Ex :reddit-logo: user and resident leftist edgelord there. On my new phone (unfortunately it's an iphone so vuvuzela), I really want to keep it as "normie" as possible.
The only thing I have transferred over there is my phone number, and I'm using a new icloud email address too. is this something to worry about (sorry for the boomer-tier questions). If there's not much I can do, what can I do to fuck up the data that I do have so I can at least resist being profiled?
Why does your phone specifically need to be "normie"? In terms of generally providing less information to companies:
In terms of iOS privacy settings in general, giving Apple specifically less info:
Turn stuff off in
Settings > Privacy > Tracking
Settings > Privacy > Analytics and Improvements
Settings > Privacy > Apple Advertising
Don't enable iCloud Backup or iCloud Drive for stuff you don't want to be online, because almost all stuff stored online is not locally encrypted before being uploaded. You can enable it if you want of course, if you don't think the feds are out to get you lol. You can also backup your entire iPhone contents via iTunes to a local file instead, but you'll only be able to restore everything or nothing I believe.
In general:
Delete old online accounts that you don't use (usually through account settings in their web interface, or by going to their support page and sending an email to the proper support address).
Web browsers provide all sorts of stuff that companies can "fingerprint" you with. Logging into many websites in the same browser will probably make it easier to track you. Use a browser like Firefox and enable "Strict" tracking protection in the settings under Tracking Protection to block a lot of tracking stuff. Although safari is probably decent for this already. It's basically an arms race though. Expect to be tracked.
There's a million things a million people have written about this stuff you can find online. I'm not really much of a privacy nut myself.
Call me paranoid, but as a lefty. I'm really concerned about privacy. So I think that if I can't make myself all that anonymous, the next best thing is to be so fundamentally boring on my phone that I don't leak too much that would bite me in the ass.
I'm definitely trying to delete as many of my old :reddit-logo: accounts that I can, I had one that had almost 70k karma that I forgot the pasword to, but I don't think that will do me too much harm because that was my "reasonable lefty" account.
I'm definitely going to delete some of my alts, and any new accounts I do make will be temporary at best except for my normie ones.
Yeah in my mind there's kind of three different privacy levels:
Being anonymous to random internet strangers, which isn't too hard unless someone wants to go digging and they can probably dox me.
Separating my real life identity with online identity enough that if I apply for jobs they won't ask me about my Hexbear or Reddit account.
Privacy from the government, which I'm basically not even going to try because my info and documents and stuff are all already out there. And there's a million ways to track people from just viewing stuff in online accounts to doing packet capture to see website activity.
1 and 2 are pretty trivial for 99% of people as long as you use some basic common sense. 3 is very, very difficult and almost not worth worrying about. Don't take your phone to a protest or anything stupid like that, but if the Government is at the point of subpeona-ing your Hexbear Dot Org posts, you're already fucked.
Yeah there are definitely real life things that you should do your best to make sure the government doesn't have access to. Things which could be weaponized by police departments. But you can't really hide your political beliefs or organizing or anything like that.