And before GTA VI.

Love it. Lol.

Even if you never went online, heaps of data about you is collected and sold.

• ALPRs collect and sell your car’s movement and location data.
• Stores you shop at collect identity data and share your purchases and consumer behaviors, even when you pay cash.
• Banks and financial institutions share information about your assets, financial holdings, purchases, and electronic transactions.
• Governments mandate that all sorts of information about you is public.

And if you are online, the “be as anonymous as you can and don’t share your personal data over the internet.” statement makes it sound easy, which is far from true. It’s a constant game of whack-a-mole where one needs incredibly disciplined to compartmentalize and segregate login sessions across browsers and devices. If one isn’t technically skilled and constantly vigilant, it’s a losing battle. That’s why awareness and campaigns that support privacy focused regulation are important.

Yeah. I’ve heard good things about Ente. For me, I was at a storage tier where i was over 100gb of docs & photos, and between 1 & 2TB when you include video. Most hosted services get kinda pricey at those storage tiers.

I didn’t really set out to self host, but since in needed to solve for docs, photos, and videos, I just went with self hosting. I’m happy with it, just acknowledging that it’s not for everyone

His do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.

I was the same as you. Got Gmail way back when. I’ve left pretty much all google services at this point except YouTube.

For me, mail and cal were the easiest things to switch switched to mailbox.org. I tried Proton first, and i like using Proton quite a bit, but opted for Mailbox because my my wife (who wants to keep Gmail for personal) can get IMAP for mailbox and her remaining google in a single app. Proton is more polished, but Mailbox suited our need better. Tuta is good too.

Switching away from Google docs and Photos was harder. I used google docs extensively, and it was harder to find a good replacement. Same for photos which used since it was Picasa. I opted for self hosted for those (Paperless-ngx, nextcloud, and immich). I like paperless a lot. Its tons better than google drive for static docs. Immich is pretty promising, and has some great tools. But you do sacrifice a bit of polish and simplicity. Still worth it for me.

Price of self hosting is probably a wash compared to paid storage as long as you ignore the cost of your labor to learn and set it all up.

They should just mandate that the child pornographers set the evil bit. It would save the EU leaders the trouble of learning how cryptography works.