Definitely yeah! If you’re just a regular person living in a fairly democratic country and you’re thinking about physically clogging your usb ports to avoid someone breaking in your room and tampering your device while you’re exploring Barcelona, or if you consider removing camera and microphone from your pixel phone that you use every day, you’re probably taking it too far.

OTOH I’m still having trouble getting people away from Meta apps and I think it’s absolutely crazy how little thought people put into the amount of data that Meta collects.

TBH even in many dictatorships you’re mostly fine just using a VPN and fake accounts if you have government critical opinions. But that’s just my personal experience. Goes without saying if you have a decent follower count or are some kind of journalist you should be very paranoid.

Anyway, the point is, it’s probably good to feel slightly paranoid because most people aren’t paranoid enough, but most of us are also not Edward Snowden or Saudi journalists, so there should be a balance between practicality and privacy.

Yes and I see two reasonable reasons for that.

One is that, like in most communities, those that feel more compelled to post and comment are those that are more passionate about the topic and/or have more extreme views.

The other reason is that given the sensitive nature of the topic, without knowing the threat level of the reader I can see how one would be reluctant to go for the "good enough".

I'm like a test-bed for a) my business customers and b) friends and family. also, "wasting" time thusly is vastly better than my previous "hobby", namely buying new and exciting shit.

my customers benefit from me knowing how exactly (and why!) I should implement e.g. an unbound instance on-premise. or an in-house prosody communication platform. or the "dev team" (buncha dudes poking at wordpress) getting a slew of used elitebooks with linux for the price of one new windows-with-ai yoga the spec initially called for.

f&f benefit from my early adoption by way of trickle-down tech. no way is anyone of them going to selfhost all this crap, but they get sprinkles of benefits in the form of "get this phone with that OS with those apps" and they're dramatically better off. you don't need the new ideapad ryzen that's "on sale" (isn't), have this 10-year old macbook I fixed and installed linux on - off you go. you don't need the new phone that's "free" with an exorbitantly priced plan, have the cheapest plan with this Redmi/Poco phone I swapped the battery on and installed LineageOS.

as to practical considerations, any and all interactions with the likes of FAANG are and should be adversarial from the get-go, they are out to hurt you by any means necessary. them fucks lost the benefit of doubt ages ago so you not letting them have a millimeter of grasp in your domicile should be your primary task. as their gains are cumulative in nature, every battle won is significant and you'd do well to remind yourself constantly of that.

Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what's done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don't care, and can't be made to care.

For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can't or doesn't, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can't argue with that, even though it's provably false.

Once, someone sent me an Amazon link for baby nappies, and fool me clicked on it. Now Amazon showed boomer me baby nappies suggestions for the next six months. AI at its best... These things annoy me, so I try to avoid being tracked whenever reasonably possible.

OTOH, I am old and hope to not live long enough to experience any rogue government or whatever else persecuting me for having clicked on a baby nappies link years ago; so my threat model is short term only. I keep my privacy to a level, where it hopefully prevents as many annoyances as possible, but does not hamper what I am doing online too much. If I was younger, I'd likely do more.