A question as old as time, I know.

I'm getting away from Google and I've done the easy stuff: CoMaps, Proton mail (I know, not the best move), aveslibre, etc. I currently don't have the time (or the knowledge base) to learn how to self host, but hopefully that will replace Drive and such in the future.

But I digress. I'm looking at a new OS for my phone. I'm currently in a contract with a phone that is incompatible with alternative OSs. Graphene needs a Pixel. Used, they're $150-400. /e/OS will run on a Motorola or whatever and those are like $80.

There's also the option of going full Fairphone with /e/os and I like that idea in the future.

The internet people tell me that Graphene is the best due to ease of installation, privacy, and security.

I don't need a lot of security. I just want Google to stop suckling all that sweet, sweet data from my teat.

What are your thoughts?

Hi people.

I suspect my office might be bugged. How should I detect hidden cams and mics?

In order to curb dissatisfaction the Discord CTO released a blog post. In it a lot of c-suite speak and empty words. They claim 90 percent of users won’t be affected. And with caveats I believe them. Most people’s experience probably won’t change. And they will carry on with their spied on lives.

Where I get upset is this claim that these age verification steps won’t at all infringe on privacy or identity. That Discord won’t read messages and won’t track things. I know this is a flat out lie. They already do all of this. It’s their whole fucking business model! I think it’s sickening in attempt to save face they just further lie. It’s like they pretend oh money just magically appears for us. And we offer this free service with no strings attached.

I fear most people will take that post at face value. They will move on and take a blatant lie and accept it. Further reinforcing they can do whatever they want and you’ll comply.

Discord arguably just doubled down on what they are doing hoping you will calm down and forget by launch. While I know the majority of people simply don’t care enough about this stuff. I still fully and emphatically advise everyone get off Discord asap.

For some of us sadly proton and Linux still isn’t a viable option for daily gaming on PC. While that means you’re stuck on Windows it doesn’t mean your experience truly has to suck.

I went down the rabbit hole of Windows Debloating and to me the most viable option was Atlas OS. Not technically a new OS but rather an (overall) easy to use tool that will automatically remove and disable windows worst features. This is my honest opinion on it after using for 3 months !

Installation honestly was the worst part of the experience for me. I had additional issues due to technical problems with the motherboard. For most people it won’t be nearly as hard. The problem is many of the steps are decoupled from the Atlas provided software. In other words the process asks you to go to other websites to download other files. If you follow the steps perfectly you shouldn’t have issues. If you do and the errors are unrelated, things may get painful.

The key selling point of Atlas OS is increased performance for gaming. And to be honest this wasn’t a thing for me. My games ran as good and no better. CPU usages were exactly the same. What was better was the Windows experience. No more pop up ads. No more needing to delete 3rd party software I never installed. And best yet no Co-Pilot! It’s unclear to me if these are just disabled or entirely uninstalled. From what I can see most telemetry has been disabled. In short it’s the windows experience I’ve been expecting. Less hiccups and less crashing.

If you look you will find critics who say this takes away control to remove every thing you could want. But personally I can’t think of anything else I would want to remove. Is it still windows ? Well yeah. Is it entirely free of garbage, probably not but it’s sure a lot less noticeable.

For me and I imagine for many Atlas OS might be the “good enough” to keep dealing with Windows. And If you are curious I suggest taking a look. I do hope eventually we do get the full gaming Linux revolution. But for now. Atlas will do.

Can’t access Lemmy.ml anymore even after changing servers. Using ProtonVPN everything loads fine suddenly.

World's most secure P2P messenger. End-to-end encrypted, zero-server architecture, quantum-resistant roadmap. WebRTC direct connections, advanced ECDH + DTLS + SAS verification, full ASN.1 validation. FOSS

https://github.com/Secureremovedat/securebit-chat

Surveillance strategies in the UK and Israel often go global

Hi. I just got a new phone (Motorola) and spent a bunch of time manually removing access to location etc. I hate Google so much, "don't do evil" my ass. I'm just looking for my blindspots. Im not in tech so, what should be disabled to keep my phone private?

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59424100

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called for an end to widespread anonymity on the internet, saying users should post under their real names.

Many of us know how bad modern cars are for privacy. Yet many of our friends and neighbors do not realize how intrusive it really is. I linked a blog entry from Mozilla's investigation about car privacy. In that blog is a link to their make-by-make analysis. The amount of very intimate information a modern car collects is honestly appalling. It includes health data, real time mood information, weight gain or loss, and so on. And it does so even for passengers.

The web has many resources talking about this problem, but almost no resources on what to do about it. I know the simple thing is to say, "just drive an old car bro!" That's fine if you can, but not everyone can. Also it has drawbacks like more maintenance. Sometimes less safety if it's older than certain safety features. For the purpose of this thread, it is more interesting to focus on newer, surveillance enabled cars which are the majority of what people drive on the road today.

Some people have figured out how to bypass the surveillance package on some cars. One way is to uncouple the antenna it uses to phone home. Other times you can bypass the telematics module or remove a fuse that powers it. I feel like we really need a central model by model repository of information.

Past that, how do we prove it has worked, if we do it? Has anyone reading this tried to use an RF detector to see if their car is still trying to phone home, after they have bypassed telematics? What are your experiences? I want to buy one and use it to test my own car, but the info on the web seems sketch.

I hear it’s the first browser in a long while to come with a new engine. Completely independent and no revenue model. To me that would work well for privacy but I see no mention of privacy as any benefit. In fact I don’t see a privacy policy anywhere !

Is a goal of the browser to be telemetry free ? Should I as a person who cares about privacy be showing any interest?

Israeli companies have developed and are selling advanced cyber tools that can hack into the tech of your car and use it to collect intelligence on you.

Three years ago, Haaretz revealed the existence of the offensive cyber intelligence company Toka, which was co-founded by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a former Israel Defense Forces cyber chief, Brig. Gen. (ret.) Yaron Rosen. The firm specialized in hacking into security cameras, but as documents obtained by Haaretz at the time revealed, Toka also had a product called CARINT that fused camera data with data linked to cars.

At the time, the industry was in its infancy. But industry sources say that Toka has since expanded its offering on cars. It has developed and even sold a product capable of hacking into a specific vehicle's multimedia systems, pinpointing its location and tracking its movements; that is, a specific model by a specific manufacturer. The technology can even remotely access the microphone of the vehicle's hands-free system, allowing eavesdropping on the driver, and even tap into cameras installed on the dashboard or around the car.

There is no truer adage to me than nothings is perfect. And when it comes to anything related to Discord it’s no different.

Discord itself to me has been an issue for years. Its use of data collection, the obsession of companies trying to buy it all were concerning. For me the latest age verification just further reinforces my beliefs. That being said the majority of users who ignored all this and kept going, really nothing would change. Most people I know use Discord lightly and aren’t in large chats that use hentai gifs. I still would tell anyone who would listen to get out of dodge. But if you never cared about data usage then you’re probably not going to start now.

For all the alternatives out there truth is, none are really anywhere near perfect. Matrix and most of its clients while encrypted don’t offer true jump in /jump out game chat. More a kin to Skype really. Foss Discord implementations like Spacebar are to all over the place and for me are not really functional. Stoat while probably my favorite is still really small and not holding up to the stress of the user influx. And of course it’s missing “discord features” and the new kid Fluxer while appealing is still to new and it’s monetization model a little to concerning. 300 bucks as a backer for unproven project ? And of course with the exception of Matrix none of the other projects currently offer encryption.

Truth is no option really is ideal. Truth is all the options have some pretty serious flaws. And truth is getting your large swaths of friends to move might be close to impossible.

So if you are looking to move please do some digging. Ask people who use the apps their opinions. Try to as a group of friends chose to make a move.

And the final truth is it’s a really good thing we finally have some options. No matter the flaws having competition brings innovation.

I hope this posts helps clear up some things for people who might be confused or concerned.

It merely helps you navigate your data package from Discord and craft data deletion requests to send to their privacy team. In cases where their privacy team's policies prohibit deletion, it guides you through automating the remaining tasks yourself.

How this works Discord acts in malicious compliance with the GDPR. You are not allowed to delete your DMs through their support flow, since you can always regain access to a DM, technically speaking, since you are always a member of the DM channel on their backend.

For servers and group DMs you no longer have access to, however, Discord will comply with deletion requests. This tool helps you identify those messages and craft deletion requests for their privacy team.

For 1:1 DMs, Discord will not delete them through the privacy request process. In that case, the risky flow guides you through automating the deletion yourself via browser extensions.

More relevant than ever.

does anyone know a good workaround for watching age-restricted videos from youtube without being forced to having a google account? i've tried

• a few browser extensions (very old ones) who promised to solve it. didn't work.
• downloading them through classic youtube downloading services. didn't work.
• switching to nsfwyoutube.com/url . didn't work does anyone know of a working solution right now? thanks a lot in advance!!

(Don't click that before reading more.) If you check out Upsolve.org because you are considering bankruptcy due to any sort of reason, there is a tool to help you evaluate whether bankruptcy is appropriate at my.upsolve.org/bankruptcy-screener.

Bankruptcy is a difficult choice. Sometimes people pursue it as a result of medical debt or other extremely personal reasons.

Upsolve.org bills itself as an organization that help the poor. Unlike a lawyer's office, it can help people without charging a lot and unlike a lawyer's office, there is no duty of confidentiality or privilege.

However, someone taking a screening tool might be providing information just to see if bankruptcy is even possible. And Upsolve.org sells or gives this information to Facebook. Even if it's not selling the screener results, just someone landing on this page, combined with IP gives Facebook valuable information.

The user who goes there without their IP protected could later get ads for predatory financial companies to "help" debtors and importantly, this information can be sold to data brokers to determine that the people viewing the site are a credit risk.

For example, if someone gets into a car accident and needs 90,000 worth of medical care over two weeks. They get the bill after the two weeks of medical care. They are going to be unable to work for a while and they are considering bankruptcy. The 90,000 has not gone to collections. This person is technically still employed but will need a lot of time off. They may not even be able to go back to work.

Normally, if this person decided not to declare bankruptcy and to wait 4 months and hopefully go back to work, they might be able to get a loan from a bank. But if Facebook has sold their info (person with this IP identified is a person interested in bankruptcy information) to data brokers, and the bank has access to that information, that loan will be denied.

Real consequences can happen from selling shit like this to Facebook. Worst of all, the Facebook analytics aren't on the main page and instead are hidden in the screener.

Although Upsolve.org probably just wants to target users online with ads about how great its service is, and it's actually a service that can help many save a ton of money, it may be overlooking the privacy risk. I hate seeing scripts like this in pages for things that should be confidential, things like abortion clinics, addiction treatment clinics, financial help pages, and pages related to mental health. All of that fucking info gets monetized the second someone hits the page if there are analytics in the page. It would be one thing if that info only resulted in helpful services being sold, but it also is given to companies building profiles on people which can wind up in the hands of surveillance state government officials, financial industry decision makers, and others that classify people based on browsing habits.

I may be wrong about this and facebook doesn't sell that specific "looking at possible bankruptcy" data to data brokers. I can't be sure. But I wish I didn't have to wonder. And they probably do. And it probably does go to financial institutions somehow, ultimately hurting some people who were merely considering bankruptcy but don't ultimately do it.

Original Link: https://youtu.be/nID9gWrUfN4

I remember something about Google asking developers for verification in 2027, will this affect GrapheneOS? Is a Pixel phone really worth buying still?

Ring is terminating its partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety, the Amazon-owned company announced Thursday.

The partnership between Flock and Ring came under scrutiny after the Amazon doorbell company ran an ad during the Super Bowl that touted a “Search Party” feature that uses AI to help locate lost pets. When a user initiates the feature, it activates a network of participating Ring cameras, which scan footage for images resembling the missing dog. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the feature a “surveillance nightmare.”

Flock, meanwhile, operates a network of automated license plate readers, and sells access to that software to customers that include law enforcement agencies.

Ring’s decision to cancel its partnership with Flock comes as tech companies face growing pressure to reexamine their work with federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier this week, Salesforce employees pressed CEO Marc Benioff to cancel “ICE opportunities,” CNBC reported. More than 900 Google employees also asked their company to divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

To my understanding, Signal requires that you have a physical phone to use the desktop version. Is there any way to scan the QR code without a physical device? I'm trying to make an anonymous Signal account.

My idea:

1.) Set up Android VM on Linux laptop

2.) Use laptop camera to scan the QR code on my desktop

Youtube has added a new "feature" that blocks users with adblockers from viewing videos. How do I get around this while still blocking ads? I currently use uBlock Origin on firefox.

💯

Australia's Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind determined in 2024 that Bunnings breached privacy laws by scanning hundreds of thousands of customers' faces without their proper consent.

A review of that decision by the Administrative Review Tribunal of Australia has now found the opposite

The retailer did not break the law by scanning customers' identities, but should improve its privacy policy and notify customers of the use of AI-based facial recognition technology, the ruling said

Petty typical stuff by this point. The privacy-invading company wins, pissweak government makes a few privacy "recommendations" but stops short of enforcing anything