Signal provides all the privacy I need, and it’s nowhere near as skeezy as most of the alternatives mentioned in the comments here. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, but if OP would like to detail their objections to it, I’d be happy to hear them.

Signal.

Google bought up GrandCentral years ago and turned it into Google Voice, where they could freeze the feature set and ignore the product and any possible innovation. Multiline autoringing and speech-to-text on voicemail was it, forever. If innovation had stayed on the table, we could have had rule-based personal phone trees, maybe with different greetings and options based on known/unknown/masked caller ID.

25 years ago, I pressed 7 and got to hear the duck quack. We didn’t know at the time that it was a golden age.

I’ve already been creating a unique email address for nearly every service, for many years. That probably complicates something like Incogni, which is a good point, thanks. It’s also amusing and telling when the phishing emails start coming into equifax@mydomain (true story).

This is a very helpful anecdote, thanks!

It’s about the exact combination of extensions you have installed, along with all of the other info that a nosy website can obtain from you (installed fonts, User Agent string including exact version numbers, etc). It doesn’t come down to any one particular piece of info, but every bit adds to the overall picture. Here is a good overview and their main page runs an active test on your browser.

Second this, including buying from Costco. I don’t love the Lorex interface, but they’ve been around for a long time and can’t really compete on the modem Ring-style features so they’re now advertising the privacy benefits of their local storage.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) cameras are the way to go, connecting the camera wires directly to the NVR box, which doesn’t itself need to be connected to your network. The NVR box has a hard drive and an HDMI port. If you do optionally connect it to the network (but just don’t), then their app will facilitate connecting to your box either locally or over the internet so that you can stream your video directly from your hard drive, not their cloud.

If you want it protected against power outages, you just put the NVR on a UPS and you’re done.

Of course, if a burglar finds your NVR and takes it, then all of your footage is gone.

Why have you never been able to do it? I set up a full mail system years ago on a Xen/Linux VPS with stuff like Postfix, maildrop, Courier IMAP, a custom set of MySQL tables for aliases and such, and at one point migrated my TLS from CACert to LetsEncrypt. I enjoyed some aspects of the huge pain in the ass that all of that was, and having it work nicely was great. Spinning up a new email alias was easy and free, so I created a new one for damn near every site I interacted with, which later turned into a form of lock in having to continue running my server.

The continual server maintenance was a pain in the ass, requiring me to remember in substantial detail how it all worked so that I could appropriately integrate new things I had to learn like SPF and DMARC. I’m glad to have had some detailed sysadmin experience, but I was so glad in the end to finally migrate away from all that and just pay Fastmail instead.

I still have nearly the same flexibility with Fastmail and my custom domains, but they’re the ones that need to do all the maintenance. I can’t scale across unlimited domains for the same zero marginal cost, but I can make it work for a reasonable price with a few domains and scale arbitrarily within that. I’m sure there are other hosts out there that do a similarly good job, and Fastmail hasn’t been without its own troubles, but it’s been a net win for me.

I don’t recommend running your own server. I won’t do it again. I do recommend building an army of custom aliases all at your own custom domain(s).