It's easy to scoff at this whole "You will own nothing, and you will be happy" phrase, but it's really gone too far already.

Honestly, the EU's where it's at.

• Universal standards like USB-C instead of proprietary ports that cause waste
• Removable batteries
• GDPR
• Universal healthcare
• Right to repair

Invest in your people, and you'll go far.

This is great to see. I love when big players make moves into the fediverse, because it educates the masses. I'm a nobody on the internet advocating for privacy, security, and ethical social media... and I can advocate til my fingers bleed.

But when companies, publications, celebrities, and others of influence do this, it creates awareness and opens their mind up a bit into the platforms, why they're important, etc. And even if they don't understand federation at first, at least it's a touchpoint. A bit of exposure into how we can have a better, open, and private web.

Not the first time facial recognition tech has been misused, and certainly won't be the last. The UK in particular has caught a lotta flak around this.

We seem to have a hard time connecting the digital world to the physical world and realizing just how interwoven they are at this point.

Therefore, I made an open source website called idcaboutprivacy to demonstrate the importance—and dangers—of tech like this.

It's a list of news articles that demonstrate real-life situations where people are impacted.

If you wanna contribute to the project, please do. I made it simple enough to where you don't need to know Git or anything advanced to contribute to it. (I don't even really know Git.)

I don't "like" that it got this bad, but I do like that the worse things get, the more we can collectively organize and pressure reform to fix these things.

It'd be great to see a true social revolution take place in my lifetime. Social for the sake of social, not controlled by a single corporation with a business model that's designed to exploit its users.

If you wanna keep your bookmarks and the subreddits (communities) that you're subscribed to before deleting your account, I made a free tool to help you store and offload that data.

It's called Reddit Account Manager, and it's 100% free.

You can also use it to manage your Lemmy account(s), of course.

As usual, it's only Big Tech that's able to compete with Big Tech. They all love to throw their weight around when they can, and join forces when it's convenient.

Neither corporation should be defended or trusted with your data.

The only thing that's kinda funny here is the irony of Microsoft tryna poach Chrome users into their own... wait for it... Chromium-based browser.

If you wanna keep your bookmarks and the subreddits (communities) that you're subscribed to before deleting your Reddit account, I made a free tool to help you store and offload that data.

It's called Reddit Account Manager, and it's 100% free.

You can also use it to manage your Lemmy account(s), of course.

I can't emphasize how important it is for you to control your phone, especially notifications. Every notification is literally a mind hijacking attempt. Regardless of the type of notification, it's something that disrupts our thinking and our flow.

Some of them are necessary—but most aren't.

All the native apps will of course try to get as much permission from you as possible, including notifications. Don't allow this permission freely.

Get really strict about which apps need to send you notifications, and when. Take it from a dude who used to give free reign to all apps for notifications.

Once I started thinking in a more digitally minimalistic way, it made a huge difference. Running GrapheneOS actually helped with this a lot. But you don't need GOS to do this and feel the difference.

I got some notifications turned on, but most of em are silent. So they still get delivered, but they're not time-sensitive. They'll be there when I check my phone next. I don't need em interrupting whatever I was doing or thinking.

TL;DR: Be strict about which notifications you allow, and when. It'll do wonders for your thinking, productivity, and mental health.

There's no reason you should be using Chrome. Using Chrome:

• Means you consent to spyware (along with everyone else you interact with)
• Allows Google to continue dictating web standards
• Is a resource hog

If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading this comic about the dangers of Chrome: https://contrachrome.com/

If you need to absolutely use a Chromium-based browser, at least use Brave (just for that site).

Not-so-fun fact from the comic Contra Chrome: Google Chrome's URL bar is called the "omnibox." The name is derived from the Latin word "omnis," meaning "everything."

When you type into the omnibox, it's sent to Google's servers and added to your profile forever.

Even if you deleted it or didn't hit enter.

Why privacy matters, reason #854203

"dangerously close"?

"There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software." – Edward Tufte

It also literally says to not input sensitive data...

This is one of the first things I flagged regarding LLMs, and later on they added the warning. But if people don't care and are still gonna feed the machine everything regardless, then that's a human problem.

The beauty of the Fediverse is that no single entity controls it... In 12 years, I'd wager we're still around.

There's nothing that can express my disdain for Google's reCaptcha.

😒 We're training its AI models 😒 It's free labor for Google 😒 Sometimes it wants the corner of an object, sometimes it doesn't 😒 Wildly inconsistent 😒 Always blurry and hard to see 😒 Seemingly endless 😒 It's the robot asking us humans if we're the robots

Doing course correction in fixing social media is a long game. It'll take a while, and there'll be turbulence, but this is a great start

I wouldn't be able to handle this. Been running GrapheneOS since last year, and I don't think I could go back to anything else.

Actually started working on a GrapheneOS installation service called SwapMyOS that I think could be helpful to those who wanna install GrapheneOS but don't how.

I kick a percentage back to GrapheneOS itself to keep the project funded and running (which is the primary motive behind the project).

Gimmicks is how you justify planned obsolescence.

I did boost it. If anyone else wants to, here's the original post: https://social.coop/@eloquence/110663689429123291

Marketers ruin everything. — a fellow marketer

Or at least the option to make it the default. I could see some situations where someone may want to test a link with non-identifying parameters (like identifying the campaign source), and not wanting to have that stripped from the URL by default.

But I get you, from a consumer perspective I'd also want it as my default.

In the meantime, there's ClearURLs or uBlock Origin with filter lists.

Hello from GrapheneOS 👋

Unfortunately, you could say the same about WhatsApp..

A testament to how important good legislation is... most—if not all—privacy issues that we face today are in large part due to legislative failures.

Everything this person said. - Sent from a GrapheneOS device

What do you mean? Tons of links on the web have trackers appended to the URL.

That's nice of you, but it appears that the ad-supported business model doesn't work. It just results in enshittification and surveillance.

"We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them."

Jaron Lanier: How we need to remake the internet

Providing this info in the first place is the data breach... 🥴

Looks like another migration wave may be underway... 🤞🌊

If you're interested in keeping your bookmarks and the subreddits (communities) you're subscribed to before deleting your account(s), I made a free tool to help you store and offload that data.

It's called Reddit Account Manager, and it's 100% free.

You can also use it to manage your Lemmy accounts, of course.

I started a website called OpenSourcely to do exactly this.

It aggregates news, projects, and announcements related to open source.

I'm always on the lookout for new RSS feeds and outlets to add to it, so if anyone has any, feel free to send them my way.

Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho

It's a hardware authentication key. Kinda like a USB flash drive.

You know how some services offer multifactor authentication (MFA), also referred to as two factor authentication (2FA)?

There are typically two types offered: time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) where you have 30-60 seconds to type in a 6-digit code, and SMS-based where they text you a 4-6 digit code (that also expires within a set time frame).

With a Yubikey, you gotta plug in the Yubikey into your computer or phone. Or, there are some models that use near field communication (NFC) and you just need to bring it near the device you're tryna authenticate.

So rather than typing in those codes you get either from SMS or your authenticator app, you use the Yubikey as your authentication method.

Signal for everything.

There are a couple people who are too lazy to get Signal, and they got iPhones, so I set up an iMessage server to forward messages to my GrapheneOS phone.

But the communication there is extremely sparse and surface level. It's basically just a touch point. The real conversations all go through Signal.

From the studies I've read, this seems to be the case across the entire school system, not just university. If anything, it might even affect K-12 even more, since, the younger we are, the more sleep we need.

Nevertheless, I had my most challenging class 8am my freshman year of college and yeah, can confirm—it was horrific.

In retrospect, maybe it didn't help that I was out partying til 3am every day too, but that's a different story... (Jp, I was actually very diligent about it, but still couldn't crack the formula. It was simply too early.)

Elf.

I know Will turned down an obscene amount of money for it, and it was prolly the right decision, but I'm still surprised a sequel never got made given how popular Elf continues to be.

Who doesn't like an underdog? 😤

✅ Biometrics and ID stored forever who-knows-where

✅ Continued data mining and exploitation

✅ Total surveillance state

💩 The enshittification continues. Gotta love it.

Seriously though... I'm not bullish on this platform. I don't know what it's turning into, but if it truly is a "WeChat of the West," it's not something I'm interested in participating in. And I don't wanna have a hand in building it.

In this route, it means that X would really become an identity platform.

And us being on this platform gives it value. Gives it validity.

I wonder every single day if it makes sense to leave the platforms in protest, or stay in the belly of the beast and raise awareness from within.

I see value in both, but I don't think there's a way to know which is the "correct" or "best" approach until you have hindsight.

Either way, it's clear that we don't matter for anything other than exploitation. The business model doesn't allow for anything else, really.

Side note: Here's a clean version of the URL: https://twitter.com/popcrave/status/1691852136236327316

(Remember to delete everything after the ampersand. Everything after it is an identifier.)

I understand your sentiment, and I do agree that costumers gotta be more aware about what they're getting into.

With that said, consumers can't be blamed for legislative failures. That's what this is, at its core.

When people signed up to Facebook, they just wanted to keep in touch with their friends. When people signed up for Instagram, they just wanted to share pictures. They didn't want to be endlessly exploited.

And let's be real, no one is sifting through these privacy policies and ToS that are designed to be impossible to understand.

Same thing here. People just wanna understand their genealogy. Wanting to know your ancestry, shouldn't come at the expense of incredibly privacy-invading practices.

Why is it that we as consumers need to share to these horrendous business practices if we wanna know our ancestry? Why are there no protections in place? Is it realistic/reasonable to have to read all this incomprehensible language?

Feel free to continually emphasize this with your fellow morning larks pls

The thing is... The bubble colors do matter. But people aren't caring about the colors for the right reasons.

The color matters because the color has to do with the security of that message.

Sending a message through the iMessage protocol is more secure than SMS/MMS.

People should care that their messages are secure and private (and they do care, they just don't always realize it or know it yet). Unfortunately, the people behind the whole blue vs. green bubble culture war don't seem to focus on this security aspect, which is actually what/why it matters.

As an Apple investor who would benefit from more iPhone sales, "Buy an iPhone" is not the right response/solution to this problem, despite what Tim Apple says.

Choose open source. Say no to walled gardens.

Use—and donate to—Signal.

Greetings from GrapheneOS, as a former iOS and stock Android user.