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  "path": "/t/anti-privacy-measures-are-ruining-my-health-unsure-of-what-to-do/38491#post_7",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-12T14:21:56.000Z",
  "site": "https://discuss.privacyguides.net",
  "tags": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs"
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  "textContent": "Welcome. So first of all, please take a deep breath.\n\nThere’s more surveillance than ever, sure. But also, taking personal steps to improve your privacy has never been easier.\n\n> “When I would talk about this to people I know, I would either get told that I’m paranoid or I have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide”\n\nI would advice against doing that. “Normies” get scared about this stuff really easily. They navigate their world of privacy with what little they understand and what they can do, and don’t want to know anything that would increase their worries. You can only ask your closest friends to care to the extent of not sharing your personal life, and you can only ask them to use the same secure messaging apps. My experience is, that if they don’t major in CS, they have absolutely no idea about any of this stuff, and most likely won’t care.\n\nThe issue with news is media needs to sell, and fear sells. It sounds to me like you’re neck deep in news, and doing high effort magical thinking to try to change the world by stressing about it. That won’t work. One more privacy tool won’t help. One more consumer privacy law won’t fix it. It’s politics, which is an eternal tug-of-war between interest groups. This stuff is never going away.\n\nTo me it sounds your anxiety comes from deeply rooted lack of “basic trust” (Erik Erikson) that normally tells people the world is safe. You didn’t obviously learn it in your adolesence.\n\nSo let me say it. You’re safe. There’s a lot of people who go about their daily lives knowing what you know, and they’re not being shoved into the hole for speaking out. Take Cory Doctorow for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs You should try to find good role models like him, and remember that even at their position, with their opinions, charisma, platform, and influence, they’re fine.\n\nThere seems to be a lot of what-ifs in your internal monologue, like the “what if AI surveillance misidentifies me as a criminal”. You go about your day every day playing lottery with every car you come aross: the driver could be drunk, on drugs, get a seizure, or be mentally ill or suicidal. You accept those risks because being paralyzed by fear would mean you wouldn’t live your life at all.\n\nThe difference here is your extreme focus on privacy issues. You know every risk that’s been published, but you’re not an oracle and you don’t know the true probabilities of those risks. Thus, you can’t perform realistic threat modeling, and every infinitesimally unlikely threat is a perceived threat to you, simply because you can name it and describe it.\n\nYou need to focus on your mental health first.\n\nI say this with all the love I can muster: I don’t have the faintest idea who you are. You’re not in charge of the defence against surveillance state, and not I, nor anyone else is counting on you at the moment. We got great people like EFF’s Cory preaching to the public. We have ACLU’s Chris Soghoian advising senator Wyden, and we got FOSS project authors writing privacy-first tech. We can absolutely manage without you, but we’d LOVE to have you once you’re ready.  This means you have every right to focus on yourself, and get your mental health in order first.\n\nTo get there, you need to stop stressing over details of privacy stuff, and you need to start looking into what you can sustain. Here’s a few examples:\n\nOperating Systems\n\nE.g. do not waste energy trying to debloat Windows and to make it respect your privacy. It’s closed source and you’ll never know what it actually does. But you can compartmentalize. Run Windows only for games and occasional photoshop. If you can, disconnect it from net network permanently. The chances are, no big brother cares about you enough to bridge the air gap.\n\nOr, you can switch to Linux permanently. There’s a learning curve, sure, but you’d be surprised how much ChatGPT can help you to get started. Asking for it to explain how to do tasks in terminal isn’t really leaking sensitive things about your life. Stressing over LLMs is pointless as long as you don’t use it as a therapist or friend.\n\nBrowsers\n\nStop fuzzing about browser extensions and settings. Big lines matter most: Use Firefox for stuff you don’t care someone learns you doing online. Use Mullvad Browser and a decent VPN for when you want to avoid commercial surveillance. Use Tor Browser when you want to minimize what state surveillance can learn. Then through trial and error, try to figure for the Mullvad/Tor browsers which safety slider level you can have without it breaking your browsing experience. That’s it.\n\nMessaging\n\nIn case it’s a thing, stop trying to convert people to use your app. Close friends you have deep convos with don’t mind using private apps if you ask them. What apps they accept will affect how close relationship you can have with them.\n\nIf the close friend / partner understands your concern and is willing to switch, use Signal if you only want to keep what you say to them private. Use Cwtch if you want to keep it a secret you’re in contact with them in the first place (unlikely). Otherwise, use what they’re willing to use and self-censor accordingly. Best way to deepen relationships is F2F anyway, and that’s still mostly surveillance free.\n\nDiary\n\nStop worrying about computer endpoint security and (state) hackers having access to your private thoughts you write down. Save money and buy an old second hand laptop from Craigslist, and run a Full Disk Encrypted Linux without network on it. A 2010 potato laptop can run latest Lubuntu OS, so it doesn’t have to be anything fancy.\n\nPassword managers\n\nUse offline application. KeepassXC is great. Generate 128-bit random unique passwords for every service. Make sure you have keepass DB backup.\n\n* * *\n\nDeimos mentioned privacy fatique. It’s indeed real, and anything that requires frequent extra steps is something you’ll eventually give up doing anyway. Not today, but 10-15 years from now for sure. So again, the common theme with the examples above, is you need to identify critical things that have minimal robust fix (like the airgapped diary), and for everything else, you want Pareto optimal solutions (80% of privacy and security with 20% of work).\n\nAnd this advice is targeted to you specifically. You don’t sound like you’re in life-or-death situation wrt activism. You sound like you’d just prefer to be left alone, and you need to find peace. You won’t have time or energy for the trauma therapy if this stuff consumes your days, but I also get you can’t just drop it.\n\nSo start thinking strategically about ways to optimize the privacy stuff to start building resources (time and energy), and then get help ASAP. You said you weren’t made of money and I get therapy is expensive. If you manage to save up for it, make sure to find out beforehand that the therapist specializes in your childhoold trauma experiences. If nothing else, there’s always books. Avoid grifty self-help books, and instead try to find books written by therapists and experts of their field. Not many people know this but librarians aren’t there to just put books on the shelf. They have professional training for finding high quality literature for pretty much any topic.",
  "title": "Anti privacy measures are ruining my health, unsure of what to do"
}