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 (also a dumpster-dive machine) machine 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.
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.
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 🤣
My concern would be that they count this as positive engagement, then use those metrics to encourage integration of gen AI into more products. “Users love our new AI feature, they spend hours chatting with it!”
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.
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.
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!
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.
All?
Its a small library. And no , probably not the books on CD, just music. Its 5 dollars to full an entire bag.
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.
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.
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.
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 don’t have the ability 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.
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.
Do you have to use a big social platform? Click on all of the ads you see or click on some of them, but don’t buy anything.
Check out AdNauseam, it’s based on uBlock Origin
Using that app kinda makes browsing suck. I’d never gotten captchas from google themselves until I used it, then I got them frequently.
It does good work though.
Oh, I thought my VPN was the reason I got all of those.
TBF, google throws up captchas & ‘suspicious activity detected’ at the drop of a hat these days. One of our clients is a SMB that runs off Google SaaS, and recently implemented a 3rd party, device based SSO that is supposed to sync with Google auth. We’ve has nothing but issues, VPN or no, adblockers or no, and stupid captcha pages all the time. Youtube as a google product sucks now bc embedded videos randomly flag across all browsers and make you sign in to watch an embedded video on someone else’s webpage. I understand (though disagree) with google flagging something like known mullvad vpn IPs or something but a corporate vpn? A company approved ad blocking extension allow-listed in GOOGLE ADMIN? GTFO. Just a mess.
You also get less spam and calls that way.
It’s kind of amazing. I do most of this stuff in my day-to-day life without even thinking about it.
