A private computing system in 2021
(in progress)
Here, experts help us set up a computing setup that is actually private, and explain the various steps and privacy risks at each step. Building a private setup might have different meanings for different people. In this case, we take the example of a family man who wants to keep completely private anything pertaining to him and anyone in his household: anything they write, any photos and videos, and projects they're working on. He uses the internet for websurfing and communications like email, and uses apps on his phone for communications and viewing images and videos, such as instagram and fb. He may cross borders and carries computing devices along with him. These borders include ones with countries that actually kill journalists regularly.
1: HARDWARE
IME
RAM/CPUmemory
Nature of Android device, Pinephone, versus laptop or tower
ENCRYPTION
levels of, at os, disk, programs, internet communications
2: OS
We'll only talk about Linux options since the other two have unknown telemetry.
It seems Ubuntu (Canonical) isn't very secure, but it's the most used. According to Dan, it has at least 4 pieces of spyware pre-installed (telemetry), which can be removed with:
sudo apt purge ubuntu-report popularity-contest apport whoopsie
(https://askubuntu.com/questions/1027532/how-to-opt-out-of-system-information-reports)3: PROGRAMS
CACHE
'DELETED' FILES
4: INTERNET