The Cyber-Cleanse: Take Back Your Digital Footprint
New Year, New Digital You!
New Years are an opportunity for committing to resolutions, starting new habits, discarding what no longer serves us. Why not take the challenge and start a Cyber-Cleanse?
This is not a digital detox: one of those getaways where you lock your phone away for a few days and attempt to focus on the world around you instead of constant notifications. It's a chance to take stock of your digital footprint, clean up what you've left behind, and move with intention toward a different set of digital habits in the coming years.
Why Leave, Why Now?
For many of us, the events of the past few months have finally shone a light on the dangers of the personal data economy. It was never just about privacy. It was about the harvesting of human interactions to fuel something bigger. Massive corporations with imperial-style power. Founders turned CEO's turned oligarchs. Political power over what people in a democracy see, hear, and believe in their hearts to be true.
More recently, we've also seen that the apotheosis of what we once called Web 2.0--the "social web"-- was about building something bigger, that threatens our jobs, our care, our connection, our humanity: generative A.I. Systems that impress us with parlour tricks but are otherwise being sold, business-to-business, to cut employees and restore profits where efficiencies cannot otherwise be found.
Now more than ever, it's time to fight back. I invite you to take the challenge to cleanse your digital footprint, and embrace an online life according to different principles.
I promise, I'll be with you every step of the way!
The Opt Out Guide for Everyone
This is a user-friendly guide to retrieving your digital life from the Tech Giants. In a post per day over three weeks, I'll walk you through a process for changing your digital habits and services to set you up for success in 2025 and beyond.
For those looking to get a headstart over the New Year, I'll lead you through from January 1-January 21, 2025. If you follow along, by January 21, 2025 you'll experience a new, fresh, digital you.
Of course, you can start (or return to) this series at any time. Doing this in three weeks is intense, to be sure, but I'll try to keep the activities under an hour a day, some longer and some shorter.
Rome wasn't built in a day: similarly, if you built up a digital trail over decades online, it will take some time to deconstruct. And sure, you could just take the nuclear option and blow all your accounts away. But that doesn't ensure that the data is removed from the platforms. Some of this you have to be systematic about and remove step by step.
Plus, in many cases, you actually want to keep things handy. Emails. Contacts. Photos from that vacation fifteen years ago.That's okay. We'll find a way to retrieve it so that it is yours.
Remember, "the cloud" is just someone else's computer. Let's bring your data back home.
What this series is NOT
This is not a rejection of the Internet or your precious digital connections. If anything, you'll find you rediscover your digital agency and how it's been stripped from you! You'll engage in new ways online that put you in the drivers' seat. You'll also find your values start to shift. You'll stop asking if a service can do something for you, and instead ask what it wants from you in return--and whether that's a price worth paying, especially if it's "free."
It's also not a course for those deep into the InfoSec world (Information Security). I won't teach you how to go dark, how to move around the web entirely anonymously. But I will teach you how to take steps toward that direction, so that the path is available to you once these short weeks are up.
To that end, I will recommend systems and services that some people who are deep into infosec won't like. Internet nerds have deep and well informed opinions and controversies erupt all the time. For instance, some people recently are angry at Mozilla for some changes they are making, so they recommend not using Firefox. That's just one example. Some will be upset to find that I am still recommending Firefox -- among many other options.
Why? For one, I want to recommend user-friendly systems of many stripes. I will never tell you to just use one thing: the ball is in your court! I'll also tell you when there are concerns, some of which you may care about and others you won't. I don't think there is (or should be) one system to rule them all. There should be many options. We should use many of them, instead of just one. It's way more freeing to do so.
I also want to get you used to something new: moving. Jumping ship. Right now, we think of moving from one service to another like moving a house you've lived in for fifty years. It's a huge burden, and exhausting to even consider. This forces a kind of lock-in where users never want to leave. Tech companies count on this. Academics hand-wring over this form of lock-in, especially in social media.
But once you get started moving your data around, taking agency in how you work the web, you'll see it's actually much easier than you thought. That way, you might move to a new browser and not like it very much (for whatever reason)-- and instead of going back to Google, you'll try something new. Easy peasy. No moving company involved.
I'll clue you in to a different way to use the web. You'll pay more attention to tech gossip. You'll know if a company is doing something nefarious or making a change. You'll know what to do if so. You'll already have one foot out the door anyway.
That's because Opting Out isn't just about leaving systems we don't like -- it's about opting in to systems and communities we value instead.
Ready to get started? Click below!
- Day One: Getting Set Up
- Day Two: Better Browsing
- Day Three: Your Data Roadmap
- Day Four: Secure Your Email
- Day Five: Masking Email Addresses
- Day Six: Leave Gmail (or another insecure provider)
- Day Seven: Settle In
- Day Eight: Contacts and Calendars
- Day Nine: Secure Messaging
- Day Ten: Leave Social Media
- Day Eleven: Get Social Again
- Day Twelve: Password Protection
- Day Thirteen: Shop Securely
- Day Fourteen: Replace your Accounts
- Day Fifteen: Trash Unwanted Accounts
- Day Sixteen: Get a VPN
- Day Seventeen: Control your Collaborations
- Day Eighteen: Personal Photos
- Day Nineteen: Adios, Alexa!
Don't leave without doing at least one of the following:
- Bookmarking THIS PAGE so you can return daily
- Signing up for my mailing list for periodic reminders
- Subscribing via RSS reader to https://www.optoutproject.net/feed
Let's do it!
