A single hand pie filled with brown sits in the center, slowly crumbling to bits

The only surefire form of privacy is to not store information digitally in the first place, ideally not at all.

But sometimes we do have information that needs storing. And in that case privacy requires that you control the data at rest and encrypt the data at transit. All free cloud services can snoop your data if they really want to. If you value privacy, minimize your use of them.

You should assume that every social network is ride with spying, both for corporate and governmental purposes. For example, the main reason TikTok is currently getting threatened with a banning is because they have a less fed-friendly algorithm, so large masses of people are actually seeing the horrors in Gaza. If you watch the nightly news, you won’t see that content. If you go to YouTube, you won’t see that content. You also will barely see it on Reddit (which literally hired someone that worked at the CIA to be their community manager person lol). Do your best to dissociate your online activity from your personal identity. Use a good VPN that you pay for with cash or a proxy system like a voucher that can’t be traced back to you. Use burner email accounts. Etc etc.

You think the Marcos government returned from partial alignment to the full alignment with the previous neocolonial regime under the thumb of the primary global superpower that already occupies their country and has done so for over 100 years because “China scary”?

lmao

The current Marcos government is a shift towards the United States and is gladly offering up The Philippines, a neocolony of the United States, as a forward base for the “containment” of China. This includes a reversal in both policy and propaganda when it comes to the South China Sea.

Countries like the UK weaponize aid. It’s not simple charity, it is another means by which to exert power. You can see it right now with the defunding of UNRWA, the blockade of Gaza, sitting by while Israel blocks aid. It is part of a pressure campaign.

It also acts as PR.

As Thomas Sankara said, “he who feeds you, controls you”.

This is why Western powers react negatively when other countries seek food sovereignty.

It is very difficult to run an email provider and not get banned by the others. Google, Microsoft, and Apple control the US market, for example. If they decide your domain is spam, you suddenly can’t email anyone with a Gmail or Hotmail or Apple account. Avoiding getting banned means you have to regulate your own outgoing emails very carefully, rate-limit them just right, and yet also build up a reputation of trustworthiness by sending a lot of emails that don’t get marked as spam.

The only privacy-secure way to do your email would be DIY but this risks getting banned like… all the time.

Personally, I recommend having your own domain and setting up MX records to a reliable email provider that is not one of the big ones and ideally offers some kind of theoretical inbox protection (please note that they could always still read everything if they just copied all incoming messages to another database as well).

Email is itself not very secure. You can use GPG to make it better but most people won’t know how to receive your messages or send secure ones. For security, I recommend using a dedicated e2e chat service or in-person communication.

I expect a somewhat more material and psychological explanation for political tendencies than, “here are their slogans that they repeat to us” lol