I don’t try and push my weird opinions on my wife lmao. She knows how I feel and understands and does what she wants and that’s okay. My advice is to communicate and respect each other even if you don’t agree and don’t be a controlling dork.

Part of relationships is accepting people. They behave the way they do because they have values and preferences and don’t always align with ours. Respect that. Make your case, but respect that they may not come to the same conclusions you do.

The idea that I would involve myself in my wife’s digital privacy habits seems perverse to me. That is her business. I assume she has sane habits, but I do not interact with her devices.

I don’t try to convince her. I’ve set up her Firefox with ublock because she kept complaining about ads, otherwise I leave her to it. In return, she doesn’t try to convince me to become a vegetarian.

I make the private option easier than the locked in version.

Homeassistant will let us see our locations, run lights, run media centers, control AC, etc. So why do you need Google Home or Google Maps Location Sharing?

Signal will let us chat over WIFI unlike texts, and I will answer it unlike a Google chat account. Before the SMS death it was easier since it did SMS and signal in one app, easier to convince someone if it can replace the old one and add new features.

I configure two SSIDs, one for things I trust and one for those I don’t. I can run firewall rules and add security on the backend where they can’t see it.

Tiktok you can run a campaign against it by saying it damages cognition, is harmful to youth, supports the CCP.

You can run a pi hole style filter list,ehich might break some stuff so you have to be willing to play tech support.

I don’t know anything about kids but it couldn’t hurt to teach them some simple skills like html so they get a taste for what’s happening behind the scenes.

I just added her MAC address to be assigned its own specific IP address, and she gets served a public DNS as opposed to my PiHole’s IP address.

She expressed actually wanting advertisements, and at this point in life, I’m too tired to argue about it.

I wouldn’t say that my partner “doesn’t care”, but they take a much more pragmatic view than I which results in more exposure. In general, we do the following:

1. To a first approximation, they decide what apps and services they use. It’s not a monarchy. They’ll ask for feedback when comparison shopping, but often the answer is “every dominant ecosystem in this space is terrible, the privacy respecting options don’t meet your requirements, this option is 5% worse and this one is 5% better… glhf”.
2. For social media accounts that share posts about our nuclear family, we come to broad consensus on the privacy settings and practices. There’s give and take here, but I make space to use dominant sharing apps and they make space to limit our collective exposure within reason. If I have a desire to “harden” the privacy settings on a service, it’s on me to put in the effort to craft the proposed settings changes and get their buy in on the implications.
3. I have many fewer privacy raiding accounts than they do. I both benefit from transitive access to the junk they sign up for, and pay a cost in my own privacy by association. This just is what it is. The market for partners that align with my own views perfectly is basically zero though, and honestly I probably wouldn’t put up with my shit even if I could find one.
4. If I can self-host a competitive option for a use-case that I’m happier with… they’ll give it the old college try. But it has to actually be competitive or they’ll fail out of the system and fall back to whatever works for them. If we can figure out what’s not working we’ll sometimes iterate together, but sometimes it’s just not good enough and we go back to something I like worse.

It’s basically like navigating any other conflict in values. You each have to articulate what your goals are, and make meaningful compromise on how to achieve something that preserves the essentials on both sides. As a privacy outlier, sometimes one also needs to be able to hear “I want to do normal shit and not feel bad about it” and accept it. But if we do want to reach for outlier privacy practices in some specific area, it’s on us to break that desire down into actionable steps in realistic directions at a sustainable pace and to not ignore the impacts to our partners of the various tradeoffs we’re proposing. Privacy is often uncomfortable and we need to acknowledge the totality of what we’re asking for when we ask our partners to accommodate our goals there.

What good is your privacy of those closest to you can be used to track you.

In short. I won’t force them, my spouse, to use privacy apps if she does not want it. I’ve accepted that absolute privacy in my case is impossible. So I use privacy apps because I like them not because I don’t want to be tracked. Heck, even my credit card tracks me, a service i cannot continue living without.

I’d they’re compassionate, have them watch The Social Dilemma

I’ve been surprised by the number of people who dont care about privacy but deleted their Facebook accounts after seeing that film

setting home network to fwd all dns through paid nextdns, beyond that just fighting a war of attrition

I’m annoying my girlfriend by installing a dns ad blocker that sometimes interferes with her work, and I have to whitelist things when her work links doesn’t work (Microsoft stuff).

It’s a bit of an annoyance but I feel strongly about not letting these companies get data about what we are doing.

Just yesterday I installed a kodi plugin (called “up next” ), and turns out it’s reporting back what shows I’m watching! The only reason I became aware of this is because it was blocked by the dns ad blocker.

I care about my apps not calling home and reporting what im doing. It should be illegal.

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My girlfriend has allowed me get her bitwarden so she can at least have complex passwords but thats about as far as I’m gonna get I believe.

What I’ve done is set up a default DNS block list for the whole home internet, and given others their own. I’m using NextDNS, so profiles are easy to set up for individual people with different tastes. I have my own that is relatively strict, and I have lighter configurations for others so that less things are blocked for them. I think you can do a similar thing with a PiHole, but I’m not entirely sure on that.

IME something like Signal is an easy sell since it’s simple and works well. For all the fair criticism about relying on phone numbers it makes the onboarding easy. For other things compartmentalising helps, e.g., “okay we’ll collaborate using this cloud file storage but I personally will be accessing it through the browser while keeping most of my files in a SyncThing over here”. While I self-host certain things I don’t volunteer to do that for family/friends because it will be too frustrating for everyone if/when I let them down.

In this kind of situation there’s a fine line between someone who maximises their privacy through tech decisions and someone who makes their “correct” tech choices their self identity. If you drift into the latter, being asked to compromise can feel like an attack, leading to overreacting and coming across as insecure and annoying. Not to psychoanalyse anyone in particular but sometimes I think people need a reminder.