Join the club. It’s surprisingly easy and here are some steps to take if you want to dip your toes into the water but don’t want to get too deep into it.

1.) Ditch Twitter. Ditch Facebook after you’ve managed to convince everyone you care about to also ditch it. But if you really cared about not being disappeared from the internet: Mewe, Gab, Mastodon, and Diaspora are really better options. Mewe just has that friendly, easy to use interface that I really like. I am very suspicious about Parler.

2.) Get a VPN. nordVPN or ProtonVPN. I like ProtonVPN because it bundles with Protonmail, and I have used nordVPN before and really liked it. Once you have it, freaking use it.

3.) Speaking of Protonmail, get a different email address that is not associated with google, microsoft, yahoo, or other major tech conglomerate. Preferably one that focuses on privacy and security. Hence, my move to Protonmail. If you own an internet domain you can associate it with that too if you want to get fancy (most email services allow this btw).

4.) Get Firefox, Brave, or other browser built around security and privacy. Do not use IE/Edge/Chrome. Then get adblock and tracking disabling extensions for them like Ublock Origin for that additional protection.

5.) Get Signal. Seriously. Unless you actually like third parties being able to read your text messages. Telegram also works but isn’t open source. I have them both, Telegram’s groups are amazing.

6.) Don’t upload anything to ‘the cloud’ you don’t want other people to see, unless it’s a secure cloud storage. The Proton people are working on that, but it’s still in beta. I trust google and microsoft as far as I can throw them. No Google Drive, no One Drive.

7.) Ditch Google Play store (if you’re an Apple user: rofl) and use F-Droid (for open source software, which tends to be more privacy and security focused) or Aptoid (just beware what you install. It’s old school internet over there).

8.) And finally if you’re really serious about things. Get Linux. If you’re new with the whole not using Windows or Mac thing, get Ubuntu. But there’s a linux out there that fits every kind of computer knowledge capability.