Parry and hit back. Ask her why it matters what you use if you can function with them as if you use google. Then return fire with your favorite reason not to use google. For me, I like to open the dev tools in Firefox, and show the head of any website. Let them choose. Find the line with google analytics, google tag service, or google ad sense. “Wow this website has nothing to do with google. Why is this here? To track you. Did you know that google can track your mouse? Even if you don’t click on anything? Or they can track you by installing fonts?” Etc. Etc. Scare the shit out of them and they’ll leave you alone. Hopefully you can slowly begin to convert them.

Ask her if all her friends jumped down a cliff would she also jump down a cliff?

I have found that even when people are conscious of the “technocratic & surveillance” state of the world, they still dont change their habits. Just like “this sucks” but they dont bother on looking for alternatives.

Even when I tell them about E2EE services, or the fediverse, they’re like “that sounds awesome”, but they never try it. Once I had a friend try Pixelfed and they loved it! I was so happy hehe but it goes stale after a few days, since other friends didnt switch. But were both telling others to switch sometimes.

My family uses Life360 for safety or emergencies, and I managed to switch them over to Paralino. It was all working seamlessly until they suddenly decided they wanted to go back, for whatever reason. I don’t know what it was, they wouldnt say, but it frustrates me that they would prefer giving out all out location info in rreal time to a company that has had many breaches and has sold such data, compared to a small one that can’t even access such data, and its just a few bucks. Idunno.

No, they respect my goals and seem to have accepted that I’m sometimes just unreachable. The only thing they might be annoyed about is my GrapheneOS and Signal proselytism. If anything, it’s more apathy than antagonism. They’ll agree with me on privacy issues but rarely ever give up the conveniences of Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. in practice.

thats wierd to me. my brother is not even techie but he grabbed a dns name. Most people, including family, think its kinda cool.

Same here, while this was a few years back it’s still relevant. My girlfriends parents are helicopter parents and would have a back door into everything if they could. So the one day I noticed that her mother had said to me that she doesn’t mind us going to movies two weeks from then. This was only said between the two of us in a text. This was a good opportunity to switch her over to signal. She asked me if there is a way to check if she was in anything else so I had her change password and move over to a password manager instead of the paper notebook in her room that her mother probably looked through.

Only a week later her mother did look through that notebook at one point for passwords because because she openly asked for it one day “so she could check her school email for scholarship information”, didn’t ask for just the password, but the whole notebook. From what I remember my girlfriend had a conversation with her mother about privacy that would turn into an argument.

Moral of the story, even people you are told you are supposed to trust aren’t trustworthy.

I’m the family’s tech nerd so no.
Btw mom’s laptop will soon rock Mint. Later step will be de-gmail-ing her.

If by family you mean biological family, I never really cared much what they think about anything (or about anyone). Also, I was still a little boy when I had to learn how to protect my privacy from my intrusive mom. So, yeah what anyone else may think about my choice and priorities was never that important.

If you’re referring to my real family, aka the person I decided to share my life with almost 30 years ago, we’re both adults and we both are fine with the other not doing things exactly like we would do them (it happens we also both care about preserving as much of our privacy), like we’re fine with the other having activities we’re not involved in ;)

I’ve known my lady friend for 30 or so now. She lives in her house and I in mine. We value our time together, but we also enjoy our own time alone. When she comes over, she is not as concerned about all the intricacies of privacy, anonymity, and security, she just wants to watch her shows, and doom scroll her phone for tasty recipes and such. She is an accomplished chef as well as a painter, and her confectioneries are divine. I set up a small NUC that is backed up with the main backups. On it is Mealie, so she can transfer recipes to a digital format for preservation.

She does acknowledge the validity of preserving her data, but that responsibility rests on me, the network admin. I made her a special vlan, kind of a ‘dumbed down’ version of my own where she can be reasonably protected, yet enjoy all the things she is used to doing on the internet. Other than that, when friends drop by to visit, they sometimes want to use the wifi. So, I have a guest Wi-Fi which is rather restrictive. So my core network is never accessed or by anyone other than me. It took a lot of time to assemble it all and make it all work, and I’m not going to willy-nilly adjust firewall rules on my core network so you can surf TikTok. Nothing against TikTok other than the shady specter that hangs over it. The content is fine. Some of the videos I’ve seen are funny, educational, etc. but it’s just not my thing.

So, yeah, I’ve had to make accommodations for a handful of people. Her laptop was giving her fits, so I introduced Mint into the mix. She has no problems driving the Linux bus. It looks like Windows, responds like Windows, she’s able to do the same things she did on Windows, so she is comfortable with the installation.

Totally

I’ll expand this question to my entire social circle.

I haven’t found that anybody cares about my email provider. It doesn’t affect them because email is federated. Nobody has ever asked me why I’m mailing them from a domain I own rather than a service provider they’ve heard of.

Where I do run into a lot of resistance is trying to get people to use Signal. Some people seem to find the concept of having multiple messaging apps objectionable, which has never made any sense to me as long as they have basic computer skills. On occasion, I’m on the other side of that conversation when I’m unwilling to use Facebook Messenger for reasons that should be obvious to anyone in this community.

My family is not against it, they just don’t understand

Tell her; “no mom, if some 30 year old man was tracking me, reading my mail, texts and tracked my location you’d be getting ready to murder him. Why should I let gmail get away with the same shit?”

Do they care about what e-mail you use? Weird.

my mental health was questioned so there’s that.

my explaination about surveillance capitalism and what possibilities corporations have to spy on us fell on deaf ears and raised concern. i got called “paranoid” and also “stupid”