Whatever its stores and however it stores it doesn’t matter to me: I moved its storage space to my ~/.Private encrypted directory. Same thing for my browser: I don’t use a master password or rely on its encryption because I set it up so it too saves my profile in the ~/.Private directory.

See here for more information. You can essentially secure any data saved by any app with eCryptfs - at least when you’re logged out.

Linux-only of course. In Windows… well, Windows.

Set your language to English: you’ll get the nag in English.

🥁🪘🥁

Sorry…

Seriously though, install Ublock Origin and block as many Google domains as possible. In Reddit, to get rid of that particular nag, block accounts.google.com and google.com.

Alternatively, don’t do Reddit.

Techlore isn’t about preaching rules or activism

What is it about then?

It’s TOTALLY about preaching rules and activism: they advocate for privacy and purport to educate people on how to achieve better privacy.

I read their reasoning and it sort of makes sense: what they’re saying is essentially “We do Discord because that’s where the people we want to reach - the folks who don’t know anything about privacy - hang out.”

Well, I get that. But it’s kind of like Al Gore saying his flying around the world and spewing megatons of CO2 doesn’t matter because he’s doing that to promote environmental causes. I don’t like people who exempt themselves from the rules they preach, whatever their reason. People who walk the talk are usually more convincing.

But yeah, they do have a point I guess…

Oh I didn’t know that. Privacy-wise, Discord is… suboptimal to say the least.

YouTube is Google. Asking how to use Google without losing your privacy is asking how to swim without getting wet.

Use PeerTube. You’re asking this question on Lemmy, so surely you’re comfortable with the whole Fediverse thing.

You don’t have a disability. Just saying.

Doing anything online that requires you to break strict anonymity… breaks your anonymity, hence your privacy. The two should be separate subject matters, but the corporate surveillance model ensures that if anything can be traced back to you, your privacy is as good as gone.

You say you do Facebook… There’s your answer.

Funny, I wanna ping 8.8.8.8 every microsecond forever, and make as many machines as possible all around the world do the same…

I’m a bit confused by your question: it sounds like you want to advertise yourself and your work. Why don’t you let AI scrape your information? If I were you, I’d want a chatbot to spit out my details when someone asks it to name the name of someone who does what I do.

I’m violently anti-AI, but this is the one use case I would happily feed it information: to use it as an amplifier to spread public information I want to broadcast as far and as wide as possible.

I don’t know what it is with Mozilla, they’re both the only saving grace of the open-source browser world and the most stupid internet company at the same time. And they’ve been both for decades, with a budget that could have allowed them to be and to do so much more…

Privacy used to be priceless. It still is for my generation. I work my ass off to maintain my privacy, which is harder and harder in this increasingly dystopian world, and I lose out on more and more services and conveniences everybody else enjoys as a result. But privacy is non-negociable for many people my age.

For younger folks, sadly they were born in the dystopia - or an early version of it - and they never lost the privacy they never had. For a lot of younger folks, not enjoying true privacy is their normal. Many of them are waking up to the obscenety of what Big Data does to all of us, but of course it’s harder to wake up than to resist someone trying to put you to sleep.

And finally, the assault on privacy is so relentless and comes from actors with so much more clout and resources that many simply give up, because it’s just too much. I’m one of those who refuse to drive and take the bus because cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance. But most people are not willing to accept that level of loss of quality of life and it’s fully understandable.

In other news, CNN says the best news source is CNN.

Totally agree! I can’t wait to put that granite-cased phone with wood-backed PCBs in my pocket.

It’s time to stop thinking phones are anything but commodity hardware with variable degrees of shittiness. There are no such things as premium phones, just premium prices.

Wow… If even Best Buy figured out those repair programs are designed to appease the regulators who ask for the right to repair but never actually be used, it should tell you how unappealing it is.s

CoPilot, ChatGPT and more are unable to use the Bing services so in turn are also not working or not working fully.

That’s sad, since one would logically expect any AI to get better if it loses access to Bing search results.

Privacy isn’t a cutesy. It’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, just like not doing stupid shit when you’re a teenager, you get to find out how important privacy is years later when the stupid shit you did years before comes back to haunt you and it’s too late.

The problem of course is that Big Data has made it exceedingly difficult and painful to maintain your privacy. Because of course the last thing they want is for you to have any. It hurts their bottom line.

Because of the corporate surveillance collective, in 2024, if you truly want to maintain your privacy, your life becomes significantly crappier than if you didn’t bother. But that doesn’t mean privacy isn’t as important today as it’s ever been.

Ain’t you glad you gave Reddit content for free and they’re reselling if for millions?

I think privacy and social media are inherently at odds

It doesn’t have to be.

I’ve spent decades online on Usenet, IRC, Slashdot and elsewhere before modern social media, and today on (some) social media sites, and nobody knows who am I because I’ve always been super-careful to keep my online personae and my real identity totally separate. It takes a bit of paranoia, but it’s possible to have an online footprint that’s watertight and completely divorced from real-life.

I have many, many online identities and none of them tie back to the real me. But Big Tech sure is aggressively trying to deanonymize me, and it takes a lot more care and effort than it used to to make sure that they never do.