Welcome to the online privacy guide
I have always been an advocator of privacy, however I myself haven't done the best job of withholding that. After hearing about the UK's OSA act, the US' KOSA act and about how companies use your data. I decided to get really into privacy, taking it far more seriously.
Privacy is an international human right, so by taking these measures you are putting effort into protecting your human rights. (check article 12 here)
Also, this can help free you from big companies by switching to open source applications that are way more friendly and privacy focuses.
Personally I can understand where your coming from, it feels like there's nothing you can do. This is why it has been so accepted, I myself used to have this sort of line of thinking.
However, real world consequences CAN happen. A data breach is common, and I have actually found my own login information on Data Breaches before up to 6 times on just ONE of my passwords! In this scenario you could basically win a negative lottery ticket, and the hacker decides to take control of your information in the sea of many login informations in a Data Breach. Admittedly it is uncommon but mitigating this is a good idea for internet safety. All I'm saying is that privacy is not about hiding, but protecting ourselves from hackers, scammers, and targetted ads.
I can also give you an analogy, if we don't just give our home address and card info to strangers we meet on the streets, why is that fine to random websites online? "They ain't gonna pull up bruh" I mean it is unlikely that if you told a random stranger even in person, that they would pull up, but you're uncomfortable with that?
I hope this has convinced you, and if you are kind of on my boat, but are concerned about giving up conviences, I can tell you how it's not a big deal, and you can set yourself limits of how much privacy you want based on what you're willing to sacrifice. I will highlight some situations like this in the guide.
Also one bonus is that everything here is FREE, some are subscription services with Free tiers that are good enough. But I have not spent a dime on any of this with one exception.
This will be things that do not require any sacrifices, I recommend starting with these if you are on the fence.
As a start, you can go into your devices privacy settings and disabling or enabling anything you think is beneficial, if you are unsure, do some searching and form an opinion from there
Go on any services you use, they usually have their own privacy settings which you can configure with
However this doesn't do much, I reccomend going a step further. For this we'll seperate the guide into 3 sections.
1. Universal Changes
2. Android
3. Desktop
Remember, if you aren't comfortable with some of these, don't do them, just only do the suggestions you are willing to.
If you have a desktop as well, you can do additonal things
I have a good example of this, there's many personal, technical and finanical reasons to not go more into privacy. Don't feel bad about it, in fact it would be worse to go all the way and sacrifice a lot and not even feel good about privacy. Here's some personal examples that I have decided I would sacrifice my privacy for.
So a good rule of thumb is to identify, is privacy worth trading this over, if it is, that's just it. Nobody should tell you you have to do anything else.
I hope this provided a good starting point to help you start taking privacy more seriously. And I hoped with this guide to not alienate people, who sometimes can't reject conveience, it's unreasonable to expect that somebody is able to do EVERYTHING I listed. This couldn't possibly include everything, and I couldn't go in-depth about some complicated things mentioned here, so you will need to look into those things yourself.