Going Dark

For messaging I use Element over Matrix, on a homeserver I run myself. That's the part most people skip: even with end-to-end encryption, whoever runs the server can still see metadata — who's talking to who, when, how often. Self-hosting the homeserver means that metadata never leaves my own infrastructure in the first place.

For email, I use Tuta. It encrypts end-to-end by default, including the subject line, which most "encrypted" email providers still leave in plaintext.

For a VPN, I use Mullvad. Talk is cheap when it comes to "no-logs" claims, but in April 2023 Swedish police raided Mullvad's offices with a warrant looking for customer data — and left with nothing, because there was nothing to find. That's a no-logs policy actually being tested, not just marketing copy.

Your ISP's default DNS is a full log of every domain you've ever visited, sitting with a company that has zero incentive to protect it. Point your DNS at a privacy-respecting provider instead, and if you want it handled for every device on your network automatically, a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole does that plus ad and tracker blocking at the network level.

For daily use I do use Windows but it's a flaw in my opinon and I want to switch ASAP to Linux. Windows ships with far more built-in telemetry than most people realize, and it's closed-source, so you're taking Microsoft's word for what it's actually doing under the hood. You should use Linux instead — Fedora, Qubes, or anything Arch or Debian based all work well, depending on how much you want to tinker versus how much you want it to just work.

For anything I need to do once and then leave zero trace of, I boot Tails from a USB stick. It runs entirely in RAM, routes everything through Tor by default, and forgets everything the moment you shut it down unless you explicitly set up persistent storage.