How do you deal with Privacy?

Posted by satis
Aug 28, 2021 at 06:10 PM

I’ve given up a significant amount of privacy by choosing a task manager which uses its own cloud infrastructure and syncs events to Google Calendar, opening up my life to two companies. And I personally prefer apps whose data I just have to trust will be secure. But if I more gravely cared about personal privacy I’d choose apps that allow you to forgo syncing and keep my files locally on my phone (then have to choose between encrypted cloud backups or periodic manual backups).

My personal Journal Day One uses its own cloud but lets you lock individual journals with e2e encryption, which I do for my personal notes. Day One has been around for a decade and to date no encrypted journals have ever been breached by hackers. (Earlier this summer the company which owns Wordpress purchased them, so it’s likely we’ll see the ability to create and post to blogs in the near future.)

I retain copies of insurance papers, drivers license, passport etc inside encrypted 1Password vaults (although I could similarly lock them in individual encrypted, synced Apple Notes documents or in Day One).

If you don’t trust devs with your private data choose apps that offer end-to-end encryption to files in the cloud. Then it is not be a matter of trusting the cloud service you used.

If e2e encryption is a must then your’ve most powerful and popular apps. But with fewer apps to choose from you have an easier choice to make among the remaining apps. These days most top-tier, full-featured apps offer sync between mobile and desktop devices, and that necessarily means trusting the dev’s syncing and encryption technology, even if they don’t provide their own cloud data repository and let you use your own.

The most privacy-conscious option is to use (an even smaller subset of) apps that sync with something like Nextcloud, a suite of open source cloud sync software that lets you create your own e2e private file server by run on your own paid hosting instance.