Privacy Bear

2018 is gone, 2019 is here, and now is the time to really look at how your privacy and security is. 2018 was full of privacy/security scandals, leaving millions of peoples' information out for anyone to see. Knowing this, it seems that most people honestly don't care. Getting people to switch off Facebook has been next to impossible, even though Facebook has said they don't want your information safe. However, now that the new year is here, it is finally time to get off those sites that want to use your information.

I am pledging that this is the year I quit Facebook. I have alerted people to this, and slowly have been phasing a lot of the FB functionality over to other sites/platforms. By the end of February, I will be off that platform for good. Why the long wait? Getting everyone the information on how to get a hold of me.

This is also the year I will be dropping as many Google services as possible. Google+ is being shut down after major data breaches, and that should tell you how Google handles your information. My Gmail is basically used for spam at this point, having switched over to ProtonMail. Anything in Drive I cared about is already switched over to pCloud. I haven't used Google Docs/Sheets/Slides in a while, and have plenty of ways not to. Keep is already switched out for Joplin, and an offline notes app. Two that are hard to get away from are Maps (even though it is becoming worse and worse), and YouTube. There are ways to use YouTube without Google tracking you, and I am using them more. Maps really doesn't have competition on Android, except maybe Here, as OpenStreetMaps is great, but hard to get exact addresses to work.

Make this your year to take back your data, your security, and your privacy. The companies we use every day take advantage of us, but we can make them take less advantage of us.

Best regards, and happy new year, Privacy Bear