Transcription
So, the past couple weeks, I've completely de-Googled. Wait a minute. Is this real? I don't use any of Google's so-called free services. PewDiePie is done with Google. PewDiePie is a privacy advocate.
Now, this all started because of privacy concerns. Being tracked with literally everything I do just feels kind of odd. I'm really happy to see this development. It came out after Felix started building his own computer and then he installed Linux on it, and he absolutely fell in love with the whole world of open source and Linux itself. And now he seems to be going yet another step further with this whole journey and realizing that the importance of open source is not just for the freedom to install whatever you want and modify your gadgets, but it's to also protect your fundamental human and digital rights, such as your right to privacy, which is being violated by literally every single proprietary and centralized service out there. And I'm very happy to see that PewDiePie is now making these videos about this because he's doing this important advocacy for the stuff that we privacy advocates have always been struggling to get out there, to get to the normal, regular people.
I've been doing this on my channel since like 2016, right? And I realized that a lot of my talking points are really just preaching to the choir. I really, I try to get to as many people as possible, and I really try to get even the normies, which is why I'm on YouTube. But the YouTube algorithm works in a way that it does not really open you up to the outside of your bubble, to new communities. So it was really frustrating to see that I cannot actually reach the masses as widely as it is needed. So now, with PewDiePie, one of the biggest channels out there, proactively promoting and going out of his way to actually promote Linux, open source, and now privacy, is a massive win for all of our communities.
Now, I have a lot of things to say about what this video, PewDiePie being done with Google, is about, and I have a lot of my own suggestions about what you can do with your privacy setup. I admire what Felix is doing here because he's going this self-hosted, I'm my own boss route, which is valid, and it's absolutely amazing. However, not everybody is really willing to go that route. And because Felix is also making this point that it is important to protect your privacy, I want to build up on the strategy that he is showing to his audience. And if you stumble upon this video, I want to help you find maybe easier ways that you can achieve the same level of privacy protection that Felix is getting with his decentralized, self-hosted solution.
So, right off the bat, Felix starts with where it is most important, and that is your search engine. He's suggesting DuckDuckGo, and there is like not much else to, you know, talk about this. DuckDuckGo is not a self-hosted solution. You can have more decentralized search engines if you want to, but, uh, I personally do use DuckDuckGo. There are other options such as Startpage, Quant, Ecosia. You can also use Searx, I think, and maybe there are some other options. DuckDuckGo is solid. The reason it is important to change your search engine is because this is something that you probably use the most out of all of these things, and it is the easiest to change. You don't have to do anything. You either change your default search engine inside your web browser settings, or you can also install the DuckDuckGo search engine app on your iOS or Android. DuckDuckGo also comes with this search bar and other widgets, and it has some privacy features built into it, anti-trackers. It can also wipe your search history from the device so that it's not being used to track you in some way. That is a browser on its own, so we can use it in that way too. And it is just a fascinating way to start moving away from Google. And we are not moving away from Google for the sake of being de-Googled. We are doing it for privacy reasons because you can have a completely de-Googled device on an iPhone, and you would still not be any reasonably more private.
The next most important step is obviously to change your web browser. Even though a lot of people are using native mobile applications, browsing is one of the major ways that you are being surveilled and tracked on the internet. Felix is suggesting Firefox, which is the nonprofit, open-source champion in the world. It has decades of experience, and Firefox is really good. Although Firefox really does have some problems with development, mostly in terms of their security features, unfortunately. And this has been proven to be the case, Firefox is not as secure as Chromium-based browsers. Now, everybody knows Google Chrome, and hopefully everybody knows that Google Chrome is bad for your privacy because it is a Google product. It's proprietary. It is spying on your activities. So you need something else. Fortunately, you can take what is great about the Google Chrome, which is the open-source Chromium engine, and have it on a different web browser, which is, for instance, on GrapheneOS, which is a phone that Felix mentions in his video. You can actually use Vivaldi, which is ultra-secure and also very private web browser. If you don't have GrapheneOS, you can also use something like Brave browser, which comes with its own privacy enhancement features that are not found elsewhere, and is also stripped off all the Google tracking that's built into the Google Chrome.
The third most important step in your privacy journey should also be changing your email address. I've done many videos about this privacy strategizing and, uh, the steps that you need to be taking, and Felix is very much following the exact formula that I've actually created for myself and for my viewers. I don't know if he actually watched any of my videos or how he figured this stuff out, but it's not that I'm the only one that figured it out, but it would be really awesome if he actually watched at least one of my videos. Changing your email address can be very, very simple. As Felix suggests, you can use Proton Mail. I think Tutanota, which is based in Germany, is also very good, if not better than Proton Mail. In many instances, it is just as secure and just as private, and probably even cheaper than Proton Mail. But both Proton Mail and Tutanota are very good options. You can obviously self-host your email. The problem with email is that it doesn't really have any privacy built into it. So if you are just messaging anyone from outside of Proton or from outside of Tutanota, the contents of the messages is not going to be encrypted unless you go out of your way and exchange the PGP keys and all that stuff, which is a complicated mess of things where everything can go wrong if you just make one mistake. The benefit of using something like Proton Mail and Tutanota is that neither of these providers are going to be using your inbox to spy on you or monetize you or target you with ads. So while you have the Proton Mail and Tutanota encrypted within themselves, the bigger benefit that I see in these email providers is that when you install them on your phone or use them on your laptop or wherever, they're not actually like following you around the web or tracking your activity across apps as Google is, for instance, doing because Google has Gmail. When you have Gmail, it's not just that you're giving up your emails to Google. You're also giving up all of your other activities across different apps and websites that have nothing to do with Google on the surface. But behind the scenes, there is hidden Google Analytics and tracking pixels or tracking code that these developers have put in there, and Google is just spying on your information that way.
The next step that Felix is going for is to use a GrapheneOS device on a Pixel. Pixel is a Google phone, but if you install GrapheneOS on it, you actually like remove all of the Google code and trackers on it. So Google is actually not making any money off of you outside of that single hardware purchase that you made, which, in my opinion, this is perfectly fine with me because the primary market for Google, the major revenue stream is obviously advertising and services. So if I'm not allowing Google to advertise on me, and I'm not giving them any money for their services, then the fact that I bought their phone is actually probably losing them more money, which I'm very much for. Now, GrapheneOS is a privacy-enhanced and security-focused mobile operating system that is based off Android, but is building a lot of privacy-enhancing features that no other phone, including the iPhone, has. Many of the benefits that GrapheneOS offers are actually invisible to the end user. It's like memory allocator and hardened SE Linux policies that overall make your operating system so much more secure that it's just very, very difficult and expensive to hack into it, to compromise it, even by advanced nation-state sponsored hacking groups. Most importantly, you can pretty much use GrapheneOS completely anonymously. You don't have to use a Google account. You don't have to use any Google app, and still get your favorite apps on it. You can use it pretty much as any other Android device. You don't have to learn anything new. Any app is going to work on GrapheneOS with a very, very small selection of exceptions that can be, you know, substituted for something else. I'm using GrapheneOS exclusively as my daily driver. I literally do not have any other phone other than GrapheneOS, and it's perfect. It may sound kind of scary that like you're installing a custom ROM on your mobile device, but it's really not that problematic. Like, it's extremely simple. It's a matter of just plugging in your phone into your laptop, for instance, and then using the GrapheneOS website to just install GrapheneOS on your phone. You don't have to learn any coding. You are not actually using any like commands or anything like that, which is something that PewDiePie likes to showcase his Linux command skills in his videos. With GrapheneOS, this is not the case. It is extremely simple. It is the most simple installation that you can experience in your whole life. And also the chances of you actually breaking something to the point that you cannot actually recover from that are very, very close to zero. So GrapheneOS has went very, very far for the end user to make security and privacy the paramount feature of what they're doing, but also making it as user-friendly as possible so that anyone and literally everyone could be using this.
Now, the next step for Felix is, uh, a choice of password managers, and Felix is using something called Vaultwarden, which is actually coming from the company called Bitwarden. And Bitwarden is an open-source, privacy-focused password manager where you can actually sign up for that service. Yes, you're actually paying a subscription fee. What Felix is using is self-hosted. That's the Vaultwarden version. But if you don't want to self-host and you are just okay with paying a relatively small fee for a very, very good service, I highly recommend Bitwarden. Bitwarden is going to be doing all of that synchronization and cloud backups for you for your passwords. The passwords are all going to be encrypted. So you will only have to remember your password to the Bitwarden itself. You can secure Bitwarden with a second factor authentication. And actually Bitwarden does have a free plan that you don't have to pay anything for, but I actually highly recommend that you get the paid version so you have access to more features. And if you want to have something that is just a file that does not exist anywhere in the cloud, then I would highly recommend KeePass. You can get KeePass from KeePassXC for a laptop, for a Linux laptop, for instance, or you can get KeePass for your Android phone or even the iPhone, I think, and you can just manage your passwords completely offline, and then they don't have to travel anywhere if that's what you want.
Now, then Felix is talking about note-taking, which is one of these things that, that Google has a product for pretty much anything that you would want to do on the internet. Note-taking is one of those things that people actually like, probably don't even know that there are alternatives that are very, very secure and very private. I personally like Standard Notes and also Notesnook. These are very good note-taking apps. They allow you to do plenty of, uh, text editing, and it's a very good office replacement also. It has reminders and all that stuff, and all of it is encrypted, which is the absolute gold standard that I want to have in all of my apps. I want all of my content to be end-to-end encrypted so that I am the only one who has access to what I'm writing about. I want any of my information, especially my thoughts and ideas, to be accessible to anyone except for me. It is possible to self-host note-taking, but I personally like to use something like Notesnook or Standard Notes because I can just log into my Notesnook or Standard Notes account and access my notes from anywhere and just, you know, resume work from where I left it.
For Google Drive alternatives, there are several options that you could choose from. I personally like Proton Drive, although it's kind of like new and it doesn't have as many features as, uh, Google Drive does, but in terms of like syncing your files between different machines that you might have, and then, uh, uploading a backup of your files to the drive, using something like Proton Drive could actually be quite reasonable. You can also back up your photos in there. If you just want something to back up your photos, maybe that is Crypt.ee, and it's also very good, although it only exists as a web app, so you would have to access it from the web browser. It doesn't have a mobile app. And there's also Tresorit, which I think is actually offered by the Swiss Postal Service, which is interesting. But the most important thing is that whether you decide to go the self-hosted route or not, you want to make sure that your cloud backups are encrypted, either end-to-end encrypted, especially if you go for a third-party provider, or at least encrypted in some way that only you can access. Otherwise, you know, people could get access into your cloud backups.
Now, for AI, I've done actually like lots of AI videos recently talking about how you can set up open-source AI and open-source models on your host machine. You can self-host it in a server if you want to, or you can just run it on your laptop if you have a powerful enough laptop. Some models can actually run off of your phone. Some of them you would have to get like a separate GPU device, probably, which you can get. You can run it on your computer. Felix says that he has a powerful computer. The easiest way to start running a local LLM today, I think, would be with something called Jan.ai. And that is pretty much a front end for you to open up an LLM and any anyone that you want, and just text with it or do whatever you want with it, maybe, you know, let it analyze some information for you. And you can download any model that is capable of running on your laptop with your computer with the hardware that you configured. There's also another way to get all of this running, and that's with Open WebUI, and I have tutorials that I've done on my channel, and I've done in collaboration with Naomi Brock over on her channel. So you can check that out. I'm going to leave all the links to the videos in the description. So, yeah, go ahead. And running an LLM locally, I think, is a must if you want to use an AI. Although these AIs are going to be less powerful than the large cloud-based AIs, I would never trust something like OpenAI or Gemini or anything that is uploading all of my prompts to these companies, and then these companies can use them for whatever purpose and reason, including training of their future models.
Now, then Felix is talking about something called Nextcloud. I've had experience with Nextcloud, but I haven't been using it very much recently, but you can go ahead and give it a try if you want to. Nextcloud is very much about self-hosting all of your stuff. Although you can find different providers offering you different Nextcloud services if you want to. A lot of these are for free, some of these are paid. I think you can find a different provider for different things. Like, for instance, Proton is not just Proton Mail. It is also Proton Drive. It is ProtonVPN and many of the other Proton products that are out there. So it's a suite of apps that you can have inside Proton. Same with Tutanota. Tutanota also comes with a calendar app, and that's also very good. So Nextcloud is something like that, like it's a suite of apps that you can use, and the biggest benefit of Nextcloud is if you can self-host everything.
Now, for the final thing, I think that Felix is mentioning is, uh, the replacement for Google Maps. And he says that the first time I used my open-source alternative, I ended up 30 minutes late. He doesn't mention which one it was. I think that's good that he doesn't mention it because I think it was his fault for getting it wrong, to be honest, because I've been using open-source maps exclusively for the past 10 years or more, and I was never late, and I never was able to not find the place that I was looking for. And the only two map apps that I've been using are OSM and Organic Maps, and both of these are pretty much based off OpenStreetMap, and they are excellent. I was never able to not find a route, and that's whether it's for hiking, for trails, for biking, car navigation. I don't use that much because I don't actually have a car. But, you know, I was able to find everything in any country or any city that I've been to. So I don't know what the problem Felix had there, but you should absolutely use something like OSM or Organic Maps. What you should be doing is that you should be downloading apps that you need for your routes or for your trips to your phones. They're offline, so that you don't have to use any data or internet access to actually navigate. You can have all of your navigation happening on your phone without any data leaving your device. So there would be no tracking of your activities, even if you have GPS location enabled, because GPS in that scenario is just completely local. And what you can do, and this is what I do, is that I actually have my phone in airplane mode. And I only enable location services for the Organic Maps app or OSM, and no other apps know where I currently am. On top of that, if you're on GrapheneOS and you're extra paranoid, what you can do is that you can completely revoke internet access to these apps. So that after you downloaded a bunch of offline maps, you can revoke their internet permission. And even if they try to like track certain amount of information from you, they don't do that. But even if even if that was the case, you can just prevent them from doing that by running them completely offline, and you would have peace of mind, and none of your data would ever, would ever realistically leave your device.
Overall, I'm very happy that Felix made this video, and I really wonder if he actually watched any of my videos to, you know, get some of these ideas because they're very similar to what I've been talking about. There are plenty of other, you know, privacy sources out there that are going to be suggesting very, very similar stuff. But in terms of YouTube, I think I've been the longest advocate for this exact privacy setup that I'm recommending here. The biggest exception that I have with Felix is that like, I'm not self-hosting anything because I'm not actually in control of the premises where I would be doing the self-hosting, which is a very fancy way of saying that I don't actually own the place where I live. I am renting, and I move a lot. So I cannot actually afford to move all of my self-hosting setup with me at all times. But yeah, if you're inspired by PewDiePie's video to start your own privacy journey and you don't want to learn all the complicated self-hosting, which you can do, but if you don't, then feel free to follow the setup that I've expanded on in my video and follow any of my privacy tutorials that I have on my YouTube channel. And I also talk a lot about privacy, security, anonymity, and other stuff on my Patreon podcast, which I highly recommend that you join and listen to all of my episodes so that you can actually get even more information and tutorial analysis about all of that. So, thank you very much. Have a good one, and goodbye.