Me. I deal with IT security every day at work. I'm also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). There are also other members that have similar background that I'm sure can speak their minds as well. I think Roger was asking in another thread about options for communicating securely. If you still want to stay online and have a smart phone, there are some suggestions that have been made by members. I'll just add my 2 cents here. Take it for what it's worth...
Get rid of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft logons. If you need an explanation of why at this point, please do yourself a favor and start a thread calling Travis a homo and enjoy that for a while.
For me, getting rid of Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft logons was easy, I just ripped the Band-Aid off. Google is more complicated. My Gmail account is all over the place online. I need to scrub all my online accounts. Cancel all the ones that are stupid to keep, and then change my account email address for the rest. If you have an android phone, it's difficult to use without a Google account and still use the core services or fetch apps off the Google play store for instance. It isn't impossible but it would required way more expertise than many have. But you can go into your Google account details and turn off a bunch of features like location history, search history etc. Yeah they probably can dig that off their servers but it would take effort.
I am going to a secure email address and account. An organization called protonmail is out of Switzerland. It's secure, encrypted email, they don't have ads, and they don't keep logs of email. They claim that even they cannot read your email. They also have a real VPN app (not just a proxy server) that does end to end encryption from your device to the VPN server. That makes it impossible for your ISP to watch your activities. Both the email and the VPN have free options, without ads and without logging and with full encryption. The paid accounts offer more features and bandwidth like being able to secure multiple devices simultaneously, having multiple email alias accounts, more load balancing across multiple servers, more email storage, more bandwidth etc. They only make money if someone gets a paid account so you may want to consider that. As an example, I got a paid email and VPN bundle deal on Black Friday for $8/ month called their "plus" plan. I can try and find a link to that if anyone is interested if it's still active on their web site.
For a messenger, a lot of people use Facebook messenger. Again, at this point- stupid. Some folks use a messenger called Whatsapp. Well, Facebook bought them, so still stupid. I am researching a secure messenger called "Signal", which is open source, not owned by any of the douche bag tech companies, and offers end to end encryption. That's all I know for now. If anyone is interested in that as an option, I will check it out and reply to the thread. The challenging thing about a messenger, is that whoever you communicate with will likely need the same app or the end to end encryption is moot and you might as well just shout your secrets out the window at rush hour.
For online searches, please do not use Google, Yahoo, or Bing anymore. Some have suggested they use Duckduckgo. That's better but not best imo. Yes, you are not using the Google servers for your searches. But as OP mentioned in another thread, Duckduckgo does use an archive of Google's search database. Google may not be tracking your searches in real time, but the search results may be optimized by their AI algorithms to give you targeted results that THEY want to give people to steer humans' thinking in a certain direction. For example, if you were to search on "corrupt politicians", Google's AI may give you a bunch of targeted results referring to Trump first, instead of Biden or Hilary etc. And that bias may be archived in what Duckduckgo uses. As someone mentioned in another thread, I use Qwant for a search engine which is out of France.
Bottom line, when looking for ways to securely communicate online, there is no perfect solution, but some simple changes can make you a lot more obscure. When looking at secure email, messengers and search engines, it's sad to say but I tend to look at options under the European Union security laws. Their privacy laws are much more strict than ours in the States. Our tech companies are in on the agenda and they are in bed with some very bad people.
Take care and welcome to Amerika comrads.
