• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • To create an effective burner account you need an effective burner device and a burner network to use it on. Otherwise it is trivial for companies that collect your data to figure out who that data belongs to.

    This is more technologically difficult than the average person is willing to deal with. It’s too high of a bar to clear when your browser is being fingerprinted, your devices are being fingerprinted, every new device you buy has some app or subscription, and algorithms collect and anonymize your data with such recklessness that it’s basically trivial to unanonymize it.

    Use the same network as your parents and you’ll get ads for the toothpaste they use, and maybe what they plan to buy you for Christmas.

    Try to remove or block trackers? That just makes it easy to single you out as a specific individual. Try to firehouse those trackers with garbage data? Same problem.

    If you think using a dummy Facebook account on the same device you use for regular accounts means Facebook doesn’t track you or know who you are? That’s a pipe dream.

    It’s the same with other apps too.

    Especially Google and their app network.

    Understand that it’s not that I don’t think this is a good idea (to remove certain services from your electronic life, and to curtail the use of others). But I think your strategy will give people a false sense of security.















  • That’s why I said an app like signal. People assume that every app works the same. Telegram had issues with encryption where all parties didn’t have encryption enabled but one or more of the parties involved assumed the chat was still encrypted.

    However I should probably change that to read more along the lines of: know the features and settings of your app and ensure that encryption settings are set to maximize the protection of privacy.

    I’m gonna have to workshop that. It’s a mouthful.

    Either way, thank you for pointing that out.




  • We’re not talking about firing up chat gpt in a web browser here. Microsoft is installing “agentic AI” on windows machines regardless of whether or not customers want it. They don’t have a say in the matter except the more tech savvy of them who will find ways to edge around the restrictions on how long you can delay downloads or whether or not certain features get downloaded at all.

    Saying otherwise (that it’s just consumers deciding to use this “feature”) is as disingenuous as your first bad analogy about the lock. Especially since you haven’t explained what function this AI performs. The lock performs a singular function adequately enough for the risk involved for most people. And it does it passively. The AI is not the same no matter how often or how hard you try to shoehorn it into your silly analogy.

    You explained your doubling and tripling down quite adequately when you said you work in AI. It would be helpful to this conversation if you could stop drinking the flavorade for five minutes and just think about the fact that people don’t want this and Microsoft is saying that they know it’s problematic but they are forcing it on people anyway.

    This conversation is over though because you want to be right more than you want to be logical and correct and so now you are neither. Have a nice life.


  • To be fair (even though I also am both happy and relieved to see articles like this), just because you convert to Linux, that doesn’t mean everyone else will. I have used so many guides to help debloat windows computers, and turn off nonsense I don’t want (mostly so I can use proprietary software for work). My choice to not use windows in my personal life on my personal devices doesn’t really change my situation with needing those guides to help others circumvent windows BS.

    I wish we didn’t have to live in interesting times and all that, but the guides are helpful.