Digital Simplicity

 

Today rants about "privacy" and "digital minamilism" are all the rage, and doesn't that sound like good stuff that us boaters should strive for? The short answer, is No!

Now, there's wrong with the concepts of privacy and simplicity, but I think many very online people are going about it all wrong. First, they equate lack of privacy with big services like Google, Apple, and Microsoft and the modern surveillance economy where every aspect of your life is tracked and used to serve you targeted ads. 

Do the biggies do that? Absolutely, they track you, but so does virtually every other entity you deal with in modern life: your bank, your investment company, boat dealers, equipment sellers, your DMV, your state government, your insurance company, your newspaper delivery service, your Uber, your restaurants, you name it! There is no escaping from it, even if you think you are "off the grid" on a sailboat in the Caribbean. To evade tracking for advertising purposes is a losers' game.

To gain "privacy" some suggest you have to ditch the biggies and go for nitch services that provide things like encrypted email, encrypted drive storage, VPNs, decentralized apps, etc. Interestingly, many of the popular ones cost money, often quite a bit more than what the biggies charge. In many cases you end up paying for stuff you once got for free from Google, Apple or Microsoft. Then you hear what they think is the killer phrase: "If you aren't paying, you're the product."

This convinces many to pay for inferior services that provide less, cost more, and in the end do absolutely nothing to protect your "privacy." Think about it. You purchase the absolute bulletproof encrypted email service, but the minute you send an email to one of your contacts that doesn't use the same service your message becomes unencrypted and is used for tracking. Try convincing some of your contacts they must ditch their old email address, purchase a new service, then install an additional app, and then be sure to only use this new service when 99.9% of their contacts do not use it. It is impossible!

The same applies to many other so-called privacy services to replace valuable stuff like Google Drive. With Google you get 15GB of free space. Most paid services offer a free tier with only maybe 1GB of space, and then you find the upload and download speeds are abysmal, the apps are glitchy, and you have to keep track of another login, annual payment, and set of username/passwords. Keep doing the same for all the great services you get for free from Google like Calendar, Contacts, Photos, and Maps.

Because of what I do I have tried a lot of the paid services, and they have all been inferior to the free services I utilize from Google. All of them. Some may dispute this, but I can guarantee even if they love the performance of the so-called privacy service they have an additional login setup, an additional payment to keep track of, and additional possible avenues of attack for hackers.

This final argument is hard for many people to grasp, but the biggies are really amazingly secure if you follow their recommended procedures and guidelines. Sure, Reddit and other places are full of people who have been hacked, or claiming they have been hacked, but read more carefully and you find that almost without fail those people did not follow best practices. Purchasing a so-called privacy service will not magically make you safer, and I would argue that every additional login makes you more vulnerable. It is far better to have your vault protected by one very sturdy door with a massive lock than to have many weaker doors with all sorts of fiddly locks. And, with some of the smaller services you have no idea if what they claim is really true. They could be reading your emails for kicks for all you know. 

Personally, I like to keep it simple, which makes services like Google and Apple the most attractive. I like one very secure login to get me into my stuff, and then I have it all right there laid out for me with similar interfaces, reliable performance, and millions of people all over the world to send questions to or to get advice from. The biggies are just simpler, cheaper, and more reliable. That's what we want on a cruising boat!