Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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privacy recommendations for a digital journal? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by blackboxwarrior@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hi there! A little background: I write down notes a lot to make up for my bad memory. I’ve been doing this for a few years, and it’s usually a few thousand words a day: some professional, some deeply personal. Because of this, I’m trying to be conscious about keeping these notes private. While I’ve made a few changes along the way to follow better privacy practices, I thought I’d post here and see what other ideas are out there.

Right now, I have a few thousand markdown files stored in iCloud with end to end encryption. It’s far from a perfect system: ideally I would get away from cloud storage, iCloud is closed source, and there’s no native linux client. While it’s more private, writing entirely on paper isn’t an option: typing is much faster, it’s easier to query, and I can do fun things with this data. I think my next shift is towards using syncthing to maintain copies of these notes across devices, as I often edit from various machines and want to maintain multiple backups.

Rather than asking directly for proposed solutions, I’ll ask: What should I be considering? Does the editor I use matter? Does this go down to operating system level? I think the answers are both of these are yes, but I don’t know what else I should be asking myself.

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[–] NicolaHaskell@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago

I gravitated towards icalendar as a storage format for VJOURNAL entries with Evolution as my primary entry interface.

My workflow evolved over the years, but the earliest goal was to get started writing. Evolution > Memos > New Memo List > "On This Computer". Then write.

In between writing I git-tracked that file then backed up the repository. I played with setting up xandikos to automate those parts (and it worked pretty well) but I stuck with direct file management to keep the writing path clear.

I also use tasks.org on my phone for intake, but I don't do any automatic synchronization. Typically the app serves as a dumping ground, and from time to time (ideally though rarely before it gets weedy) I'll massage those bites into longer form journal entries and clear the inbox.

From there, consumption/review is a free for all. I once converted my VJOURNAL entries to nikola blog entries so I could see them marked up, but I'm part robot and reading the markdown has been fine. I use nikola for other blogging, but the ability to view journal entries in Evolution (or some theoretical other VJOURNAL editor that I haven't been able to find) without having to do anything more than write was appealing. Web based means you could point nutch at it once grep/sed/ack/awk on local files stops scaling. It took a lot of writing to get there, good job!