De-Googling, De-Spotifying
Data privacy is a pretty active subject around the circles I frequent. The mass collection and brokering of data is an industry I can’t really wrap my head around, even if I kind of understand its mechanisms and purpose.
I can’t help feeling that the invasive and sheer scale of market demand for user data to be, to my mind, a bit of a baroque thing. A perverse thing. So I decided to untangle myself as much as I can.
One thing I didn’t intend to discover, while trying to leave the needless data-reaping hands of big corporations, was that it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Let’s take the dumpster-fire state of my Google accounts for example.
It’s been oddly meditative systematically purging the dozens of Gmail accounts I’ve accumulated over my life. Getting to decide what to keep, and what old accounts I never wish to see again. The goal here being to have only two meticulously managed email addresses.
Choosing to go with a more privacy-centric mail provider, I chose Proton Mail and I cannot recommend it enough. Their mail service has been solid.
For music, it’s been trickier: Spotify. This gave me somewhat of a moral dilemma, because I’m Sailing The High Seas with this one and I don’t like the feeling of not giving back to bands and artists.
One of the ways I’m working through this is by composing a document detailing the artists I listen to and their merch stores/donation links. I believe the average estimated take-home of Spotify artists was something ridiculously low like $0.003.
Hopefully by splurging on cool merch and donation links, or even something as simple as seeing a band if they’re in town, I can offset the need to keep Spotify around.1
All of this has been an unbelievably slow process but I believe the payout will be worth it.
If any artists/musicians read this and have a better way of supporting musicians, please shoot me an email.↩