r/privacy • u/SecretFirst0309 • 2d ago
discussion Is convenience killing our Right to Privacy?
Most of us trade data for convenience every day, location tracking for maps, saving passwords in our browser, cloud backups for photos, and using autofill for payments. It feels harmless until we realise how much of our identity is stored on someone else’s servers.
Every device in our lives is quietly collecting data. Laws like GDPR and India’s new DPDP Act exist, but enforcement is patchy. Once your data leaks, there’s no way to “get it back”. It’s permanent exposure.
How do you balance privacy vs convenience? Do you use privacy-first tools or do you just accept that surveillance is a part of modern life?
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u/SaveDnet-FRed0 2d ago
There are a lot of privacy respecting services that are both convenient to use and don't come with much of a negative trade off beyond finding out the alternatives are in fact a thing and maybe the first time setup and moving all your stuff
(Ex. For E-mail you can use Proton Mail witch is just as good as GMail [minus that the free plan only gives you up to 1GB of E-mail storage], for your browser you can use Firefox [or a fork there of] or if you need something chrome based Brave browser)
As for one your data is out there, you can go to every service and data broker that has your data and request one by one for them to remove it. But this is extremely consuming and some services will do shady things to hold onto your data requiring you to do extra work to make sure that it gets removed. The convenient alternative option is to use a data removal service to do all that for you, but you need to be careful about witch one you pick since some are effectively scams or go about removing your data in a lazy ways that can expose your data more, and they all cost a subscription fee to use the service.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the bad for privacy options do have ways to mitigate the amount of data they collect or have ways to protect that data in ways that would prevent the providers from using it, but for these services these are disabled by default, you have to dig threw pages upon pages of confusing settings pages, install add-in's / run 3ed party scrips to do so. It's also worth noting that for some privacy invasive services (Ex. YouTube) you can access them threw 3ed party frontends that will preserve your privacy but still let you use these services in a not-logged in manner.