Six easy steps can make it harder to track and control you. Take the wheel and steer your interactions more peer to peer.
1) Cash
A Dave Ramsey approved technique to control spending and stay on budget, cash has the benefit of you owning your spending habits. CCs make it too easy to spend beyond your means and lose sight of your financial goals. Banks and payment providers know what you’re buying, where you are, and are selling your data to advertisers building a profile on you and your family. Cash resets that back to you and the parties you are paying.
2) Gold
While not as spendable as cash, gold can be bought and sold in every state and every country in the world. While manipulated, gold has a lower inflation rate than cash. If worried about theft, buy PAXG and store the keys redundantly in multiple locations and in multiple forms. Crypto markets are decentralized, liquid, and never closed. Bitcoin & Ether also have lower inflation rates than any government monies, but not as private as cash and gold. For more on this topic read: https://rankinsmith.report/the-long-term-case-for-doge/ & https://rankinsmith.report/crypto-comparisons/
3) VPN
Vitural Private Network usage should be as common as a lock on your front door. You would not leave your house open for anyone to walk through and view how you live at all times, neither should your web usage be as transparent. With a click of a button, VPNs can shield you from prying eyes and make fingerprinting you less easy. Additionally, an encryption by default email provider shields your correspondence. Proton can provide both. Lastly, just as encryption makes privacy easy with VPNs and email, encryption should be default with your text messaging service like Signal and Wire. Get your friends and family use to not using SMS.
4) Email Alias
At minimum, separate personal email from commercial email. Next, learn to use email aliases. If you don't own your own domain, get familiar with services like 33mail and SimpleLogin, which allow you to create a unique email for every company you interact with. If the site you were using gets hacked or sells your contact info to other marketers (which they will, in both cases), you then can just delete the alias and stop the spam.
5) VOIP
Voice Over Internet Protocol has opened up the ability for everyday people to choose the level of contact people and companies have with them. Many of us are stuck in a landline mindset. When we only had one number we gave it to everyone because that is all we had to give. That mindset has carried over with mobile phones, but now it must stop. Google Voice was the first, easy to obtain, VOIP number that allowed one to shield personal numbers from companies. But with services like MySudo, JMP.chat, and Silent.link, we can add a gradient of privacy. Sure, friends and family may still have our personal numbers, but the company we have an ongoing relationship may have a VOIP number we keep for years, and others may have a number we just use one time.
6) Travel
Next time you logon to book a vacation to a tropical island, ask yourself if this trip is moving you closer to your goal of freedom or further away. Instead, spend your travel budget looking for a place to escape the prison of your current way of living. Look for a place that is set in a higher trust society, encourages a more sustainable way of living, and is more peaceful and secure. If you are to the point of allocating capital in real estate, forgo the AIRBNB in a metropolitan slave-state and seek farmland, retail storefronts in forgotten towns, or lakehouses or cabins in communities in more free states.
In this new year, ask yourself the question, does this move me closer or further from my goals, and stop just giving in to the old mindset. No one is going to bring you freedom and privacy, it is way of life you much choose if you want to stay free and live on your own terms.
RSR does not have any commerical relationship with the products or services suggested in this article. None of the steps are financial advice and are only intended to help one achieve more freedom and more privacy. Credit goes to Gabriel Custodiet, The Watchman Privacy Newsletter: 2 January 2023 https://watchmanprivacy.com/ for inspring this topic.
