Continuing on my ever-evolving privacy journey

I don't know if I ever really dug into the details of my own journey of freeing myself from Big Tech. I'm aware that I lean more Tinfoil Hattie and my kids always tell me I'm doing too much, but I still want some level of convenience. These are the caveats that have informed my choices so far:

1. When it comes to my kids, I can set up some limits on their devices and inform them of risks and give advice (and I do, to an annoying extent), but ultimately I can't control everything they do.
2. My family is in the Apple/iCloud ecosystem. We are making use of all the privacy and security tools they offer, but I'm not going to try to force them to adopt other tools.
3. While my partner and I are reasonably tech savvy, we don't have the time or money to put into a home server to self-host everything. We will probably start to dabble in the future, but not now.

School and work still run on Google Workspace. We're still using Apple products. But I am trying to disentangle us from these services as much as I can, and I am pretty happy with my progress so far.

Usable Youtube alternatives

In one of my previous posts I mentioned how difficult it was to find a replacement for Youtube, but it's recently become more urgent because of the AI age-verification they have started to implement.

On desktop, I've found Freetube to be a great replacement frontend, and I've been able to subscribe to all my favorite channels without having to hook up a Google account. Initial video loading is not as snappy, and occasionally YT breaks their code, but the devs are pretty quick to fix those issues. Outside of that, I haven't had any issues watching everything I've wanted to watch.

For iOS, Unwatched for Youtube is a decent app for watching videos, but probably not suitable if you use Youtube to listen to music.

Bringing down the cloud

As mentioned, my family is on the Apple ecosystem for the foreseeable future. I acknowledge this is ethically not great, and is only marginally better than Google in terms of privacy as far as we're aware, but I'm working to mitigate our dependence on iCloud so that we can gradually leave the service as our devices age out.

Part of that is backing up whatever we have stored in the cloud, which is Computer Ownership 101, but somehow I don't know a single normie actually practicing this. Between my partner and I, we have external drives on drives on drives in our house and redundant backups.

Self-hosting Vaultwarden as a password manager has so far been a good experience. You get all the features of a paid Bitwarden account like TOTP, you can use all the regular Bitwarden apps and extensions, and it's easy enough to get up and running through RepoCloud, PikaPods, or any similar types of services.

Using SearXNG has also been very cool. It's a private metasearch engine that returns results from any major search engines of your choice, and removes all tracking from URLs. It's self-hostable but there are also lots of public instances you can use. I'm testing it against Kagi for effectiveness, and so far have had no complaints.

And lastly, analog and self-hosted media are starting to make a comeback. Spotify's ethics (rather, lack thereof) have been heavily scrutinized these past few weeks, and all the varied subscriptions have basically amounted to an old cable bill, so we're all looking for ways to "own" our media. My partner has been an avid vinyl collector for years now, and my kids have gotten into CDs from going on all these crate-digging journeys with their dad. And everything I know about tech I learned from sailing the high seas, so I'm now learning how to update my methods from the skills I used back in college.