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The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/The_Reason_is_Me on 2026-03-04 01:00:51+00:00.
Last few years I have been getting more and more interested in my personal privacy and IT security. Today it seems like everything is monitoring you and what I would like to achieve is to maximally separate my digital footprint from myself as a Person. My big wake up call was a few years back when I was targeted by a Russian hacker group because of my work. The attack came when I was sleeping. They went for my accounts both work and personal, they tried to get into my home network, it felt like they knew everything about me. My over-protectiveness and IT paranoia luckily saved all my important stuff but I did not sleep well for a long while after that.
I would like to use this post to create a discussion and a repository about how to utilize self hosting for this purpose of protecting yourself against surveilance.
Here are some questions I'd like to ask for a start (feel free to add your own):
- What are your favorite self hosted tools to get away from the mass surveillance of corporations?
- How do you secure your network to keep your data safe?
- How do you backup your data off site?
- What is worth switching to self hosting for and what should we invest into development of?
- How do you replace collaborative work tools like google docs?
- How do you share your data with others safely?
- How do you deal with the ever evolving world of software security and keep up with newfound vulnerabilities in the software you use?
- How do you separate your IT identity from your personal identity?
- etc...
Good question. My homelab privacy setup:
Pi-hole for DNS filtering — blocks ads and trackers at the network level. Huge privacy win for all devices.
Wireguard VPN — so I can tunnel through my home connection from anywhere, and route DNS through Pi-hole remotely.
Nextcloud — replaces Google Drive/Photos. Self-hosted, encrypted.
Vaultwarden — self-hosted Bitwarden. All passwords stay on my hardware.
Monitoring — I run periodic checks on my setup to make sure DNS isn't leaking and my browser fingerprint isn't too unique.
The biggest win is DNS-level blocking. Once you see how many tracker domains your devices contact, you can't unsee it.