I created an account while in the store with an email of [email protected] and a basic password and surprisingly didn't have to verify the email. Then turned on a VPN to my house.

I plan on just creating a new account every time I go in just to fill up their database with nonsense.

This is straight from their privacy policy:

We do not sell your personal information in a way that most people would think of as a sale. However, we do participate in online targeted advertising and use analytics which allows tech companies, in exchange for our use of their services, to use user information collected from our App to improve their own products and to improve the services they provide to others. Under some laws, this is considered our "sale" of your user data to third parties. You can opt-out of this as provided in the “How to Submit a Request” section below.

Forcing the older generation to change from a service that works perfectly fine to another one that isn't as polished and isn't a houshould name is a loosing battle.

I'd just bring up privacy concerns from time to time and suggest ways to increase their privacy when they ask for advice.

Check out wireguard, its way smaller and faster than OpenVPN and still FOSS.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/vpn-features/wireguard

Very user friendly if you install it with a GUI, almost to plug and play level.

Brother.. apple couldn't find my airtag when it was dropped somewhere in my yard.. How would apple find a submarine 5 miles below sea level in a faradayed submarine?

Proprietary, targeting users who want to be anonymous, centralizes faux identities and passwords, provides plaintext SMS services..

It looks like a fed, and it smells like a fed..

I'm a tinkering nerd, so I like to have a headless Linux box.

I did use self hosting operating systems in the beginning, and they're nice. However, when I tried just a plain Ubuntu headless install, I felt way more accomplished after getting everything working.

Checking the router is probably the only way to see if someone is active on your network.

Can anybody hack your computer? No. Most people only know how to run scripts that are known and patched in most operating systems.

There are skilled people who may be able to create an exploit or find a vulnerability in your computer, but they will mostly target businesses or people they know will be worth it to hack, so most likely they won't bother you.

Generally if your on your own WiFi, having a WPA-2+ personal password is enough, but the more paranoid may have an IDS/IPS on their home network.

If your out and about, I'd personally use a VPN. I don't like public ones and like to recommend setting one up on your home WiFi instead.

If you think you've been hacked.. change your passwords and run virus scans. If you still don't feel safe, backup your data and reinstall your operating system.

Unless there's a super hacker or NSA agent in the class that can figure out your password in real time.. You should be fine doing that.

Did a little research and seems to be a PIA issue; they don't provide config files.. But there is a workaround: https://github.com/pia-foss/manual-connections

Or a Python script to obtain a config file: https://github.com/hsand/pia-wg

But there are other VPNs that will let you download config files for use, I have no idea why PIA makes it hard.

You would need to create a docker image or some sort of container/VM (container preferred) to host wireguard. This is what I personally use: https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy

You can tunnel RDP over SSH. Then you'd only open a port that requires authentication to access and is encrypted.

I disagree. Firefox is fine, but saying chromium is spyware because its primarily maintained by google is like saying android is spyware.

Additionally chromium browsers are arguably more secure than Firefox, and has more advanced sand boxing. So much so that graphine OS used chromium instead of Firefox for their vanadium browser.

Only thing I agree with is not using brave.. Cause well.. They fishy.

I would have a failsafe, like use a major email provider for emails that you need to go through for like work order government stuff.

Hosting your own email is a great learning experience and is fun to do; but your emails will get marked as spam, you'll have to constantly perform maintenance, and have major reliability issues.

Most of the issues youll have are fine for personal use, but is dicey if you plan to migrate 100%

Edit: receiving email is less of an issue of sending. The forwarder should be reliable, however, its the sending from the forwarding address that would possibly be an issue.

Tails isn't really designed for daily driving. I'd go for a user friendly distro like Ubuntu if you an on switching from windows.

It is possible to make windows a little more private if you didn't want to switch. Here's a pretty good guide in modifying the the iso before installing: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/create-custom-windows-11-install-disk

Modifying window does help users gain more control and privacy, but windows is proprietary so a person can only do so much. Be careful on what you remove if you GI this route, windows relies on weird apps to function.

Another note, I wouldn't be afraid of torrenting. The inky person that would care that your getting free movies and such is your ISP, and you can just flip on a VPN to clear their radar.

DNS of HTTPS or TLS has been available for years, but it hasn't been adopted widely because the hello at the beginning if the three way handshake when connecting to a website ratted you out to your ISP anyways.

GraphineOS sandboxes google services. You can take it a step further and only install sandboxed google services on a work profile or user profile so you can have toggle-able google services, allowing bank access and whatnot.

I mean you can tunnel any traffic through SSH or SSL. Its pretty easy.

Subnetting and VLANs can get hard to conceptualize when they are virtualized on a single machine.

I'd suggest going to draw.io and making a logical network diagram so that you can have a reference when setting up your network.

If you want EVERYTHING going through piHole which is on a different subnet, easiest way I've done it was make going through the pihole necessary to make it to the default gateway.

But if you have a different situation for pihole you can set up DNS relays.

While this is good for survielience circumventing.. It is looking like the beginning of the end of DNS filtering and the popularization of encrypted telemetry.

Since its for school you'll want it to be reliable and to work 100% of the time. I'd just get a big brand and not connect it to the internet if you don't want your data collected.

Other than that you can try to block the telemetry at the DNS level by VPN to your home with a pihole instance or using a private DNS.

If you really don't wanna use apple or google OS, then best bet is to buy the tablet for the hardware and try to flash a different OS. But then you'll risk it not working very well or having app compatibility issues.