Any Extreme Privacy Enthusiasts Here? Share your setup.

[ibose]

What happens when someone in authority shows up at your door and demands access to all your devices and apps? You will have to comply because you have no choice, and the very act of overly securing your data can be easily twisted into suspicion and can be used against you in our country.

So what you are really saying is that just because of this hypothetical possibility, we should stop securing our personal information ? I refuse to give my Aadhar unless it is required by law. Does that imply the authorities will target me ? If that is the case, you are implying that the law of the land is totally absent. Sorry but I don't subscribe to this absurdity.
If you want to express your frustration against the current regime, we have innumerable threads already available where you can do so. Let's not derail this thread any more.
@puns @logistopath please help clean this thread.

 

[buzz88]

So according to you the user blr_p should open a separate thread to say what ever he thinks about the subject if his views are opposite?

How is the situation here any different?

Yes, that is a classic case of thread derailment as is this present thread. The OP of both that and this thread wanted to discuss certain things as mentioned in their opening posts. Other members should give their views or share their knowledge that is related to the OP's queries or requests. This is common courtesy on forums such as this and the wider internet. This does not encroach upon your freedom of speech. The OP was not seeking a moral or a social debate, they only wanted a feedback on their query and possible solutions. If you want to make it a moral or a social debate, feel free to create a new thread and continue discussing it with other like-minded people.

This is a recurring problem and happens with many threads. Citing examples of the said problem happening elsewhere does not make the present case any less problematic.

@mods I request to move the unrelated posts, including this one, to a new thread, please.

 

[Heisen]

My apologies.

 

[blr_p]

What happens when someone in authority shows up at your door and demands access to all your devices and apps?

On what authority?

Telling them to fcuk off should be your first reaction

You will have to comply because you have no choice, and the very act of overly securing your data can be easily twisted into suspicion and can be used against you in our country.

Don't they need a warrant of some sort.

Police have too much power here, they can bend the laws against "probable cause" at their will, and can get anything they want from your secured folders. That, to me, is a far more serious problem.

Some proper legal advice would help. If you let them intimidate you then you make it easy for them.

This is not a police state. You do have rights. You need to be aware of them. And fight like there is no tomorrow to defend them.

Decide whether you want to live on your legs or on your knees.

Only works if you know the rules of the game. Otherwise counter productive.

So many people I find here have had the spirit beaten out of them from a young age so the default response is to comply and obey. Too many cynics. People who have surrendered.

Apologies @blr_p for dragging you in this by using your post as an example. The is the latest one I could remember from top of my head.

Was about to hit post and then saw this part

 

[PunkX 75]

---

Apologies @blr_p for dragging you in this by using your post as an example. The is the latest one I could remember from top of my head.

OP,

An excellent write-up on privacy measures!

I have started taking baby steps in being a bit more privacy-focused, as targeted ads on my feeds had started getting out of hand. Deleting Chrome was step 1.

 

[Vishnu2jd]

God damn, seeing this thread today. WTH. Why are people bashing me? I'm just sharing my setup and expected like-minded people to suggest improvements or share their setups. I didn't think this would also feel like Reddit

OP has too much free time on his hand

Yeah, I have free time, and I spend it on this hobby. Also, this setup took like years (started from my late teenage years) of understanding(linux, docker , security etc) to achieve this and I'm proud of the progress I've made. I mean, from normie to here. This is a slow process. Also, the advantage of this is a "minimal" setup, which reduces mobile use

what you gonna do when some police man gonna come to your house regarding some random investigation which has nothing to do with you and asks you to unlock all your devices

It doesn't mean we need to take care of our privacy on what's possible right? I like to take it to the level I'm comfortable with. If we're talking about that level of extremes and have that threat level, Graphene OS has a duress password, which, when entered on the normal password page, wipes all the data and factory resets it. A similar setup can be made to home servers and others.

My dear friend, you put your real name on an internet forum

Yeah, that's the choice I made. I should be capable of giving my data whenever/wherever I want. I'm the one who should be deciding where my data is going. That's also a matter of privacy. By the way, I'm not all devices removed, forest living paranoid. Also, in this forum, the name matters less when selling/buying, we will even be posting our location, which is an even bigger risk than just the name alone. As I said, I also enabled data collection on KDE. Cause that's the choice I made.

Do you run rr setup on pi how is the performance

Yeah. It is good enough. Obviously no transcoding. Only direct play.

Did you have any issues with nextdns, I had some issues like instagram gif not working so i changed to mullvad dns

Nah. Nextdns is working perfectly for me. Regarding mullvad, I think they don't have servers in India and so I felt dns lookup took long time for me(I tried 1-2 years ago).

Privacy awareness is sorely lacking here.

Yeah didn't expect this from niche forums like this.

Allow me to introduce you to Cambridge Analytica in UK. The firm used datasets created by the Facebook (now Meta) to target voters with messages on the basis of their political leaning. The goal was to sway public opinion to leave EU. And they succeeded.

That's what I meant when I said privacy from government.

Not having google maps, and android auto is the only annoying part.

That's the beauty with graphene os. You can have separate profiles (or work) with play services. I have google maps on work profile . In other custom roms like lineage , you are either stuck with play services or not for full device. Another thing is play services are sandboxed , so they are just like any other apps instead of being system apps and having full(almost) control of the device like when gapps are flashed to custom roms. You can deny any app permissions you like. Also updates are frequent and graphene os doesn't seem like just a guy building custom roms in his free time. They are serious about supporting it.

So what you are really saying is that just because of this hypothetical possibility, we should stop securing our personal information ?

Yeah that's such a poor argument. It's like saying I will never drive because of dying in an accident in a hypothetical scenario

I have started taking baby steps in being a bit more privacy-focused, as targeted ads on my feeds had started getting out of hand. Deleting Chrome was step 1.

Congrats on the journey. Instead of going on hard at once, take small steps so you don't feel overwhelmed.

 

[blr_p]

If we're talking about that level of extremes and have that threat level, Graphene OS has a duress password, which, when entered on the normal password page, wipes all the data and factory resets it. A similar setup can be made to home servers and others.

If we're talking extremes only ^that works

 

[Vishnu2jd]

Phone is one thing I could not change. I am too old to work with custom ROMs and custom problems. Always check privacy settings on whatever apps I am using

Yeah phone is the biggest hurdle in this jouney. Also it is the most capable tracking device . In my case, I live in tier-2 town(so no relying on many fancy apps) and I also want to maintain minimal setup , so going hard way.
Another thing is google intentionally breaking custom rom users day by day , with things like play integrity check etc. We need linux of smartphones. But it's impossible.

And how are you accessing are suite + Jellyfin setup from outside home network? I have the same setup but limited to home network. Don’t know how what’s the best way to access it remotely.

nginx reverse proxy + bought a domain for just Rs 90 from hostinger.in(not .com . It is expensive there). This setup only works if you have public ip . Opening ports is risky. Only open if you are confident enough on the server security and have many layers or protections. Using spying big tech services is better than badly setup home server . I feel like even my setup is a bit risky. Working on imporving it(port knocking, closing ssh port and relying only on wiregaurd etc). If you want easiest setup, cloudflare tunnels or tailscale. But both of them have their drawbacks.
Cloudflare tunnel : depends on single external service. Arr setups may violate their TOS. since it is reverse proxy (And free service) it feels slow sometimes.
Tailscale: good if you are the sole user of the server and its services. Not easy to setup for friedns or family, tvs etc. Struggles to have direct connection if both server and user are behing cgnat. Also limited to 3 users on free plan.

Another thing is vps reverse proxy which I feel is the best. But you need to have vps and pay it monthly.

 

[ninjenstein]

nginx reverse proxy + bought a domain for just Rs 90 from hostinger.in(not .com . It is expensive there). This setup only works if you have public ip . Opening ports is risky. Only open if you are confident enough on the server security and have many layers or protections. Using spying big tech services is better than badly setup home server . I feel like even my setup is a bit risky. Working on imporving it(port knocking, closing ssh port and relying only on wiregaurd etc). If you want easiest setup, cloudflare tunnels or tailscale. But both of them have their drawbacks.
Cloudflare tunnel : depends on single external service. Arr setups may violate their TOS. since it is reverse proxy (And free service) it feels slow sometimes.
Tailscale: good if you are the sole user of the server and its services. Not easy to setup for friedns or family, tvs etc. Struggles to have direct connection if both server and user are behing cgnat. Also limited to 3 users on free plan.

Another thing is vps reverse proxy which I feel is the best. But you need to have vps and pay it monthly.

Thanks for the detailed reply. As one of the many newbies to self-hosting this is exactly the kind of point-out-the-way help we’re looking for from veterans with more experience.

I’ll look into the options you’ve suggested. The domain option is looking like the cheapest and most doable, though I’ll have to figure out how to get this “public IP.”

For the VPS option, does a shared VPS work? Like this Hetzner $4 option? Or is a dedicated server required?

 

[privateer]

Any VPS will work, but servers with better routing and closer to home would be better. You can get some good deals on lowendtalk if you stick to good providers. I have a 6Eur/year VPS in Europe and it is great. ionos/strato/netcup has 1Eur/month options as well on promotions sometime.
Also try pangolin on a vps if you dont want to use cloudflare tunnels.

 

[Vishnu2jd]

For the VPS option, does a shared VPS work? Like this Hetzner $4 option? Or is a dedicated server required?

I believe Hetzner's data centers are only in Europe. Avoid choosing European servers, as latency (and speed) will be terrible, depending on your ISP's international routing. Services, especially data-heavy ones like Jellyfin, will feel slow and sluggish. Always try to choose the nearest data center VPS; at most, consider Singapore-based ones.

OVH Cloud's Singapore option is available for around 74Rs per month(excl gst) for the first year, which is not a bad deal for the price.

VPS Configurator

www.ovhcloud.com

It's good for trying out.

Also, note that if you only pay for one month, the price will revert to the normal rate of 320Rs per month from the second month. So, if you need it for a year, you'll need to pay upfront.

 

[ninjenstein]

I believe Hetzner's data centers are only in Europe. Avoid choosing European servers, as latency (and speed) will be terrible, depending on your ISP's international routing. Services, especially data-heavy ones like Jellyfin, will feel slow and sluggish. Always try to choose the nearest data center VPS; at most, consider Singapore-based ones.

OVH Cloud's Singapore option is available for around 74Rs per month(excl gst) for the first year, which is not a bad deal for the price.

VPS Configurator

www.ovhcloud.com

It's good for trying out.

Also, note that if you only pay for one month, the price will revert to the normal rate of 320Rs per month from the second month. So, if you need it for a year, you'll need to pay upfront.

Thanks for the info!

 

[evilsmirker]

Yeah phone is the biggest hurdle in this jouney. Also it is the most capable tracking device . In my case, I live in tier-2 town(so no relying on many fancy apps) and I also want to maintain minimal setup , so going hard way.
Another thing is google intentionally breaking custom rom users day by day , with things like play integrity check etc. We need linux of smartphones. But it's impossible.

nginx reverse proxy + bought a domain for just Rs 90 from hostinger.in(not .com . It is expensive there). This setup only works if you have public ip . Opening ports is risky. Only open if you are confident enough on the server security and have many layers or protections. Using spying big tech services is better than badly setup home server . I feel like even my setup is a bit risky. Working on imporving it(port knocking, closing ssh port and relying only on wiregaurd etc). If you want easiest setup, cloudflare tunnels or tailscale. But both of them have their drawbacks.
Cloudflare tunnel : depends on single external service. Arr setups may violate their TOS. since it is reverse proxy (And free service) it feels slow sometimes.
Tailscale: good if you are the sole user of the server and its services. Not easy to setup for friedns or family, tvs etc. Struggles to have direct connection if both server and user are behing cgnat. Also limited to 3 users on free plan.

Another thing is vps reverse proxy which I feel is the best. But you need to have vps and pay it monthly.

Ah, I'm looking into reverse proxy as well. I'm currently on tailscale, only hosting jellyfin at the moment with 1-2 users apart from myself, and setting up a reverse proxy seems to be the next big exciting thing to move onto- that and maybe something like immich once I get something better than the RPi4 I'm using.

 

[Rayman]

Ah, I'm looking into reverse proxy as well. I'm currently on tailscale, only hosting jellyfin at the moment with 1-2 users apart from myself, and setting up a reverse proxy seems to be the next big exciting thing to move onto- that and maybe something like immich once I get something better than the RPi4 I'm using.

You should take a look at pangolin project if you own a domain and want cloudflare tunnel like functionality. Its super cool and integrates multiple apps together like a reverse proxy, tunnels(wireguard) etc.

 

[evilsmirker]

You should take a look at pangolin project if you own a domain and want cloudflare tunnel like functionality. Its super cool and integrates multiple apps together like a reverse proxy, tunnels(wireguard) etc.

That does sound cool, will have a look! I've seen the name pop up when I've surfing around the self-hosting sub-reddit, but never checked it. I like the name though, always liked that animal.