Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Good, glad it's getting some main stream attention. If more people start taking advantage of these settings and alternatives it's going to hurt Meta's bottom line eventually
it’s going to hurt Meta’s bottom ~~line~~ eventually
Just hurting Meta's bottom is good enough for me
They'll just bury the settings, or remove them. Who's going to stop them now?
I don’t want to get my hopes up but is this Facebook’s MySpace moment?
My personal MySpace moment for Facebook was 10 years ago. Best choice ever made.
Nobody left MySpace because of enshitification
Use Magic Earth or Organic Maps instead of Google Maps too. Neither will track you.
Organic Maps is fantastic except for one crucial thing. Traffic info. That is literally the only thing stopping me from using it instead of GM or Waze. I need traffic info, I don't want to be late to stuff because I didn't know an accident happened, or a road got flooded, or there's just high volume traffic, etc.
I'm not sure how they would implement it and keep everything relatively privacy friendly (well it's FOSS so at the very least they aren't selling our data ❤️), but I need it.
Have a look at Magicearth.com
Just tried it out yesterday and today, and thought it was pretty good! Compared the routes it showed me with Waze (GM data) and it showed similar/exact routes.
For others who are curious, the only issues I noticed were:
Other than that, seems great, has all the features Organic Maps does and more. Likely to be my permanent navigator app.
Correct me if wrong, but isn't there a law in the us that says, all us companies have to give the government access to all data without disclosing this information? That would rule out any us based companies for privacy concerns as alternatives atm.
You should expect any data hosted on a server to be accessible by the given government…and thanks to NSA you should expect any data that travels through the US to be accessible by their government
Privacy in this case is around the selling to advertisers
Took a long time, but nice to see this topic getting mainstream attention.
Nice! Just shared this (as a PDF without the domain name lol) with my family!
Coward!
Hey it’s a group chat with my grandma ಠ_ಠ
and now you’ve robbed her of her chance to sell john oliver her collection of valuable rat erotica
Why don't stories like this EVER mention Lemmy?
Well, I get that Lemmy is an alternative social media, but it's not really an alternative to Facebook. Anonymous usernames, text-based posts, you can't follow people, Fediverse is somewhat confusing.. I'd recommend it as an alternative to Reddit, but probably not the website where boomers want to check up on their neighbors and friends
you can't follow people
Challenge accepted
you can’t follow people
He said "Lemmy" but probably meant "Threadiverse", and mbin does support both the Twitter-style following user model and the Reddit-style forum model.
To use fedia.io as an example:
I dunno about piefed, haven't used it.
That's what Friendica is for
The problem I see with this is that a Meta employee literally came out on Mastodon recently and revealed that non of these settings do anything and are false flags.
I’ve been wanting to try pixelfed but I haven’t figured out what to do: start my own for friends or join an existing one.
I heard there were some issues with a dev or something so I haven’t signed up for the original instance yet
good initiative but uh what's up with that domain name?
There was a whole saga of him buying expensive rat erotica artwork at one point, which is a sentence I never thought I'd write.
sentence I never thought I’d write
🤣 🤣
John Oliver's show is doing amazing things, including the Drumpfinator addon.
What is that URL, though? I'm guessing I'm know it if I (happily) watch the episode?
The site doesn't suggest any alternatives though or am I not seeing that?
The alternatives were suggested briefly in the segment, not the site. Oliver pointed to the site those people who can't ditch Meta right now.
Why not just recommend adblockers? No ads, no revenue, no matter how much tracking.
Selling user profiling data is also worth money, even if you're not shown ads because of ad-blockers you bring value to the dataset by increasing it's size with useful demographic data.
John Oliver for president ✊
He can't because he wasn't born here, but we could totally elect his wife and let him do the whole first husband thing while still advising if she needs it.
For the masses maybe, but Signal & Bluesky ain’t it for a Privacy forum
How is Signal not privacy-friendly? It's the most private thing that can be called a "messenger app".
I think the main red flag is that they are spending so much money. In 2023 they had 55m monthly active users and they spent $35m. The casual WhatsApp user that might switch to Signal is definitely not gonna pay for this so either Signal fans have to donate more or Signal has to start finding other monetization which if we look at other companies means selling private data.
(Also, half their spending is on hosting and they are not self hosting so a donation to Signal is basically a donation to Amazon and Google.)
either Signal fans have to donate more or Signal has to start finding other monetization which if we look at other companies means selling private data.
Lo and behold, after RiseUp now Signal is accused of selling data. Well, it is well known (and audited) that Signal keeps so little metadata it is not even useful to the authorities that have subpoeana-ed it.
This is an extra-ordinary claim you have to back with extra-ordinary evidence, in order to save face.
It is entirely centralized in the US—& there is 100% chance the NSA is tapped in on the metadata they can get a hold of. You can’t self-host. They have been hostile toward alternate clients & are very adamant you use one of the duopoly of Google/Apple mobile OSs as your primary device (screw you if you want to run an alternative OS or no phone I guess). There is a hole in the history for the server that leaves room for conspiracy theories.
Signal is adequate for privacy-focused normies, but does not deserve the pedestal it is put on which is why many folks more serious about the ideals instead of focusing on making concessions are skeptical of Signal. This isn’t a hot take or new stance.