my whole Google account. I still have one for work, but thats out of my control.

The downside of not having Dropbox is that I need to backup my data. I have two encrypted disks, one is used for Time Machine and the other one SuperDuper!. Additionally I am using Arq to store an encrypted Backup on AWS Glacier.

My smartphone broke and I did not bother to get a new one. I have a dumb phone now and I am more than happy with it.

I am manually sharing my contacts between devices, my files with a USB-stick and my calendar is only on my laptop.

There are countless things left to do. The next account I will delete is Amazon but I am not sure what to replace it with. There is probably only one solution: buying in real shops.

Conclusion

I feel better now. I know there are many other things you can do and this is certainly not the end but more the beginning of a long journey. I would love to hear what you are doing about it!