It is horrifying to realize that a throbbing majority of people believe that ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ in matters respecting privacy. If that were true, then specifically among my fellow Filipinos who are parroting this falsity, I could demand access to their Facebook (FB) Messenger accounts. Many would be convicted for violations of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 (Republic Act 10175), the Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009 (Republic Act 9775), and the Special Protection of Children Against Abuse, Exploitation and Discrimination Act (Republic Act 7610), involving lewd messages to minors. Or I could lay those solicitations bare before their spouses.
I have everything to hide. We all have everything to hide. The State and its agents are not to be trusted wholesale. Otherwise, there is no necessity for a Bill of Rights to limit the already overwhelming power of the State over its citizens.
We all have everything to hide.
This is not about the State vis-à-vis our Constitutional right to privacy, as that is an entirely different matter. This is about privacy that we are slowly giving away to insatiable corporations. Every online act is tracked, monetized, and sold. Corporations trade our data for advertising revenue through profiling, often with little regard for the consequences, as they can certainly throw money at whatever fines the European Union slaps their wrists. Check your threat model since the onus is on us to strengthen it. I already know mine, and this is how I address it.
Threat Model: Filipino Lawyer
Personally, I do not like reading or hearing other people prefixing their professions when they are trying to make a point. One’s profession shouldn’t be an entire personality. But allow me to commit the transgression I also loathe:
As a lawyer, I have an inherently paradoxical privacy threat model. The legal profession demands that my identity and professional details be subject to public scrutiny. A notary public, for instance, must display his email address, tax identification number, and receipt numbers on the very documents he notarizes. And this is as it should be, as it ensures that the public can easily verify whether a lawyer is legitimate. Jurisprudence defines the legal profession as a form of public trust.
Yet, this same openness exposes lawyers to significant privacy risks. By virtue of belonging to the legal profession, we bear the brunt of regulatory checks that others do not. Western security experts often dismiss privacy concerns with the suggestion: “Just don’t use FB or Google.” Unfortunately, this advice is impractical in the Philippines.
In this jurisdiction, government agencies, businesses, and most importantly, the people, have these platforms as a necessity, dare I say, even central to their own existence. American rugged individualism often fosters isolation, whereas in the Philippines, it retains the warm community that we want to belong to, regardless of its form, physical, digital, or ephemeral.
…we [the Filipino people] want to belong regardless of its form, physical, digital, or ephemeral.
Nevertheless, the deadly threat is real. Lawyers are not even the most vulnerable. Journalists, political dissidents, and the indigenous peoples are the ones suffering the most. Do not take my seemingly lightweight treatment of this matter be mistaken for indifference toward the struggles of others. All of my dismissiveness to privacy concerns is not for those persons I enumerated above, but for you, dear reader, who, for sure, is just unreasonably paranoid; you do not matter that much or at all. You can use these platforms much more freely than the rest of us, but don’t forget to practice great caution.
Meta
The sole reason for maintaining an FB and/or Instagram (IG) account is to safeguard against impersonation. Identity theft has become a common tactic among GCash scammers, and a well-secured and maintained FB account can serve as a strong deterrent. You can use the platform solely for Messenger—without posting life updates, uploading real-time photos of your whereabouts, or sharing your fleeting feelings.
You can ignore the algorithm-driven feed entirely. The point is, simply, to reserve your online identity on FB. After all, how else do you expect people, family, friends, partners, clients, or headhunters to contact you? As for me, I want to be left alone, but not to be alone.
I usually use the platform to advertise myself. I post sporadically, sometimes with lawyerly insights, oftentimes with silly memes, to signal that my account is active, that I am still alive, and that I can be reached. Significant milestones in my profession are also shared as Stories on both FB and IG—for example, when I visit the Supreme Court. My contacts often react positively to these kinds of posts: inquiring where I am working, asking for my legal advice, and/or seeking a loan from me, in that order. This also creates the impression that I’ve advanced considerably in my legal career. That impression is true, though social media magnifies it to a slightly higher degree.
This is how I use these platforms: I utilize them to my advantage. I do not allow myself to be enslaved by Meta’s dopamine-driven manipulations. Instead, I use social media as a professional or business tool. While the law grants me the right to object to Meta’s processing, I find it more efficient to simply deny Mark Zuckerberg the pleasure.
Meta has been garbage for the entirety of its existence. The businesses and fan pages I follow do not, at all, appear in my feed anymore. Instead, I am bombarded with propaganda, both local and abroad. Hence, FB as a source of information is dumbassery; make it exclusively as a tool and nothing else. Be the user, not the spent.
Be the user, not the spent.
Speaking of propaganda, LinkedIn is the most absurd social media that I unwillingly maintain. Are we really pretending we like using this? Admittedly, I enjoy using Instagram, but with LinkedIn, I can not extract joy from using it.
LinkedIn feels impersonal and fake. It is like visiting a hospital; it might smell of strong chemical disinfectant, but you can always catch the whiff of death from its sterility. Capitalism is really forcing us to put up a façade that we like corporate slavery. Hello?! Nobody likes to work!
Unfortunately, in terms of professional visibility, nothing beats LinkedIn. It employs search engine optimization (SEO) magic so that my profile is the first result in search engines when I query for my name. My professional life is the only part of me that I am willing to let out in public, anyway.
It is well-documented that Google is evil. It does not even pretend to conceal its vile behavior. The enshittification of the intrawebs is not just by Google acting on its own. It is a decades-long mutual destruction between the search engine company and SEO professionals/content mills. Google would tweak its algorithms, claiming to purge manipulation and elevate “quality.” The SEO industry would respond in kind, reverse-engineering the changes, devising new tricks, and flooding the web with endless trash.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is destroying how the internet is meant to be. Google is effectively harvesting the hard work of actual people and presenting it as its own. This illegal monopoly maneuver is called “zero-click,” where independent websites are starved of the traffic they need to survive. To make matters worse, these AI summaries are often confidently wrong.
I am not even talking about privacy crimes committed by Alphabet yet. Hence, I left Gmail, vowed not to use Google Analytics and AdSense on this site or hawd.net, ditched Google Photos and Google Drive, abandoned Google Workplace, and switched to an iPhone with no Google Chrome. Chrome was the easiest to let go of. I’ve been a Firefox user throughout my adult life—especially back when I managed Flash-based browser games portals, the only way I could download .swf files was through a Firefox add-on.
…I left Gmail, vowed not to use Google Analytics and AdSense on this site, ditched Google Photos, abandoned Google Drive, ignored Google Workplace,…
Goddamn it, I was so dependent on Google. And if I’m being completely honest? I still am in some ways. Take Google Maps, for example, no word can describe it perfectly, but god-sent. Try using Apple Maps or Open Maps in the Philippines, and you’ll probably end up super lost. Before smartphones were a thing, I used to sit in internet cafés and literally draw directions on paper just to make sure I didn’t mess up the route.
And then there’s YouTube. It’s still the default for video, whether I like it or not. Everyone and everything is there. I’ve learned a lot from watching YouTube videos, from opening hard-to-open jars to fixing door knobs. Finally, there’s Google Search. It’s often criticized as problematic, but at its most flawed, it is still the best at what it does. The rest just can’t compete.
Microsoft
If Google is the creepy stalker watching your every move, Microsoft (MS) has already stabbed you just below the ribs…with an icepick. While the former is busy selling your profile to advertisers, the latter is bombastically winning billion-dollar military contracts. MS builds the tech that powers modern warfare. From providing the infrastructure for government surveillance to developing high-tech goggles that help soldiers kill more efficiently on the battlefield. MS products have a literal body count.
As we are on the topic of body count, let us discuss Bill Gates’. He spent years trying to brand himself as a saintly grandpa-philanthropist, but he can’t scrub away his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Genocidal rapist is how we should describe MS after all its crimes against humanity.
Genocidal rapist is how we should describe MS after all its crimes against humanity.
I’m done with Windows, even without the virtue signalling. Seriously—what have these AI agents done to this operating system? It is bloated, it breaks things every update, and it is a privacy nightmare. It slowed down my Thinkpad X13 like an imbecile, so I decided to switch to Linux.
Admittedly, Microsoft still has a strong hold on gaming. I canceled my Game Pass subscription because, unbelievably, it wouldn’t allow me to use my PlayStation 5 controller with their games. But even with Steam making otherworldly progress with Proton, some games, specifically multiplayer games, still require Windows. I’m good at multiplayer games that is why this is a difficult goodbye.
As for AI, it will never be used in this blog or any of my sites, not for generating photos or images, and not for generating written content. Come on, now, it’s not that hard to write. I may have used AI unwittingly for grammar checks, the kind that come with browsers or WordPress installations—but that’s probably it. I’m not even sure how AI operates behind my tech stack. I reject AI, LLM, Copilot, whatever-the-fuck you call this, wholeheartedly across the board.
Although to be unapologetically transparent, I once dabbled in an Upwork gig as an AI response evaluator for a Chinese chatbot. It paid me $30 and some change. It meant a lot of money when I was in poverty.
My current engagement with the Energy Regulatory Commission has required me to use the full Microsoft suite, but I’ve completely decoupled my personal devices from my work laptop. There is no entanglement between work and personal life in my devices. Hence, for my personal computing, Microsoft products are not considered.
As for OneDrive, I had an absolute privacy nightmare experience, so much so that I could swear under oath that Microsoft is sloppy in handling user data. Someone else’s photos—not documents, but actual photos—appeared in my OneDrive. I have no idea how that happened. I know they weren’t mine because who are these people!? I thought maybe that I had suffered retrograde amnesia; it might be photos of cases that I am handling. Still, the upload dates were from before I even created my OneDrive account. That is some scary incompetence on MS’s part.
Because of the aforementioned circumstances, I stopped using OneDrive altogether. I’m currently using Dropbox, though I also consider it equally a privacy concern. I’ve already paid for a one-year subscription, so I’d finish that but won’t renew. I use Dropbox to store the digital original copies of my notarized documents because of the speed and ease of use. The primary reason for the subscription is for You Need A Budget 4 syncing, but I’ve since moved on to Actual Budgeting, a free and open-source software. Yes, if it was not painfully obvious by now, I’m definitely heading in that direction.
The Future is Free and Open Source (FOSS)
I’m now actively looking for FOSS alternatives wherever they make sense. Choosing open-source isn’t about being a paranoid nerd; it’s simply running away from this largely unattractive technofeudalism. I do not want my data floating around for everybody’s consumption. I am not a slut.
Last Updated on March 13, 2026
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