Privacy Goals: 2025

As the year comes to a close, I thought I'd have a look back at how I'd fared on my privacy journey this year, and what goals I have for 2026.

Desktop

On desktop, my goal was to largely migrate to Linux full-time. Windows is becoming increasingly drenched in AI slop, both on the front end with Co-Pilot constantly shoved in your face, as well as behind the scenes with Microsoft mandating that their engineers and coders use it for at least 30% of their work.

It is no co-incidence that 2025 has seen some egregious bugs hitting Windows, such as task manager replicating itself over and over again.

And with the forced end of Windows 10, Windows 11 is proving to be a perfect platform for MS to push their AI shovelware onto users, regardless of whether they like it or not. Add to that the fact that they are absolutely hell-bent on forcing users to create and use an online Microsoft Account in order to log into their own PC? Suppressing the use of local accounts and ways of using them to install Windows is a privacy-eroding development, and forces you to let MS know every time you install or boot into the OS.

Guess what doesn't do this phone-home shenanigans?

Linux

So as I mentioned above the goal was to move as much as possible to Linux, full-time if I could, and essentially dump Windows altogether on my home machine.

Largely that goal has been achieved. I'm currently using Bazzite Linux, and it's really nice.

I may or may not stick with it longer-term, as the immutable nature of the distro can sometimes prove a bit of a sticking point, but it's really very nice, and gaming on it seems to be working well for the majority of the time.

At the moment I'm only logging into Windows for raid nights for playing WoW, and that's it. Otherwise I'm on Linux full-time.

Wow still has some small niggly crashes in Bazzite, and I do NOT want that to be happening mid-raid, even if we are in full mythic farm mode right now, hoovering up Mythic Dimensius mounts for the raid team. I suspect that these are add-on or graphics driver related, so we'll see how things go after the pre-patch in January, after the Addonpocalypse occurs.

VPN

I continue to use either ProtonVPN or Mullvad here. Both are good, solid, choices for increasing your security and privacy online.

Not least because of the increasingly authoritarian nature of the UK government, but I've covered that earlier this year.

Browser et al

I've recently begun switching to a Firefox fork.

Vivaldi, while it's still an amazing browser, has been a bit glitchy and crashing on Bazzite recently. So I've been testing various forks of Firefox, given they run better than Chromium-based browsers in Linux.

There are various options here, the main ones of note being:

• Floorp
• Zen
• Waterfox
• Librewolf

Firefox as a browser has, over the course of the past few years, become less and less of an option for various reasons. Following the installation of their new CEO, it is definitely off the cards now and any time in the future. Seemingly following the lead of Microsoft, the new CEO has declared that Firefox will henceforth become an AI-Browser.

Eurgh, give me strength.

So for now, I'm testing out Floorp. It's a browser similar to Vivaldi in terms of appearance and philosophy regarding customisation, so it's my first choice for now. It's not available on mobile, but thanks to Firefox Sync you can use any combination of different FF-based browsers and sync bookmarks and so forth between devices. I'm sad to be leaving Vivaldi behind, but if I change OS to a non-immutable version of Linux, I'll likely be back to it again.

Mobile

Earlier this year I bought a Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, the current top of the line Pixel model. The intention for this phone was to eventually install GrapheneOS when it became available for the 10 series, and try to keep it for as long as possible.

I'm a tech junkie, and I do like buying the latest and greatest every 2yrs, but this time I want to do things differently.

So I bought the pixel to install GrapheneOS, but had to wait for a while until Graphene became available, as Google were delaying the release of code that would make that possible.

Then, earlier this month exactly that happened. I waited for a couple of releases, after the initial experimental releases came out towards the end of November, and since early December have now got GrapheneOS running on my Pixel 10 Pro XL with the latest QPR2 release installed.

This was another privacy and security-driven move. Graphene is one of the most secure versions of Android available, if not THE most secure. It is also, thanks to stripping out all of the Google Play services, one of the most private. If I wanted, I could run this phone with NO google apps on it at all.

However, I am a realist, and have needs for my phone, such as using it as a 2FA device for a LOT of services. The good thing is that Graphene do supply the Play store as a sandboxed app, meaning you can install it, install the apps etc you need, and given it's sandboxed, Google will not be tracking you or your activities unless you're in the app, installing or browsing apps.

Graphene also provides easy access to create secondary profiles that are sandboxed off from one another, so apps installed in one profile are not visible and completely cut-off from the other. So I've used a secondary profile to install my play-store apps, and which I can use as a regular phone. But I can very easily end that session at any time and go back to a completely vanilla GrapheneOS main profile, with no Google apps at all.

So I'm happy with how it's working at the moment, and even have contactless payments working with it, which generally DON'T work in GOS, as Google Wallet is one of the few apps that refuses to work in a sandboxed Play environment. I've done this by using the Curve app, which is one of the few NFC payment apps that work on Graphene. It wouldn't have been a deal-breaker, as I was quite prepared to go back to using my card for contactless payments, but for now it works, which is handy!

There have only been a couple of others I've noticed - NowTV refuses to install, presumably because of the "jailbroken" nature of the OS, despite the fact the bootloader is signed and locked again. Authy is the other app that refuses to work, but that wasn't a bad thing, as I've been meaning to dump Authy as a 2FA app for quite a while, so finding it won't work in Graphene was the kick up the arse I needed to remove all my accounts from it and move them to a better, open-source, 2FA app.

If you're interested in doing the same, there are a few good Open Source 2FA apps available: 2FAS, Ente Auth and Aegis Auth. All of them are equally good, so take your pick 😄

2025 Overall

I'd say compared to the start of the year, I'm now in a far better place in terms of privacy and security. Going from a mainly Windows 10 + Samsung-mobile ecosystem to Linux & GrapheneOS is a huge improvement. I'm very happy with how things are atm, with just the odd niggly crash here and there, but definitely a price I am willing to pay.

Plans for 2026?

This is where things get interesting...

Self-Hosting!

I recently purchased a Geekom A6 Mini PC, and the intention is to install Proxmox, a hypervisor environment, on it and get NextCloud up and running on it. I'll be using this as a file and media server at home. There will be a 4Tb drive in it, so plenty of space for movies, music and photos. This, in conjunction with 2Tb of lifetime storage with Filen.io should see me sorted with all of my needs for backups taken care of for years.

I am also in the process of setting up a VPS I've recently hired out. I've got Debian 12 installed on there and will be installing Yunohost with the eventual intention of running a single-user Mastodon instance on it. I'll be starting off slow, as this is the first VPS I've ever used.

I've mentioned her before, but I was inspired to go down this road by the amazing Elena Rossini over on Mastodon, particularly her blog posts here and the follow-up here.

I'll eventually migrate my main Mastodon account over to the VPS instance, and hopefully that will work smoothly. I've heard tales of single-user mastodon instances being very quiet for the single-user in terms of their feed, as discoverability can be an issue, but migrating an already in-use existing account in should hopefully negate that problem.

I'm largely only using Bluesky and Threads now to cross-post to them via Fedica, as Mastodon is now becoming my main form of Social Media.

So this weekend will be mainly spent getting both the Geekom up and running with Proxmox, as well as configuring my VPS server and getting a test Mastodon instance installed and working. Both should hopefully be up and running in production by the end of the year!

If you want to follow along with how I get on with the above ventures, give me a shout over on Mastodon 😄