Ask Paul: August 1 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We're heading into our final weekend in rainy Mexico City for this trip, so let's kick it off a bit early with another great set of reader questions.
⚠️ You gotta look out for yourself
AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Last week, the UK’s Online Safety Act came into effect. Proton is moving all of their services to EU servers as Switzerland debates online tracking of citizens. Many States in the US are passing laws requiring age verification by government id. Now Google is starting to use technology to determine user age…and we know they can determine a lot more than that already for advertising purposes.

Short of certain technology choices, what do you think the average person can do to protect themselves from these continued assaults and insults to our privacy. It really feels to me that the surveillance state and the surveillance economy are merging for their mutual benefit.

I sometimes wonder whether we live in a particularly unique time or if this just more of the same and we're stuck in some endless loop. But in keeping with a comment I made about Apple and how what one does is more important than what one says (in Apple's case, marketing), I have been personally moving more of the technology I rely on away from Big Tech and into what I now think of as Little Tech. This isn't some new plan, per se. But I don't know. Maybe it sort of is.

Events like the ones you mention can trigger us to react, it depends on the individual and the nature of whatever event. In January, when we suddenly couldn't access our YouTube channel and all the content it contains, I had to scramble to figure that out, and got lucky and was able to re-access our accounts, and so the reaction there was twofold. I backed up that content and set out to make sure I did so either automatically or on some schedule. And I started reevaluating things with online accounts more generally and started making changes there too. And I'm a writer, so I'm writing about these things in my Online Accounts (2025) series.

Ideally, we don't spend the rest of our lives just course-correcting every time something happens that we don't like. But that's the nature of things, you can only predict so much, and be prepared for the right disasters isn't a science. I'm old enough that I have whatever collection of experiences to work from, but Big Tech, world governments, and whatever else will always surprise from time-to-time. All we can do is react when something bad happens.

One of those things I've learned has come up a lot lately, and I was just discussing this with my wife. I use this phrase, "optimize for the every day," and it applies in lots of places in life. Something simple like packing for a trip to whatever place and deciding what to bring and what you can do without; many will overpack and then cart around all these things they'll never use, like umbrellas, hair dryers, or whatever. And I try to land on the far side of that, packing as lightly as possible...