Motivation and approach

Like many people, the question of how my personal and behavioral data are treated on the web bothers me. The reasons of my concern, without going into details, are mainly of an ecological nature:

• Ecological: the gigantic amount of indexes generated from each personal data, each e-mail, each click or like is a source of great digital and ecological pollution.
• Libertarian: I would like to have control over what is done with my data, to whom they are given, and for what reason.

What motivated me the most was when I saw the astronomical amount of data that a company like Google collects and holds on me Google Dashboard, or the number of trackers embedded in the applications on my Android smartphone. For this I used the application Exodus on Google Play.

Then I started a gradual path towards controlling my data, without going too far or sacrificing some features that today provide useful services. Now that I have relatively achieved my goals, I would like to share and discuss my approach.

The actions I have taken follow some guiding principles:

• Favour open-source tools
• Pay for some services and don’t look for free at any cost
• Continuity of service across my different devices: from the PC to the smartphone and the tablet.

Implementation

On the PC

I have identified the following services that exploit my personal data and I have chosen alternatives to them:

• The operating system
• Document storage in the cloud
• The office suite
• The browser
• The search engine
• The password management tool
• Map and navigation service
• The service provider for e-mail and calendar
• Office tool to access contact list, email and calendar
• The note-taking tool
• The tool to manage my personal library.
• The podcast application

On the phone

On my Android, I have identified the collection of my personal data via the services:

• The application launcher
• The browser
• The touch keyboard
• The application to access the list of contacts, email and calendar
• The messaging and conferencing tools
• The note-taking tool
• The client of my Document Cloud
• Social networks
• The Podcast application

Social networks

Since commercial social networks are the area that most exploits personal and behavioral data, I tried stracks everal open-source social networks and ended up adopting Fediverse.

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The details of these actions are provided in the following posts.

2. Choice of tools on the PC
3. Choise of applications on Android
4. Replace proprietary social networks with the Fediverse
5. Cleaning up my footprints on commercial social networks