Edging Back From the Panopticon

or: A Few Months With Linux and GrapheneOS

Earlier this year, for reasons that might seem self-evident, I started developing new privacy habits. I wanted to move away from Apple and Google and Meta and X and Amazon and all of those billionaire-run tech ecosystems that treat you not as the customer but as the product.

While I don’t love giving my information and money to billionaires as a general rule, this wasn’t a moral decision as much as a strategic one. Before the current rise of fascism, I had no particular fear of tech corporations doing much with my data besides selling it to advertisers. Now, as the tech world integrates with the authoritarian state, there are a thousand reasons to make yourself a bit less knowable, a thousand reasons to confuse the algorithms or at least give them less to work with.

I knew I couldn’t quit cold turkey, and I still haven’t. All-or-nothing solutions aren’t solutions, they’re pipe dreams. I take the steps that I can take. I make my living as a content creator, so I won’t be quitting social media completely—nor will I entirely leave macOS, since it’s currently an important part of my audio workflow.

I’ve taken a lot of steps, but the two biggest are that I’ve moved most of my work from a macbook air to a thinkpad running Linux and that I’ve replaced my iphone with a pixel running grapheneOS. I’ve swapped out my gmail for protonmail and my google calendar for proton calendar. I’m not telling you to take the same steps as me, to be clear, but they’re working for me so far.

Linux

For years, friends have been singing the praises of Linux to me, but I didn’t much like the song. The first time I installed Linux on a computer was as a teenager, but most of what I do on a computer is less computery and more media creation, so I moved to macOS decades ago and never really looked back. I preferred the slick interface and didn’t want to spend all of my time worried about what was happening under the hood.

But when you don’t look under the hood of a car, you don’t really understand it. Anything could be happening under there. And one thing that’s been happening more and more is that your computer has been collecting your data. Sometimes companies sell it, and sometimes it’s subpoenaed by law enforcement.

So I went and bought myself a ThinkPad X1, downloaded ubuntu, and installed it. The whole process was reasonably painless, and if all I wanted was a computer to write on and look at the internet and check my email, it would have stayed painless. Some things were just mild pains in the ass—I was able to use the same docking station to hook my computer up to mouse and keyboard, but I had to hook the HDMI cable straight into the laptop instead of leaving it in the port. On the other hand, a thinkpad actually comes with an HDMI port. Every new peripheral I want to add to Linux is either easy or hard… and some I simply can’t find drivers for at all, or if I do, they involve the level of tinkering in the command line that I’m simply not comfortable with.

When I wanted to run Scrivener, the non-Linux writing software I love, that took some doing and a couple hours in tutorials and doing shit on the command line I barely understood. I did succeed though.

There are some things I like better, about both the thinkpad and Linux. The thinkpad keyboard is amazing, and I like having both usb-A and usb-C ports without fucking around with adaptors. Even though it’s got a plastic case, it’s built to a higher impact standard than mac. And mostly, I love the fact that my computer actually trusts me to tell me what it’s doing. There’s a hardware switch to mute the microphone and a built-in cover on the webcam.

I’ve had to keep the macbook around for recording, so far, because my usb audio interface isn’t playing nice with Linux. And the software I use for music production (Reason Studios) doesn’t run on Linux natively.

Would I recommend other people swap out their windows or mac laptop for Linux? It depends. If you’re willing to get under the hood occasionally, and willing to troubleshoot some problems, Linux is great. If you don’t have specific, specialized software you need (like for media production), then it is great. If you don’t want your computer snitching on you about every little thing, Linux is great. And that last point… that’s a bigger and bigger one these days.

GrapheneOS

I have, overall, tended to trust iOS more than Android, when it comes to phone security. As an anecdote, when hundreds of people were arrested during the first Trump inauguration, they all had their phones confiscated by the police. The police were able to break into the androids and not the iphones, at least based on the contents of discovery. That was, though, eight years ago, and there’s no reason to assume that what was true before would be true now. There has been an arms race between police and phone manufacturers for some time around security. In general, though, Apple has prioritized encryption and security.

Then why did I leave iOS for a variant of android? Well, I trust Apple’s ability to develop hardware encryption. I just distrust their privacy practices more and more. And GrapheneOS has been recommended by people I trust as a privacy-focused operating system. It only runs on Google Pixel phones, which is a bit ironic considering my whole goal is to de-Google my life, but basically Google Pixels are the android phones built to a comparable level of hardware security as iphones.

I bought a used Google Pixel, a generation or two old, for cheap, then installed GrapheneOS. It was reasonably painless. And the end result is a phone that trusts me to make my own decisions. When I connect to a car stereo, it asks me if I want to let the car download my call history and contacts (I do not want that). You can turn off location services anytime you want. You can turn off the mic and the camera anytime you want. If you’re more security conscious than me, you can ignore the Google Play store entirely and just use “fdroid” to only install open source software on it. If you want to live a sort of normal life, you can download apps from the Google Play store and GrapheneOS will keep each app “sandboxed” from the others so that they don’t share data laterally, which helps prevent them from building up too much of a profile on your activity.

Frankly, I don’t miss my iphone at all, and this has been the easiest transition. The bluetooth connectivity is actually more convenient and easier to navigate than it was on iOS. GrapheneOS lets you look under the hood, but it doesn’t force you too. More security-focused programming should work like that.

De-Googling

De-Googling is hard. I’ve been using a couple different gmail addresses for twenty years now. I set up a protonmail account (which is not based in the US and is privacy-focused, although not perfect by any means), and I’ve been slowly moving services away from gmail towards protonmail. Basically, every time I get an email from this or that service to gmail, I go through and set it to go to protonmail in the future. You can also set up autoforwarding, but I dream of one day shutting down those gmail addresses, so I need to redirect everything.

Proton Calendar works well enough, and Zoom invites for work show up fine in there. I exported my data from google calendar and imported it to proton calendar, though I managed to do it imperfectly and missed an important meeting. I’ve also found it harder to set up shared calendars, but I think it’s possible.

Youtube is a pain in the ass now, because it has ads again. (I paid for premium, because I watch a lot of youtube). I will probably give in and maintain a google account just to have premium youtube, which of course will build a lot of algorithmic data on me, but I need my woodworking and gardening how-to videos and I’m tired of seeing the same ad over and over again.

Maintaining a gmail account for certain purposes also might make sense, like if you maintain an “aboveground” identity to use with banks and governments and landlords and all of that.

De-Spotify

Look, I don’t know that spotify’s information gathering is wildly useful to the repressive government, but it might be, and I’m just trying to move away from algorithmic life in general, so I’ve moved away from spotify. I listen to mp3s, most of which I buy off of bandcamp, and some of which I’ve had on this or that hard drive since I was a teenager. I listen to podcasts now with AntennaPod, which has a way nicer interface than spotify… and also because I listen to music and podcasts on different apps, it’s easier to keep my place in my podcasts. And I moved from audible to libro.fm, which I wish I’d done years ago because there are only upsides and no downsides.

Still to be done

All of this is a work in progress. It will never be perfect. But I’m slowly de-algorithming, slowly stepping back away from the panopticon, and it’s been going reasonably well. There’s more I want to do, much of which involves getting better at computer networking and such—until people develop more programs as easy to use as Signal or GrapheneOS. I would like to program the firewall on my home network to prevent “smart” appliances (like my TV) from saying anything to the internet I don’t want them to. I would like to better understand how vehicles communicate home and find ways to make my driving data more secure.

It’s a lot like preparedness in general: it’s not about accomplishing total preparedness. It’s about thinking about your threat model and starting to enact solutions that are a reasonable response to those threats.