It’s actually 4 years now. Still terrible for the price, of course.

If you want to stick with Chromium-based browsers, you could try Vivaldi. I am a Firefox user myself but Vivaldi is my backup browser for those rare occasions where I have issues. 95% of the browser is open source, with the remaining 5% being comprised of the closed source UI. Vivaldi has a pretty reasonable privacy policy, an inbuilt ad-blocker and is a 100% employee owned company. It supports all major operating systems and has a sync feature so you could use it as your main browser across all devices if you wanted.

Signal…what? The Android version hasn’t supported SMS for 2 years at this point.

SMS is less secure and arguably less private.

To me it’s much more of an ethical concern than a practical concern. Digital privacy is a human right (privacy is listed under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The only immediate ways in which I can uphold this right and contribute to a fairer society is through exercising my right to vote and making ethically superior choices as a consumer. So for me, it’s less about avoiding the government or big tech for practical reasons like surveillance and scams driven by data breaches (though of course these are still valid concerns for many) and more about supporting those who I believe are doing the right thing (or are at least an improvement).

If we don’t support the better alternatives then they will never grow enough to achieve mainstream success and challenge the current establishment. I know some people here hate Proton, but that is a great example of a privacy-focused tech company which has grown significantly because of consumer support - to the point where it has a full suite of products that do a much better job of competing with heavyweights like Google than a tiny, unsupported startup would have had. A company like that might not even have survived without its early adopters, and then the next one to come along would be even less likely to receive investment in the early stages due to the history of failure within the sector. To me, being privacy conscious is all about being part of a positive movement; supporting people and companies that are doing the right thing and refusing to accept problematic behaviours and practices I see in the world.

I know for some people, particularly minorities, privacy is a real world concern and I fully acknowledge that but I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by trying to sell it to everyone in such a scary way. Humans are not very good at perceiving or responding to threat until there is actual undisputable evidence of it in their immediate surroundings. So when you tell these people that they’ll lose all their money to scammers or that their government is going to unjustly target them they don’t actually believe you or take you seriously. They think you are insane. The better sell, I think, is to show people that this is a positive movement and worldwide community that they can be a part of.

EDIT: I was going to add this yesterday but forgot. I don’t know if anyone here has seen The Social Dilemma - the big reason that documentary went viral was not just because it gave a very detailed and scary overview of all the problems with surveillance capitalism and the attention economy, but also because it finished on quite an optimistic note. They told viewers “we know this is all really scary for you but we have smart people working tirelessly to change things and build a movement that we want you to be a part of”. It left people feeling engaged, like they still had some level of agency over the situation instead of paralysed with fear and just totally abandoning all hope.

I never said it’s not happening and I’m not sure why you’re suggesting otherwise. All I said is that it is a vague reason to have this level of paranoia about your privacy. It’s like having a super strict diet because you’ve read that certain foods contain carcinogens and will increase your risk of cancer. Technically it’s true, but the only people who should actually be concerned about this are people with pre-existing risk factors or whose excessive/unusual lifestyle places them at extreme risk. Nothing you have said in this thread suggests you are any different from any other regular person in the world, so I don’t feel you should be as concerned as you seem to be.

Yes, you are worrying too much I’d say. Your concerns are valid and real but you are overestimating the likelihood of something happening to you if you make a mistake or compromise and that is causing you unnecessary anxiety. You don’t have to choose between perfect privacy or caving in completely. Everything you do will help, but not necessarily to the degree required to justify sacrifices to your personal life or mental health. If you have a very specific concern about your government targeting you based on something you are doing, maybe it is worth it, but vague reasoning like “hackers with AI” is not worth this level of paranoia.

As I said last time this was shared, the article isn’t really about TikTok - that is only used as a recent example of why these big proprietary datasets are problematic. The main point of the article is really to explain why we need an alternative and how it could work, using the example of Getgee. I wish more people would read past headlines, especially for interesting articles such as this one.

Nintendo has a few things going for it that other developers don’t, like its relatively long and consistent history and the fact it has sort of transcended video gaming to become a general pop culture icon. It also consistently releases bangers and the occasional flops are usually “creative but flawed” rather than just outright broken or boring. It doesn’t chase market trends to the same degree as its competitors, which gives its games a more timeless appeal. All those factors add up to give Nintendo games more long-term value, either as collector’s items or simply as fun video games.

This is also why Microsoft discontinued the Surface Duo. No one is safe from Cisco’s trademark!

I can’t definitively say, as that depends on your financial institution. There is a community list here with apps that have been confirmed as compatible or incompatible. You could also try searching the Plexus app, which is a larger community app compatibility project. My credit union’s app has worked on every deGoogled ROM I’ve used, including iodéOS, and I’ve never experienced the problems others mention.

iodéOS is available on the Fairphone 4 and also has a very easy installation process. You just plug your phone in via USB, download the installer and follow the on-screen instructions.

I really want to know what the logic behind their thinking was…or maybe they were just lazy? I don’t know, it’s so weird that they’d get to the point of using a password manager but then still make such a basic error.

people who use a password manager but store the master password on Discord

???

iodéOS has a Matrix server and the people there are pretty friendly, but discussion is mostly focused on bug reporting and features among beta testers and developers. Probably not what you’re after but just throwing it out there anyway.

Have you tried the various Firefox forks? If one of your primary problems with Firefox is a belief that they are “evil like Google” then switching to a browser developed by Google and further entrenching their monopoly on the market is a very strange decision.

Is it actually viable for ordinary people to purchase small amounts of cryptocurrency for the sole purposes of making more private purchases online or taking advantage of cryptocurrency discounts? All the coverage on them is about large-scale investing which makes me feel like no one buying and selling actually has any interest in cryptocurrencies as an alternative currency. Instead it’s just about getting rich, which is a massive turn off.

I have that problem too but I find using a Chromium-based browser is the solution. I doubt you actually need to use Chrome for these websites you’re having problems with.

I recently reset a laptop with Windows 11 on it, prior to installing Linux, and went through the setup process again. It is so bad now, the offline account option was completely missing and it was constantly trying to push Microsoft services on me. It felt very reminiscent of how freeware installations often try to trick users into accepting additional third party garbage.

Reddit then disallowed access to all other providers, unless they can promise they won’t use the data for AI purposes.

That’s what they said publicly, but even search providers like Mojeek that have no AI capabilities appear to require some sort of “commercial agreement” to allow reddit scraping moving forward. It seems to me that Google was attempting to further distance itself from the competition with the agreement and that reddit went along with it because, in some way, it makes financial sense for reddit too.