You & your privacy - my workflow to degoogling my digital footprint.

I've seen a few posts around the internet from people that are (finally) waking up to what a problem google in particular is, and one of the first questions I see asked that is by far the most popular is: "where do I begin?". the answer of course is simple, but the simple fact that the idea seems so daunting should tell you how pervasive and how frankly good google, apple, and to a much lesser degree onedrive is. They are to be commended in their efficiency in the pursuit of eroding digital rights and autonomy - you are to be commended in waking up to the realisation that their convenience was never in your best interests.

step one is, of course, install the app. the first mistake people make in moving from one service to another is simply uninstalling about the app, only to remember later that you forgot "x thing" and end up finding a way to retrieve said thing - accordingly, your first step should be making sure you have at least three backups.

1.) Your chosen cloud service

This can be in the form of a home NAS that actually solves (to a degree) your redundancy issue, but this requires a proficiency that some people may not necessarily have. Instead you may opt for an alternative cloud service. I have opted for Proton, but another service that I found myself fond of was Jottacloud - both are EU as opposed to US based and offer end to end encryption.

I would say that the advantage of offsite cloud storage is that in the event that an act of god happens or your house burns down, you will have a fallback. This is how you should think of cloud storage that respects your privacy - a resource and a redundancy, and not a one stop failsafe.

Additionally, you should have an additional backup device such as an external drive to which to save all of your digital data. Please note that because of the nature of redundancy it's important to not only place this backup somewhere safe and accessible, but to occasionally check the health of the drive itself to make sure it isn't failing and all of your data remains uncorrupted.

In addition to this, and is entirely optional - I still to this day burn all of my data to disks. I'm an older man these days and have been doing this since my university days when I backed everything up to Zip drives, and I've never fallen out of the habit - merely updated the methodology. The cool thing about this though is that to this day I can still pull up research papers that I'd written back in the early 2000's and recall my diary notes; this is a good habit to get into.

In terms of backup of your whole system, I have never really fallen out of the practice of using Acronis True image, but this can be a little complex for some users and honestly may be overkill for many; on a mac you may find time machine more than sufficient, and for windows users I hear good things about Aomei.

2.) Your passwords

Many people get stressed out about this, but the key is to do it as organically and stress free as possible. Start with the fundamentals after you've moved all of your bookmarks from your chromium based browser because yes, best practice is to do that as well - is to find the appropriate extension for your password manager for both browsers. There are of course two ways to do this - the first is the quick and dirty way...Transfer all of your passwords using the import tool, along with all the debris you've picked up over the years, or you can use this opportunity to be a little bit zen and see it as an opportunity for a fresh start. This is where a mindset of being intentional with your time comes into play; dedicate an hour or two to sort through your bookmarks, segregating the resources that are absolutely essential (banking, utilities, your collection of memes that you've been collating over the space of 20 years) and then forget about the rest.

The reason for this is that I have found over the years that if you haven't thought about a website in at least a month, the chances are you no longer need that link or even, it might have been crushed under the weight of AI girlfriends and bots that now permeate our online presence.

Doing so this way gives you the time and grace to slowly and methodically change your emails and passwords to something that a political slave in north Korea can't easily hack. To this point, Oauth is also a great way of galvanising your online security. I would also be open to the idea of passkeys, if indeed more sites had widely adopted the passkey or physical usb key system.

3.) Your browser

Admittedly I find myself to be something of a hypocrite here, as I use Helium alongside Orion when I require compatibility that helium cannot provide. Another alternative might be a mozilla based browser such as Waterfox or even the Tor browser - All three browsers enjoy compatibility with mozill and chrome extensions, all three provide you with greater control over your privacy.