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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • cjf@feddit.uktoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*deleted by creator*
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    8 months ago

    So if an iPhone gets stolen, would having Find My completely disabled actually be a bad thing if we’re trying to improve device security? I see that’s listed in the article.

    Would this affect the ability to use the remote lock & wipe functionality?








  • It wouldn’t surprise me if WhatsApp’s model on this is what the UK government were thinking of with the Online Safety Bill when they tried to enforce a back door in encrypted messengers.

    It’s incredible just how much more interesting metadata can be than the actual message contents.

    Explaining this to people when they ask why I don’t use WhatsApp is pretty difficult though.

    I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I found out that what I thought was just a casual walk down the street mindlessly chatting with a friend turned out to also involve a third party neither of us were aware of tracking all of our movements.



  • I believe this is down to what they define as being end to end encrypted.

    It’s no secret that WhatsApp adopted Signal’s encryption protocol just before Meta acquired them, but since it’s all closed source we don’t know if they’ve changed anything since the announcement in 2016 that all forms of communications on WhatsApp are now encrypted and rolled out.

    Within WhatsApp’s privacy policy, it’s important to note that they only mention end to end encryption when it comes to your messages. Everything else is apparently “fair game” for collection. Of note, the Usage and Log information point details all the metadata they collect on you automatically, including how you use the service; how long you use the service; your profile info; the groups you’re in; whether you’re online; and the last time you were online, to name a few things.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that technically they are end to end encrypted by definition, and whilst they’ve gone ahead and implemented things such as encrypted backups (that you must enable) to make it harder for them to read your message contents, they can still collect a lot of metadata on every user.


  • The thing about Twitter/X is that the algorithm has always been tailored to get the most interactions, which very typically leads it to feed you things that get you angry. I can’t imagine what it’s like post-musk ownership.

    Facebook & Reddit are the same. I’ve never really used Instagram or TikTok so can’t really vouch for either of those.

    I’ve seen people I’ve known since childhood whom I always thought were really lovely post really xenophobic content. I’ve watched others fall into the traps of “real social dynamics” and the likes of whatever crap Jordan Peterson was spewing at the time. Heck, I’ve even seen people whom have always been quite chill “go with the flow” types try to start arguments on these platforms.

    I realised that a lot of things are posted very deliberately to enrage you. Depending on who posted it, they could also be attempting to control the way you think, too. Getting people angry is the best way to coerce them into compliance.

    If you find yourself getting angry at something you’ve seen on social media, think about why that might have posted in the first place. I generally find that the angrier people are in the comments the more likely it was posted to influence how you think about the subject.





  • GB is metric and it’s easy for us to remember. E.g. 1000 bytes = 1 Kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes = megabyte and so on.

    GiB is the binary value. In binary, you have to work in powers of 2. That is… the values double every time (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and so on…). 1024 bytes = 1 KiB, 1024 KiB = 1 MiB

    Since computers work in binary, and 1000 isn’t a number that’s easy to deal with in binary, we use the closest value available to us, 1024. In fact, back in the days when people were only concerned about KBs, they would say that 1000 KB = 1024 KiB.

    Of course, we’re now working with TBs rather than KBs. Everything ramps up including the amount of “missing” space an OS reports on a hard drive.

    I know windows tries to be helpful and shows you the value of a drive in GB, rather than its GiB value. Ever wonder why a 1TB hard drive appears as ~931GBs? This is why. Other OSes tend to show you the GiB value since that’s generally a lot more accurate.