Another 5 Best Practices FS HOT Swears By – and You Should Too (2025 Edition)

Last year we dropped the essentials. This year, we turn the screw tighter. The surveillance state didn’t slow down, and neither did we. Here’s what’s changed and how to stay untouchable in 2025.

1. Signal – Accept No Substitutes

If you’re not using Signal, you’re leaking data. It’s still the cleanest, most hardened messaging platform around — and now it’s post-quantum ready. Full encryption, photo and video sharing, calls, groups, the lot.

Forget the “but my friends use WhatsApp” excuse. Mine did too. They either moved or stopped messaging. WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger – all leaky pipes dressed as convenience. Signal or silence. Your call.

Get Signal Here

2. GrapheneOS – The Phone That Doesn’t Obey

For those serious about going dark, GrapheneOS is the real deal. Disk encryption. Random MAC addresses. Sandboxed apps. No Google leash. EXIF data wiped from every photo. Out of the box it’s cleaner than anything else in circulation.

Ditch biometrics. They’re just keys you can’t change. Use PINs, and run Brave for your browser. Pull apps from F-Droid only. The difference between Android and GrapheneOS is the difference between being watched and being left alone.

Get GrapheneOS Here

3. Run Your Services Inside Brave

Apps are resource vampires. They sit, idle, listening. Kill them. Use Brave Browser instead.

Email, AI, YouTube – they all run perfectly well in the browser. Brave gives you shields, script blocking, fingerprint defence, and speed. Bookmark your services, pin them as shortcuts. It’s leaner, safer, and far harder to track. Less bloat, fewer leaks, same function.

Get Brave Here

4. Firewall Yourself – The Human Exploit

Most breaches start between your ears. Deepfakes, cloned voices, phishing – all sharpened by AI. Don’t get played.

Never trust a voice or message blindly. Verify using a question only that person would know – something that never lived online. Example: “What cartoon did I obsess over as a kid?”

Train suspicion into muscle memory. The best firewall is still you.

Read our Personal Autonomy & Privacy Guide – 2025

5. Don’t Bare Your Soul to AI

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude – none of them are your mates. Every word you type feeds someone else’s model. Treat chats as public boards.

Use AI to code, compare specs, plan travel – fine. But never dump personal history, emotions, or identifiers. Once you upload it, it’s theirs forever. The system remembers, even if you forget.

6. Kill the IoT Creep (Bonus Tip)

Smart watch. Smart car. Smart toaster. Smart nothing.

Every “smart” device is an informant with a power cord. Cars report journeys, fridges map habits, thermostats ping metrics to clouds you’ll never see. Unless a device needs internet to function, disconnect it.

Wear analogue. Drive dumb. Keep your home quiet. The less your tech knows, the safer you are.

Conclusion

Bottom line: privacy isn’t a setting; it’s a discipline. Each year, the tools evolve, but the goal stays the same – be invisible, be efficient, be untouchable.

FS HOT 2025 – still watching the watchers.

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