Protect your private data
Why?
For the past twenty years, the Web and especially the arrival of smartphones and tablets have allowed us to develop free mass communication tools -in appearance- allowing us to exchange, publish, inform ourselves, our comments, texts, photos and videos, private or public, are stored in bulk and used to profile and sell us so-called targeted advertising. The free business model for advertising is running out of steam and the new race is played on AI. The mass storage of our data has a very high cost, the economic model of return by advertising is insufficient for companies like Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Thread) and Google (Android, Chrome, Google Drive, Maps, etc.). Amazon is facing competition from Chinese companies like Shein or Temu. Apple plays the card of a more expensive but more efficient product, which is no longer the case today.
The AI announced for release in recent years have been put into service too early, under the impetus of OpenAI and its ChatGPT that has no safeguards or control, made available to all without any preparation of the public.
Our smartphones and computers will automatically be equipped with AI that uses our data to better resemble us, make content for us and sell it to us, replacing jobs. Young people are the most vulnerable and the first target creating dependency. Our privacy has never been respected, they are sold and used to create paying content and replace jobs. An AI does not generate anything from itself, it creates from our content through mathematical models: it manufactures mediocrity at best also invents a lot. Inventing likelihood is part of his program to respond quickly to a request. Speed is crucial for the user is to use it oftenly and become dependent on it.
To replace
Facebook, Instagram, have no equivalent. TikTok is hardly better, the data are stored on servers of the Chinese state which is certainly not the state that best protects confidentiality. If we cannot do without some of these tools, we can at least replace a few and do without as much as possible. Here is a list of products, mostly free, some paid but very few compared to the service provided. Most of them are European and truly committed to privacy and security. for Google, given that the tools are integrated with Android smartphones, see this page in particular. You will also find in this article, free software suites for your emails, calendars, data storage, password management,… Please find a complete list of proven and secure apps, utilities, online services.
Best practices
For any useful purpose, a reminder of good practices regarding our data.
Never...
Use your Google, Facebook, Microsoft account to create an account on another service! If your primary account is hacked or deleted, you will no longer have access to the accounts created with it.
Clean your mailboxes and your photos/videos
The storage of data, emails, photos, videos, documents, is heavy on servers and expensive. Clean up your old emails without forgetting the “Sent”, delete unnecessary photos, videos and documents on your devices and drives.
Save offline
We have become used to our smartphones in particular saving automatically in drives installed by default… But the safest way is always to make backups on your computer and even better, from time to time, on an external hard drive.