So yesterday I went on my rant about the government monitoring phone call metadata on Verizon’s network. As the day progressed, it was revealed that the government is doing much more than that through a program they called PRISM.
My tin foil hat is squarely in place now.
That being said, I’m not going to harp on that right now. I’m very calm today. I’m enjoying my Friday and I’m going to pretend that all is right with the world.
I’m taking some precautionary steps to make things just a little more difficult for the NSA.
1. I have moved whatever email I had left on Gmail to my own domain on a little server that is powered by a windmill.
2. I have switched back to Mozilla Firefox as my primary browser.
3. I removed Google+ from my phone simply because it was eating up way too much battery life.
In addition, I am currently in the process of drafting a letter to my government officials expressing my displeasure with the latest turn of events in this whole PRISM thing.
And I’m doing it quite calmly.
Calm is good. I must say, I was rather surprised to see this on the news today. It’s made me really think about what I do with my Google+ account and blogger blog. Probably like you I am considering going pressing ‘delete’ quite a lot…
For now I’ve kept my various accounts intact across the internet, though I have been thinking twice about what I write and where I share it. I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around Google and Facebook. Twitter seems safest to me, which if you think about it, is kind of idiotic on my behalf because there’s nothing private about Twitter. But in their defense, they do have strong feelings about maintaining the privacy of their users.
I was wondering how much of a fight MacHighway will put up with information requests, or if they will notify users of such requests. I guess I need to figure out some way/place to archive my emails that I feel is secure. I had been using gmail as my “dump all”, but I need to rethink that.
I had recently moved off of Firefox to Chrome. Looks like I’ll be heading back to it again.
Damn. I feel paranoid all of a sudden.
I have a constant internal struggle with using Google services for anything because it makes me feel really used to have all my personal data used as a source of ad revenue. Advertising in general makes me insane and the data mining done by Google tied by the fact that it can also be easily shared with the government makes me just a little more crazy. Of course, using any service on the Internet can provide the government with what they want to know and I too am curious as to how anxious machighway.com is to give up their information to the Feds.