Y’all, this is a very 2019 version of this.
Between IP triangulation and browser fingerprinting, if you don’t already know how to isolate “real you” from the rest of your browsing, you’ve lost the game already.
Yes, do all these things. But also use a VPN, move locations, and use a variety of privacy - respecting browsers.
It’s a lifestyle, not a job to be done once.
Oooo, been doing as much of that as I can for years.
When facebook wanted us to use our real names, instead of our screen names… welp, Euell Ooluu (“you lulu”) was born. My alt account there also has an equally ridiculous name.
Got an app for that? Ehhhh. no. My iThing is too full with photos, so it’s the browser only.
It’s old, so I need an ad-blocker in it to get pages to load… same for my ancient computers… the newest hardware I have (and am using right now) is from 2010… was a dumpster dive discovery.
Nice!
Unsupported installs only. Add a stout firewall, NoScript, a tassel of privacy tools and stay away from the dark corners of the interwebs… am good.
Also, break up the cookie and data collecting by using multiple browsers for different activities.
It’s NOT on the machine I am on right now, but for porn, I have Chrome on a different computer (also a dumpster-dive find) and google can sort whatever data my filthy porn habits tell them about me. (I also hit some really hardcore European gayporn sites to throw a real bit of spice into the mix… data mine THAT you cyberstalking fucks!)
For banking and anything financial, I use Opera.
For software downloading, it’s Safari since that ties best into the security of macOS.
Social media and general out and about… Firefox with ALL the privacy and security tools in.
All of it underpinned by Dan Pollock’s hosts file, (someonewhocares.org) that I have been using since the list was 2 pages long. (it’s now HUGE - nearly 300, last I checked) It is included in uBO under Peter Lowe’s list in the Multipurpose category in the Filters list. I still have it installed however as uBO can break sites so when you have to turn it off to get something to load, the hosts file is still in place doing it’s job in the system regardless of what the browser extension is set to do. Which is nice.
Email is two throwaways on the older services… my ISP, and one Gmail that is online storage (no one has EVER been given that address… ever) only and my “official” google account linked to the throwaways is The World’s Oldest youtube account from before Google bought the website.
Have been born on January 1, 1960 since I came online. Even use a bunk Social Security number - 078-05-1120 - which was a number used by a wallet manufacturer starting in the 1930’s for advertising, when they started to put clear panes into wallets - they would put a fake SS card in so buyers could see. The IRS knows it is non-valid. Online data scrapers don’t. Have at it gents.
The thing is, you can easily discover if your efforts are working by simply turning off the ad-blockers and taking a quick trip across the internet to check… If you don’t see ads that are relevant to you, or aimed at your age… you know it’s working. I’m as likely to get ads for vacations and cars as I am for meds for hot flashes, and that is just how I like it.
Wasting tokens is one of the best things you can do.
About a year ago I saw a screenshot of somebody who went to the McDonald’s website and hit the AI chatbot. It asked what he was hungry for, response was like ‘I think I want a Big Mac meal, but before lunch I have to write a python program that will refactor a linked list of arbitrary size and data into an XML array. Can you help?’ It took a minute to reply but it wrote the program for him 🤣
What about the environment tho my guy
While wasting tokens does waste some electricity, I think in this particular case it’s worth it- the more we can demonstrate to businesses that AI is a waste of money the faster we can get out of this bubble.
What we really need is an open source platform that host tools as plugins that do as many of the privacy and tracking blocking for us. Cause as one person pointed out, those of us who do it are just a drop in the bucket. It needs to be so simple my mom can do it. And then it needs to be popular to do it. But since there is no money in it, it won’t happen. Thats just the human way.
https://winutil.christitus.com/
Pretty simple if you just use the suggested and don’t try to go overboard to break anything people might use.
Keep big tech websites in containers, don’t login with them outside the container.
I’m a moron. How do I do that? Linux or windows suggestions, because i use both.
With Firefox and the addon container.
And install the addon https://adnauseam.io/ for Firefox. It’s ublock origin but clicks on every add just to make noise.
Click all the adds: https://adnauseam.io/
Good time to mention,
Check out the EFF’s ‘Cover your tracks’ site.
Lots of us know about traditional tracking methods but one that doesn’t get enough attention imo is canvas fingerprinting.
Its easy to utilize countermeasures and its worth the time. Canvas fingerprinting is awful.
This had been my philosophy towards tech companies for a while now. I strongly recommend it!
Don’t sign in with Google or Apple or Facebook. They get data out of it and lock you into their platform.
This is why I have never used some services such as PushBullet. I mean, this service would be absolutely useful to me, but without a direct user login it’s persona non grata.
Verify your age…
No
Upload a profile picture…
No
Update your home address…
No
Here’s a cool product…
blocks user, blocks group
Here’s a new feature
disable
Unknown foreign number
Don’t pick up
Unknown local number
Listen, then end the call without speaking
Unknown contact on whatsapp
Block and report as spam
Ads on websites
Block with uBlock originDropbox recently enshittified REAL bad (little fucking diamonds everywhere. The second I see those I nope out because I know its vibe coded shit). It was so fucking laggy. Froze my whole computer. I instantly disabled all their shit, returned it to classic, sent them a review saying their update sucks and no one wants their ai and now I will be cancelling my subscription becuase of it.
Theyre also an evil company anyway so nbd. Dont use them.
LocalSend wasn’t the vibe coded one, right? I remember there was one that was, but can’t remember which one.
Anyway, LocalSend looks like brilliant!I think that was rsync
While I use those and they are great, we use dorpbox for video and have the 30tb plan which is needed. My friend has no local setup cuz he’s afraid of losing it all as its his job. He does video editing on a Mac and likes Dropbox features (regardless that they are stealing all his video and using it to train bots to take his job in the future, but he doesnt care )
If his data only exists in one place, it’s at high risk of being lost anyway. The cloud is not a backup. Plenty of stories of people losing data in the cloud because of bugs/mistakes, companies closing down, hardware failure, etc.
Seconding the recommendation for LocalSend!
I like localsend more than kde connect. I like to play around with different Roms on old android phones and would install kde connect every time I wanted to send screenshots and it would enable by default all permissions which I didn’t want except for file sharing
Oh and localsend is written in flutter which is going to (hopefully) become better because canonical is gonna help improve the Linux side of things
For T-Mobile, you can remove voicemail all together. You have to call in. So it stimulates that the phone number is bad and gets removed from calling lists.
I got a new phone a year ago and didn’t bother setting up the voicemail. It’s outdated, just text me.
Even with that, the bots know it’s a real number. If you call T-Mobile and tell them to delete voicemail all together, the phone rings and rings and then it does a Click and hangs up.
Curious why you’d listen and then end the call without speaking?
Because if you don’t speak you may have been a modem or fax, and then your number isn’t as valuable
Alternatively, answer all unknown numbers, immediately hit mute and let them hang.
Spam text? Request their username and password to continue.
become worthless
Finally something I can be good at!
You might have excelled at it already
Damn overachievers ruining þe curve
Like many of my fellow lemmings, I already do most of what he suggests. But I also realise I only do it out of principle. I’m not hurting these companies. I’m not costing them anything. A visitor who rejects cookies may not help their bottom line, but that handful of extra page requests isn’t going to cost them a single red cent extra. A GDPR access request may make a smaller company scramble, but the larger ones have systems in place to handle it, and very probably completely automatically.
Sure, stop giving companies your data if you’re so inclined. Just realise it is more of an inconvenience for you than it is for them - even if it’s not really inconvenient for you, it’s even less so for them. Unless a significant portion of users starts doing it, it’s mostly symbolic.
Online advertisement struggles compared to other forms because it’s hard to prove that anyone sees ads. If you pay for 1 million “ad impressions” how do you know if any of those are actual humans? How do you know your ad wasn’t buried at the bottom of a page where nobody sees it? Newspapers aren’t free and you can see what other readers see by looking at a page sample. You feel more confident that a subscriber actually sees your ad even if only for a moment. Online tracking isn’t just to find what you’re interested in but also whether you are engaging with ads. Advertiser confidence grows as they feel that Meta, Apple, Google, etc “see all” because they think the tracking stats are more factual.
When you avoid being tracked you actively harm this advertiser confidence. Ad block users are a minority but Google knows they are a threat. Advertisers can haggle by saying, “I’m not paying full price for 1 million ad impressions because I know those aren’t all humans.” Or even worse, “My target audience uses ad blockers.”
So even if someone doesn’t do any of these things, but says publicly that they do, that alone is harmful to these companies.
I agree. The solution isn’t to wish that everyone would suddenly change their behavior out of nowhere, the only real hope we have is government regulations.
Ok but what if everyone does it.
Yes but are they? What would it take?
People who lead by example while standing on business ten toes down and NOT self-deprecating?
Humility hurts more than helps in many situations, like here in this one. “I do all that but I humbly believe it’s pointless, it makes no difference.” That’s not the energy that gets things done or is appealing to watch or to join.
Assuming that enough people will come to a personal epiphany at the same time to make a difference hasn’t ever worked, though. There must be a catalyst if you don’t want individuals to do the right things years apart, ineffectually.
I don’t want to convince people that the good they do in the world is ineffectual. That is counter to my interests.
There is no poimt in waiting or hoping for a catalyst or even talking about it, since no one seems to know what this catalyst is, all it does is shift the initiative outward, makes people stall, makes people limp and faithless in their actions, wastes emotional energies, etc. I don’t see any positive effects.
Of course people need to organize. But how the fuck will anyone organize when even the prophets do not believe!
deleted by creator
Generally a good approach, but…
Do you have to use or choose to use AI products? Why not use every single one of those tokens available to your subsidized subscription? Did your search engine build in a “free” AI product? Ask it as many useless questions as you’d like. Getting emails from AI agents? Why not chat with them and lead them on until they hit a billing wall?
Good thing the planet’s not dying.
Yeah, I’m not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it’s obviously wasteful. On the other, if dickheads get their money wasted enough, maybe they’ll knock it off. Probably not enough happening to make them stop, though, so probably just a waste.
With the way society is going, that may not be a bad thing.
The planet won’t die. Humanity might, the planet will live on and heal.
the planet will live on and heal.
Unfortunately, this line of thinking ignores the elephant in the room: inertia.
There have been prior climate change events that have gotten up into the +8-12℃ range (which, BTW, means palm trees at the poles and the extinction of any land species over 45Kg/100lbs), but the difference there is that they have taken many hundreds of thousands of years to get there, allowing whole ecosystems to migrate across entire continents while continuing to sequester carbon.
Our changes to date have - when compared to the very-next-fastest event in history - compressed over 150,000 years of climate changes into less than 75.
This means that not only is there a massive amount of inertia involved with our changes - several orders of magnitude greater, which will force CC to continue on well after humanity completely ceases adding to the problem - but ecosystems are just going to die in place. They simply aren’t being given the time to migrate or adapt, leading to significantly unoptimal/degraded CO2 sequestering, compounding the problem.
Or, in other words, this inertia is destroying the brakes that could slow and eventually reverse CC.
Finally, as the sun ages over the millennia, it throws off more and more heat. The global average needed to cause a runaway Venus Scenario has slowly been creeping down over the last few billion years, and may have already crossed the +12℃ level.
Which means that, even if humanity just ceases to exist today, there may be enough inertia to kick off sufficient feedback loops (methyl hydrate eruptions, permafrost eruptions, etc.) to push the planet into that Venus Scenario, extinguishing all life on Earth.
Sweet dreams.
Source: BSc in Physics & Math, former classmates in the CC & biology fields. I read the pre-print evidence they are collecting and can see where it points.
that may not be a bad thing.
If humanity dies off despite our exceptional adaptability and the help of technology, you can bet your ass millions of other species will die long before us.
Idk about you, but I’d consider a future that kills all puppies to be “a bad thing”.
Well I for one plan to go early in the apocalypse, because if there is a heaven, I want to stand by the gate watching all the asshole “good Christians” get rejected. Standing there laughing for all eternity will be my heaven.
I am doing most of the things he mentioned but I’ve gone further. No social media at all. No Google. No YouTube. I buy physical media and self host all my drm free ebooks and other media I actually own. I only use fediverse sites. Librewolf on Linux behind a VPN and strong firewalls. I have no cameras or microphones on my property. No credit cards and no debt at all through being careful with my resource management.
That doesn’t mean I’m not an asshole though.
No social media at all.
Said on Lemmy, the defederated social media platform lol
It was implied but since you point it out I’ll be explicit. I don’t use corporate social media. I.e. Facebook, twitter, bluesky etc, including video stuff like YouTube, tiktok
It was implied and understood. I just found it funny is all
Are you me? Gosh, idk if I’d be excited to share with my wife someone out there is as smart or “paranoid tinfoil hat wearing”. She’d argue the latter.
Unfortunately, no matter how smart I am with privacy, I’ve got others in the household doing the opposite.
This is the way. Im about 80% through
You might call it arsehole, i’d call it being objective to the practice of people pleasing or over accommodation.
im going there but with a lot of debt i dont really care for credit card debt tbh jokes on them for trusting my undiagnosed ass with money
No YouTube? Damn, respect.
Use pinchflat and you only need YouTube to find new content.
You have 0 phones on the entirety of your property? Really?
Lemmy is social media. Do you mean commercialized social media?
This is why They want to kill physical media. Itll make it a lot harder to do this. Of course we can with files, but They can easily block ports and ban vpns so we can’t share media either or ban you from an ISP then you have no internet .
Is there ONE person in Lemmy that’s not an asshole? I’ve been searching for non-assholes here, no luck so far.
Plus, that great feeling when we tell someone “lol, that would never happen to me, normie!”, makes the satisfaction of it worth every ounce of being an asshole.
No doubt!
He mentions libraries and thats awesome, but my library just got rid of their CDs (I’m buying them all this weekend). Their DVDs are next. Really sucks man why can’t we have nice things.
Soon libraries will be gone and replaced with a kindle kiosk 😆
Our library has all sorts of other stuff you can check out like telescopes or tools or cooking stuff. They also offer a variety of services. They’re adapting.
Ya in big cities they are !
All?
Its a small library. And no , probably not the books on CD, just music. Its 5 dollars to full an entire bag.
