A while ago I reached a point in my privacy journey where I simply felt bored. It’s not a result of going too far in privacy, but simply my threat model has caused me to let go of a lot of things that used to entertain me (games, movie streaming, short form video, etc.) The entertainment landscape in privacy seems pretty bleak, since you no longer own the movies you watch, the games you play, and lots of proprietary software along the way. I entertain myself through FreeTube, physical copies of movies, and offline installations of games like Minecraft, but it’s still a step down from how it used to be.
What do you do to keep yourselves entertained in a privacy conscious way?
Online features don’t work on pirated games in 99% cases (it says “connection error”, “failed to connect to insert the developer company name here servers” or something similar) but I’m afraid the telemetry still works.
You’re missing a pretty key fact; any good repack is going to disable everything trying to connect outwards. Otherwise the methods for pirating that content will be easier to detect and block.
It’s also really easy to just check for yourself when a program is phoning home. https://superuser.com/questions/99039/any-good-utility-to-track-outgoing-traffic-and-requests-from-win-pc
You’d be surprised how often none of that is touched, and I really doubt any repackers are bothering to block any network calls if the original scene release didn’t. I’ve used some equivalent of OpenSnitch that prompts on all network requests that I haven’t explicitly allowed already for the past decade, and at least 90% of all games I downloaded during that time tried to phone home.
ALWAYS set firewall rules to block internet access to any software you pirate.
Hmm this is a good point.