doktor5000 wrote:What does using KDE have to do with Youtube/Google or preserving your identity?
If you don't like the proprietary driver nobody forces you to use that. If you want to preserve your identity you can use the private mode offered by nearly all major browser, and maybe use something like Tor.
Private mode won't help you preserve your identity. TOR, however, is a massive help with that.
Beyond that, using privoxy properly goes a long way toward protecting you, though you will find it to be annoying to use until you manage to configure it to suit yourself. Using Noscript on firefox or uMatrix on chromium (and if you value privacy you use chromium, not chrome) will greatly enhance your privacy, though again you will find them to be annoying until you learn to use them properly. And once you DO learn to use them properly, you will be amazed at how many trackers are being used to follow you around...and you can block ALL of them. I also use Disconnect on chromium to explicitly block trackers; many of them don't show up for uMatrix to block them because Disconnect has already done it.
If you are concerned about a "national monopoly" you might want to consider signing up for a subscription VPN service that is hosted in another country. This encrypts your traffic out of your country and makes it appear you are browsing from someplace else. Of course, TOR accomplishes this as well, but many sites do not cooperate with TOR and you can't access them.
Never use a free VPN service; those are ALL security/privacy violations, or at a minimum they have very limited bandwidth. Pay for the service; it is worth doing if you need a VPN connection.
Avoid Google. Use DuckDuckGo instead. It is not as comprehensive as Google, but a whole lot safer.
I personally maintain a virtual machine that I use only for "special browsing" which means those cases where I must either (1) search using Google or (2) visit sites that I must visit, that do not work with my normal security. On this VM (and I change to a different VM from time to time for this purpose), I run (mostly) unprotected browsers (though I do use script blockers because the ads make me crazy), and I NEVER browse with them; instead, I copy/paste the specific URI I want to visit into the browser window. Thus, from time to time, I "pop up" here and there, but can't be tracked because there is no referrer information and I am not browsing with these unsecured browsers. On those browsers, I frequently clear out all cookies and all history.
I maintain a different VM for banking. Again, its browsers are not protected but I only visit sites that involve my money from this VM. I never browse anyplace else with those browsers, and that includes any search engines, and I never visit any of my money sites using any other browsers. I don't replace this VM periodically because it is helpful if my banks and brokerages recognize me.
None of these VMs have ANY information on them other than what is needed for their job; no emails, no contact lists, no personal files, nothing.
Now, back to the question that heads this thread about nvidia telemetry. I use nvidia on my workstation and my laptop has an nvidia card in it as a secondary video card. Because of the nature of the development work that I do, I often instrument my internet connection, either directly on my workstation or my laptop, or where those connections go through one of my routers.
I have never noticed any traffic going to or coming from nvidia. If any traffic is going through to an IP address that resolves to a domain that says nvidia, I will see it, and I certainly would investigate it - and then would block it using iptables. But I have not seen it.
This does not mean it is not happening; I have not looked specifically for it and if the traffic was to an IP that didn't resolve on a reverse DNS, I wouldn't catch it without looking for it.