A Self-Hosted and Privacy Journey

It's interesting that over the last couple of days, maybe even the last week or so, I've been getting a lot of privacy-focused stuff showing up in my YouTube feed.

It got me thinking about what these tech companies actually have on me after using Google for roughly twenty years. I've had Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Photos, Android and who knows what else tied to my life for a very long time. That got me thinking more seriously about self-hosting and privacy, especially as the enshittification of a lot of products and services is starting to get pretty hard to ignore.

Louis Rossmann recently made a video about YouTube Premium and a lawsuit involving promotions being shown to Premium subscribers, with YouTube arguing that some of those promotions aren't technically ads. That got me thinking about why I cancelled Amazon Prime.

I was actually a pretty big Prime Video and Amazon Photos user for a while. Prime delivery was convenient too. But once Prime Video started putting ads into the service, I started wondering what I was really paying for. Prime delivery is nice, but most of the time I can wait another day or two for something to arrive and get free shipping anyway. For what Prime costs in Canada every year, there just wasn't enough value there for me anymore.

Then Gamers Nexus put out a video about LG smart TVs and the amount of data they can collect about their users.

That one got me thinking about smart TVs in general.

There really isn't much reason my TV needs to be collecting metadata about what I'm doing with it. I bought the TV. I didn't buy it so that the manufacturer could build another profile about me.

I don't actually have an LG TV, but I do have a Samsung, so I'm going to be looking into what this new TV is doing as well.

All of this has had me thinking a lot more about my own privacy, and more broadly about privacy for Canadians. It also ended up pushing me further into something I've already been interested in for a while: building out my own home lab.

I've started pretty simply. I have Pi-hole, Kubernetes and Headlamp running, and I've migrated Home Assistant over to it as well. It's all running on an old PC that used to be my desktop. It's more than capable of handling what I'm throwing at it, and it's pretty nice getting some use out of hardware that would otherwise just be sitting around.

The next part of the project is the network itself.

I picked up a little dual-NIC mini PC with no operating system specifically to use as my firewall. I'm going to be installing OPNsense on it, which is an open-source firewall solution that's pretty well established in the networking and self-hosting communities.

That's where I think this privacy journey is going to start: at the firewall.

Pi-hole is already handling DNS on my local network, blocking ads and a bunch of the other garbage that comes with browsing the internet. It also has the nice side effect of blocking known malicious domains and other suspicious sites.

Once I get the firewall figured out, I want to start looking seriously at de-Googling.

Google has had my data for long enough. At this point, I have the hardware and the knowledge to start hosting more of this stuff myself. My photos, files, home automation and eventually even some of the services I use every day don't necessarily need to live on somebody else's infrastructure.

I'm not expecting to completely disappear from the internet. That's probably not realistic, and it's not really what I'm after anyway.

I just want more control over my own stuff.

So that's where this project starts. An old PC, a little firewall box, some open-source software and a lot of experimenting.

We'll see how far I can take it.

Youtube sued over ads in Premium: youtube claims "promotions" are not "ads" - Louis Rossmann 216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem - Gamers Nexus

https://opnsense.org/

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0FFGQNH1D - C4 AIR Mini PC, Ryzen 5 3500U, 8GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM, 256GB SSD + PCIe 3.0 NVMe Slot, Vega 8 Graphics, Triple 4K Display, WiFi 5/BT 5.0, Micro Desktop for Business/Office/Home

https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/