Well with food something unusual at first feels weird but once you try it it might actually be good. I’ve had this experience quite a lot. Probably shows how much you’re conditioned to liking certain foods just because you’re used to them and grew up with them. So I’m not gonna judge how this would taste. But the first impression was like “ugh”.

Technically, everyone has a Facebook account, or at least a shadow account at Meta. Since they are one of the biggest data gatherers in the world, they gather data from all sorts of sources about people, not just from your active usage of their apps, sites and services. It’s extremely likely that they have quite a bit of data on everyone. Many proprietary mobile apps, for example, initiate connections and transfer some data to Meta or Google. Even apps that have nothing at all to do with them otherwise. Many websites do. Many applications and games do. Integrated proprietary software in various devices, e.g. smart TVs, does. Also, WhatsApp is used by I think ~30% of the world’s population now(?) and they started syncing/sharing all that data (mostly metadata but metadata is also very revealing) with Meta several years ago. Since WhatsApp also shares your whole contact / address book with Meta, they also effectively have a (mostly) full social connections graph on about a third of the world’s population, based on WhatsApp usage data alone… so overall they’ll have even more.

Unless you’re efficiently blocking or otherwise interrupting all of those connections, on every device, or are able to really effectively use different IPs and never reveal all of the IP addresses associated with yourself, it’s likely they still have quite a bit about you. If you’re logged into a personally identifiable Google or Meta account on your phone, for example, and your phone is in your WiFi, then it’ll have the same public-facing IP address as your computers, meaning they’ll be able to enumerate all of your devices based on what they gathered on that IP address alone. It means that IP address can now always be linked to your person for Google/Meta/and so on.

And then there’s always the possibility of the apps or websites not making your device directly connect to Meta/Google/… so it looks like only the 1st party gets your data (which always seems OK), but afterwards or in the backend it can still transmit or share the gathered data without your knowledge to those companies. This can also happen without the 1st party noticing it, because Meta and Google are often integrated in a lot of things, for example in SDKs or popular libraries. For example if you develop a mobile app using Meta’s SDK, then by default (opt-out) the resulting app will transmit various kinds of telemetry data to Meta. Unless the developer disables this consciously, which many do not know or care about, it will simply be on and active. Sometimes they also have special data sharing deals with certain companies. Google has even more ways of being included in all sorts of things, they are almost omnipresent. For example Google is doing checks whether your Android-based mobile phone is carrier-locked or not, on behalf of your carrier, not your carrier. Google also receives your (personally-identifiable) IMEI and telephone number alongside every single location request your phone is doing, even from an app that’s completely unrelated to Google. [unless your Android has configured a non-standard SUPL server, which isn’t even an option in most Androids, or you use GrapheneOS which uses a proxy SUPL server to strip that bit of personally identifiable data before redirecting it to the real SUPL server (which most likely is your provider’s, which in turn is most likely just a redirect to Google’s SUPL server in the end)]. These are just examples off the top of my head, there’s even more weird stuff happening of course.

So it doesn’t really matter if you have active accounts at those companies, or not. They still know a lot about you and your devices, and sell that data to governments and whoever else bids the most for it. And even if they don’t know you yet (if no link to your person is currently possible for a particular data set), which is highly unlikely but may be a possibility if you’re truly careful and use different IPs all the time, they still gather all these records, and it only takes one single mistake on your end and they’ll be able to link all records they gathered from that particular IP address to your person as well. Not only that, but they could even statistically calculate that based on what you visited or what you wrote somewhere online, or even how your typing style is, that you’re likely this particular person, even if the data is still “anonymous”.

It’s really hard and really inconvenient to escape all the data gathering, in practice the only thing you can do is minimize it. Most users don’t care at all or don’t want to deal with the extra effort and simply let everything flow out. It’s a much easier online life, but it’s also an almost fully surveilled online life.

• No good operating system preinstalled by default
• No headphone jack anymore

I’m barely still a Millenial. Which is kind of cool. I don’t like the “generation names” before or after that much, and I liked that I grew up with non-invasive tech and non-existent smartphones during school. I was able to grow up with tech but none of the tech I dislike today. Also, tech was still easier to understand back then. I was able to learn how to create web sites for example when HTML, CSS, JavaScript and CGI was still in its infancy and not very complex yet. Of course I learned the growing complexitty as it all developed but the point is that it kind of grew with me. Which probably made several things easier to get into in the first place. Also, I still grew up with almost forgotten values such as privacy, and my whole youth life (as well as dumb things you did when young) isn’t available online and therefore “gone”. I kind of like it that way.

If you use Google’s Play Services and/or other Google proprietary apps and services (they are standard on all commercial Android phones), then your battery will be drained slightly more due to it having spyware (euphemism: “telemetry”) integrated. The Google Play services app, for example, does transmit at the minimum this data roughly every 20 minutes to Google:

Phone #
SIM Card #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your  logged in Google account
IP address

And that is just if you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount they are always gathering from every Android user, no matter what you selected. To make matters worse, the Google Play services is typically installed as a “system critical app” which means you as the owner of the phone can’t even uninstall it or reduce some of its permissions.

(If you have an iPhone instead, and think you’re safe from this, no you aren’t. Apple also collects a minimum amount of telemetry data which you cannot ever completely disable, it just does it slightly less frequently (IIRC, it was like every hour or so, compared to Google’s every 20min at the minimum).

And then there’s also the advertisement ID, a world-wide unique identifier set in all commercial Androids as well as iOS, for apps to track you. You can only reset it to a new random ID but never disable it fully.

To stop all of this bullsh!t, and also to stop the additional battery/resource drain caused by this, I recommend getting a Pixel phone and replacing the proprietary stock Android OS with GrapheneOS and then not installing any Google apps/services on top of it. You can get apps via F-Droid, Obtainium, Aurora store (those are the convenient methods). You can use ntfy as an alternative to the Google firebase messaging (notification) service that you won’t have access to when not having Google Play services running.

Problem is, when you don’t oppose stuff like that, stuff like that gets added more and more and it’s all opt-out and some day you’ll have an update and something’s turned on by default and you don’t realize that for a year or so and then you’re like “shit, was this really on all the time”. Even worse when they hide settings well in the UI, or use dark patterns to annoy or trick you to enable a setting that’s actually bad for you.

Opt-out stuff is just bad, even in small doses. It’s always kind of a scam. I wish Mozilla wouldn’t need that kind of stuff. I mean they could be the knight-in-shining-privacy-armor browser, compared to Chrome/Edge/Opera/… But they are all similar unfortunately (by default). Yes, Firefox is still less worse than Chrome/Edge/Opera are by default. But “less worse” doesn’t equal “good”. Yes, you can configure Firefox to behave well, and by using a good preconfigured user.js these settings also will stick after updates. But you shouldn’t have to do that in the first place. The common user doesn’t do that and shouldn’t have to. The Firefox forks like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser for example do not have anything bad enabled by default. And it’s likely they won’t ever have anything bad enabled after updates. So it is possible. The only reason the common browser makers aren’t doing it is because that gives them (or their business partners) less data/money.

Yes, but my post is for the people who DO care about privacy issues. I also don’t like the defeatist’s attitude. You can always start making things better. My post is for those who want to make a better informed decision, that’s all.

Yeah, you should use Linux regardless. ;-)

Reasons are the data transmissions happening by default and Mozilla’s questionable inclusion of add-on things like Pocket. See for example:

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mozilla-firefox-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil20/

vs.

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/librewolf-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil8/ and https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mullvad-browser-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil22/

You might need to translate the site to English. If you compare that, you can see why it’s easy to recommend the forks over the original. That said, you CAN configure Firefox to also behave well, but that takes an extra effort. It is far from there by default.

Well, they’re only doing what they announced already like 1-2 years ago. So we knew it was coming. This is also accompanied by Google making YouTube more restrictive when viewed with adblockers. Google is (somewhat late, to be honest) showing its teeth against users who block ads. I always expected it to happen but it took them quite some time. Probably they wanted to play the good guys for long enough until most users are dependent on their services, and now their proprietary trap is very effective.

On the desktop, you should switch to a good Firefox fork right now. Firefox can also be used but needs configuring before it’s good. The forks LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser are already very good out of the box. There’s the potential issue of the forks not being updated fast enough, but so far these two have been fast. Mullvad shares a lot of configuration with the Tor Browser, so using it may break some sites. LibreWolf might be “better” for the average user because of that, but otherwise I think Mullvad is the best Firefox fork overall.

On mobile, Firefox-based browsers aren’t recommended, because on Android, the sandboxing mechanism of Firefox is inferior to that of the Chromium-based browsers. And on iOS, all browsers (have to) run on Apple’s proprietary Webkit engine anyway, but well this is Apple we’re talking about so of course it’s all locked-down and restricted. It’s one of the reasons I don’t even like talking about Apple that much, just be aware that as an iOS user, your choice doesn’t mean as much when it comes to browsers, and your browser might not behave like you think it does on other platforms.

So on mobile, I’d suggest things like Brave, Cromite or Mull. Or Vanadium (GrapheneOS). If the browser doesn’t have built-in adblocking capability which sidesteps the MV3 restrictions, make sure to use an ad-blocking DNS server, so your browser doesn’t have to do it. But you still need it. Adblocking not only helps you retain your sanity when browsing the web in 2024, but it also proactively secures you against known and unknown security threats coming from ads. So adblocking is a security plus, a privacy plus, and a sanity plus. It’s absolutely mandatory. As long as the ad industry is as terrible as it is, you should continue using adblocks. All the time. On every device and on every browser.

The ad industry is itself to blame for this. There could in theory be such a thing like acceptable ads, but that would require ads to be static images/text, not fed by personal data, and not dynamically generated by random scripts which could compromise your security, and not overly annoying. Since that is probably never going to happen, you should never give up using adblockers. Since they basically fight you by reducing your security and privacy, you have a right to defend yourself via technical means.

While this does seem overly restrictive and out of place there, the result of this isn’t bad, because everyone should be at the most recent vesion at all times, period. If you aren’t, you’re exposed to more security holes and bugs. So it’s weird that that program forces you to do that, but it’s still not bad that you’re forced to do it. If you get what I mean. For some less-caring users who’d otherwise never install updates, forced updates are actually a net positive.

https://system76.com/laptops

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks.tuxedo

Get an external drive, it’s useful to have lying around for those rare occasions where you have something on an optical disc.

Flameshot is great, I use it every day at work and home. The integrated editing/annoation/drawing functions are superb.

Clickbaity titles on videos or news sites is the new standard. I watched it. The point he’s making is basically that music was harder to make/produce some 50 years ago, so there was more incentive to “make it worth the effort”, compared to today. And the 2nd point he makes is that music consumption is now so easy as well (listen to whatever you want instantly) compared to when you could only listen to something when you bought the physical album, that there’s also less incentive for the listener to really get involved into some albums.

Personally I think these are valid points on the surface but they are not “the answer” to this kind of multi-faceted question. They’re at best a factor but we don’t know how big these factors are. Also I think one big reason he thinks that way is because he grew up in that environment and so he has a bias for “owning physical copies of albums”.

I also think music hasn’t gotten worse, the market is just simply over-saturated because there’s just way too much music, you’ll never be able to listen to it all. And there are absolutely hidden gems or really good bands/artists forming even today, it’s just much harder to find them. Generally a problem of today’s age: it’s likely that what you’re looking for already exists, you just have to find it within a whole ocean of content.

If you’re looking for innovative or non-standard stuff, you can always look at smaller artists or the indie scene, same is true for movies, games, music. The big producers always have a tendency to stick to what works and what’s proven to be popular so everything becomes similar. But smaller artists do not have to care about such things, they are ready to risk much more and in doing so, you might just create a real gem or something that was never or almost never tried before.

Arch is not at all problematic, however if you’re still inexperienced with Linux in general, there might be smaller issues with some packages which might be unsolvable or hard to solve in that particular case (but any experienced user can easily solve those by e.g. downgrading the problematic package until a fix is available, or by restoring a filesystem snapshot). My current Arch installation is almost 5 years old and I only had a couple of very minor individual package update issues, and one time where the system couldn’t boot anymore after an update, which could be desastrous for a newbie, but only for a newbie. So, any talk about Arch being unstable is most likely exaggerated. Windows 11 these days has more update failures than Arch, and Arch updates almost daily. Yes, Arch is not “perfectly stable” due to it being rolling release and receiving updates almost daily, but on the desktop or notebook that “less-than-perfect-stability” really doesn’t matter much unless you have some kind of allergy against breaking changes or spending 15-30min to fix something or get annoyed if you have to reboot. The fast updates and generally very up to date packages generally more than make up for the disadvantages. At least on the desktop and notebook. I’m not sure if I could recommend Arch on servers. Also, you should at least update Arch once a week (or more often). If you don’t update for multiple weeks, then updates might fail because Arch assumes that everyone is on or close to the most current updates. Or you might have to first update the pacman-keyring before updates work again. In any case, updating often is also a way to keep Arch more stable. If you don’t like updating often, don’t use Arch.

Not generally, however you might want to avoid any early dot-zero releases (e.g. 6.0.x). These tend to be a bit buggy with KDE Plasma, but the bugs get fixed soon. NVidia drivers should be better with the very latest updates, they are supposed to work well on Wayland now. But I don’t buy Nvidia, just AMD, so I’m not following this stuff closely.

That doesn’t surprise me, and yes it was always because of anti-competitive practices, so I’m all for more neutrality, I’ll just add 2 shower thoughts:

1. Seeing that Brave is at the top of the browser list, I wonder how many selected Brave just because it’s at the top of the list.
2. It’s nice to have such a thing for browsers, but it would have to be expanded to other apps as well, e.g. mail client. Oh well, maybe in another 10 years or so.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary funding evidence.”

Check out SyncThing for a peer2peer (device to device) solution which doesn’t necessarily need a server, but having an always-on device like a server is still great for using Syncthing as well. It’s easy to use, only slightly more involved than setting up Nextcloud or Dropbox or whatever. But all done via a web-based GUI. It works surprisingly well, stable and conflict-free for the complex syncing it has to do all the time. Basically you install SyncThing on all devices you want to keep in sync, and they will find each other via their IDs when they are online, and automatically sync all their directories which should be synced. Of course it’s open source and cross-platform too.