“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden
Facebook used to be my go-to social platform to interact with my friends. The Meta-owned social media app allowed me to share my travel photos, memes, and some of my thoughts. But ever since I got covid and went through so much of traumatic experiences last summer, I learned the hard way that I could no longer use the social media as I did before. It’s the place where I could share the best versions of myself with those edited photos and engage myself in fun conversations with my friends who commented on it. But none of them, when I look back on them, was memorable, and the social app was the constant reminder that my close friends are only a select few with whom I don’t necessarily have to interact through Facebook.
Because of its privacy scandals and misconduct, I always felt it was not a safe place to have some private voice calls and even exchange DMs. Since I’m particularly a politically sensitive person, who constantly mentioned geo-political issues on the platformm and all thanks to the recent global digital trend that tries to restrict our freedom of speech, I felt less and less safe to engage my digital activities on the platform.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, I only wanted to interact with my select few close friends. You see, having a hundred friends is not a miracle. A miracle is having a friend who will stand by your side when hundreds have walked away. And thankfully, I have such a few miracles in my life. And I found this app, Signal. Signal is a lot safer than any other messaging apps because it uses end-to-end encryption that ensures that no one else, not even Siganl, can read your messages. Even Edward Snowden encouraged people to use this app, instead of Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
During this year, I interact with two of my most close friends on Signal, and the rest with other messaging apps, like LINE and Slack. And I would like to invite other close friends to my Signal circle so that we could enjoy a safer digital life. And my personal digital-safety-first trend is applied to other sectors of my digital life, such as an email client and a password manager. For example, I’m now trying to migrate my main email client from Gmail to Proton Mail, a Switzerland-based privacy-oriented email service. Although some of its subscription plans are premium, I’m happy to pay for them in exchange for my digital safety. Don’t you think it might be a lot riskier if you keep using a free service that takes advantage of your personal data by letting you use the service for free? As for password manager, I switched from LastPass to 1Password, one of the most proclaimed password managers for its solid security.
So, Signal reshaped how I interact with my friends and re-defined my understanding of social apps. Even though I still use Facebook from time to time, but not as frequent as I did before. I think I only use it maybe once a month at the most. Due to my concerns of a possible covid contraction, I barely leave my neighborhood recently, so I have almost nothing to share with my friends anyway.
My personal focus at this moment is to develop my own Android apps as my portfolio and use them to attract future employers who may hire me as a potential Android app developer. I do believe it’s much better to spend my time on realistic accomplishments, such as improving my coding skills, instead of spending time on unrealistic and unproductive digital activities. Do you agree with me?
Anyways, thanks for reading, and see you soon!!
