This week’s Office Hours is a “non-live live stream” — I couldn’t be there in real time, but I still wanted to keep the routine and answer your questions async. I covered a bunch of practical privacy decisions people are making right now: switching to an EU-based domain registrar with DNSSEC and strong account security, whether MegaVPN is worth using compared to more established privacy-focused VPNs, and what (if anything) is actually ready to replace Discord. A big theme of this episode is expectations versus reality: with services like Google Drive, you can delete files, but you can’t truly verify what happens internally across backups and distributed infrastructure. I referenced a recent example where Google reportedly recovered “deleted” Nest footage, which is a good reminder that if it’s not your server, you don’t really know. My advice: assume the data has already been exposed to the risks of that ecosystem, delete what you can, move on, and do better going forward (ideally encrypt before upload). Finally, I dug into the core question: should you move from Google to a private ecosystem, and is that “too many eggs in one basket”? I don’t buy the extremism that ecosystems are inherently bad — most people already live inside Google/Apple suites. A privacy ecosystem (like Proton) can be a massive win for normal people, and compartmentalization becomes more relevant once you’re intermediate/advanced and have specific failure-mode concerns (like account lockout taking your password manager with it).