Today I saw Andrej Karpathy's post on Digital hygiene. I believe that the post is a step in the right direction, but most of the tools suggested by Andrej are just half measures that do not really make a substantial change with regard to privacy and security.

Let's start with the blog format and hosting itself. Bearblog looks like a cool minimalistic service for blogging. It claims that it does not use any tracker, javascript or stylesheets. However, do you really need to use a third-party service for blogging? Would it really be much more difficult to set up your own server for a blog? If we consider it's benefits and freedom you get it becomes no-brainer.

Most of the other points are just derivative from the hosting theme above. You either control the tool and every chain in the process, or you are just doing the half measure. Karpathy suggests using 1Password will solve your problem with passwords. You have to really trust 1Password engineers that they are perfect in terms of software security that a lot of strong hacker groups will not break the walls of one of the most popular centralised password managers.

Same in the case of a hardware security key. Is it just impossible to have a USB with ssh-key generate on it? With biometrics you just lose all the possible anonymity you are left with until this point. There are some good ideas about internet of things, but doesn't same thing about iPhone raise suspicions?

Andrej recommends signal for messaging, which is better than third-party alternatives but it has an awful client program that forces you to update every day. If you already have a server for you website, you may just want to set up an xmpp server and be in control of your communication.

Obviously from the browser perspective brave is an improvement over chrome, but essentially you are just relying on google to not kill any usability of chromium. You better just go full minimalism and switch to surf. For search engine you can use whatever you like. Every search engine sells your data or will do it soon. Just make sure to not rely on search engine for everything. You basically use 5-10 websites on a daily basis go to them with bookmarks. Avoid search engines when possible.

You already know what I will say about email. Just use your server. There is no innovation in things I mention here, it is just what everyone used to do when people had some degree of real computer literacy instead of just relying on some shady scammers, that pretend to provide privacy features.

If you are already tech savvy enough to read this post you can just do it right instead of half measures.