5 big steps to digital freedom (Step 2)
Time to take a huge chunk of your data back out of the hands of BigTech e.g. email, photos, files, contacts, calendars, videos, etc. Today there is no need to leave all this in the cloud in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
Email accounts are used to access every other online account. They are a trove of sensitive personal information: purchases, health history, travel destinations, relationships and more. Bring privacy back to email and your online life by bringing it under your control.
It is very easy to have it safely housed in your home, encrypted, and regularly backed up. Here is how:
Alternative A — Helm Personal Server (Email & Data) ($299 or $399)
Helm makes it fast and easy to control your data. Forget the hassle of installing, configuring, and securing another computer to act as your home server. Helm comes ready to use out of the box and takes just five minutes to set up.
Helm is small so it does not take up much space in your home. Helm does for you what Gmail, Outlook.com or your current email provider does (probably more). It’s gives you an unlimited number of email addresses and accounts, and it gives you 512GB or 1TB of space to use as a mail store for those accounts. It also gives you CalDAV calendaring, notes, CardDAV contacts, NextCloud to store and share your photos, videos and other documents. Plus it uses open source software (FOSS) chosen and configured for individual security and privacy.
This is my preferred alternative because email and personal files and photos are so important, it is nice to have a professionally put together system, where everything is secured and encrypted, and backed up offsite that once installed you barely need to think about. Plus you can access and share these files and photos when you are outside your house as well. It is a very clever solution and not a lot of money when you think what it is protecting. Check it out at https://thehelm.com/
I think the Helm is going to be a great solution for most people, but there are two things I am not thrilled about it.
- The app you use to manage The Helm is only available through Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. If you want to take back control of your phone and run a de-googled phone, then setting up a Google Account to access the Play Store does not help. You could always just keep your old phone and use it to manage your Helm I guess. Helm have said they will look at making the App available through a non-Google/Apple means in the future — but no timeline given.
- My understanding is the technical infrastructure Helm uses to support you and store you encrypted backups is housed in Amazon’s Cloud. This is not something that supports the move away from BigTech and I would prefer to see them move this away from Amazon.
Remember what BigTech did to Parler. Apple and Google kicked them out of their respective App Stores and Amazon shut out their access to their infrastructure running in the Amazon Cloud. That is why I am not thrilled about these last 2 points.
But overall, it gives you a safe secure server that is professionally set up and managed and that server is located in your house and holds all your emails, photos, videos, personal documents, etc. All things considered, this is a massive step forward for most of us, so lets not let perfection get in the way of the good.
Alternative B — Mail-in-a-Box
Mail in a box is almost like setting up your own Helm on your own machine or virtual server. Gives you an email server, NextCloud, a bunch of security, etc. Check it out the setup instructions here https://mailinabox.email/guide.html
I included it because I think it is an interesting alternative to Helm with many of the same features. For most people though, I think just buying Helm will be a better option.
Alternative C — Set up your own email server probably on a virtual machine in a data center
Non-YouTube Link https://ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=8G93NVWkXZk
This video does a pretty good job of showing you how to do it yourself. At the very least it will give you a good idea of what as involved so you can decide if you would prefer. You need to decide if you would sleep better at night having a professionally configured system like The Helm protecting your email, photos, videos, and files.
Alternative D— Another cloud based email service with a smaller company or encrypted service like Proton Mail
Any service where you are storing your emails, photos, videos, files etc in the cloud and not on your own server in your premises is done on the basis on trust. We have learnt over and over again, many companies start with good intentions of “doing no evil” but grow into the devil.
Let’s be smart and not repeat the same mistakes over and over again. You need your own email server.
Stop and take a breath — look how far you have come.
If you have completed Step 1 and are using a VPN and/or TOR router to hide your IP address from BigTech and now having done Step 2, BigTech can now longer exploit your email and personal contacts, photos, videos, and files for their profit or worse use it to censor, manipulate and brainwash you.
You might be just one small brick in their huge wall of data, but brick by brick we are going to take BigTech down — so please share these ideas with your friends and BigTech will die a death of a thousand (or more like a billion) cuts.
The 5 Big Steps to Digital Freedom
- Protect your IP Address (it can be used to track you and also link all your computer activity together)
- Store you email and photos, videos, files at home instead of with Gmail or on Google Drive or One Drive
- Started using Linux as your preferred operating system helping break the stranglehold of Microsoft and Apple
- Ditched the iPhone for a degoogled phone
- Established newsfeeds direct from your trusted sites using RSS Readers. Giving you communication channels independent of Big Tech and Social Media.
- Extra Bonus Step — Can now charge you cell phone safely, keep spying eyes out of your camera, protect your password and valuable docs, and finally probably never use an anti-virus product again.
Conflict of Interest Disclosure
Writer and family members do not hold any financial interest in the businesses manufacturing and selling the above 2 products. Nor are we compensated in any way e.g. commission or affiliate program if you decide to purchase these products or services.
5 big steps to digital freedom (Step 2) (text only — excluding videos and images) © 2021 by Beating Big Tech is licensed under CC BY 4.0
