On Privacy

This didn't start with the internet. It started with rooms. With conversations that weren't meant to be heard. With things I thought were mine — thoughts, movements, silences — turning out to be data points for someone else's understanding of me.

Personal privacy was breached before I ever touched a keyboard. And then, naturally, it bled into the digital. Where it only got worse. Because at least in a room, you can leave. You can push someone away. Online, the walls don't move when you push them. The exits are hidden. The chains are made of binaries and you signed a terms of service agreeing to all of it.

It's not one thing. It's the whole architecture of it.

The scale — every click, every pause, every search query, the time you spent staring at something before scrolling past it. All of it logged. Not as a biography but as a behavioral profile built to predict and manipulate you more efficiently next time.

The secrecy — it happens quietly. Under terms no one reads, in data centers no one visits, through third-party brokers most people have never heard of. You don't watch it happen. You just notice one day that the ads know something they shouldn't.

The openness — the way it's normalized. Spoken about like weather. "Oh, they track everything." Shrug. Move on. The acceptance itself is the most dangerous part. Once people stop being unsettled by surveillance, surveillance wins.

And what bothers me most is the public silence. The absence of outrage. People give away more personal information in a free app than they would hand to a stranger on the street — and they do it willingly, cheerfully, because the interface is smooth and the dopamine is immediate.

I want to be direct: individual action matters. Not because it dismantles the surveillance economy — it won't, not alone. But because privacy is a habit, and habits compound. Every step you take toward reclaiming your digital space is a real step. It is not nothing.

Start small. You don't need to disappear. You need to make the collection of your data slightly harder, then harder again. Below are tools I use or trust. None of them are paid promotions. All of them are free or have free tiers. They are not radical. They are just sensible.

I made this site as a learning exercise — I am still learning to code — but it became something more personal than that. The old web had something the current web has almost entirely lost: space. Space to be a person rather than a demographic. Space to be obscure. Space to make something strange and leave it out in the world without optimising it for engagement.

The surveillance economy runs on attention. It needs you to scroll, to engage, to react, to stay. A personal website asks nothing of you. It just exists. That feels like resistance to me, however small.

This site collects nothing about you. No analytics. No cookies. No tracking pixels. No fingerprinting. You were here and then you weren't — and that is entirely your business.