Ahh, Google’s tried and true method of throwing a million half-baked features to people before promptly cancelling them all. This will definitely work for them.

That’s a decent start, but you need a browser that’s resistant to fingerprinting through some plugins and something like ublock origin that will block all embedded content. At some point, it may require you to use a phone number, and at that point you may have a problem. If you avoid that, one of the biggest threats are the facebook and related meta content placed on other pages around the internet. The pixel is one aspect, but almost any facebook content can still track you across sites. These are easily blocked with a decent adblocker and probably privacybadger too.

I know lots of folks will disagree, but I’d care less about Facebook tracking you as they mostly only care about serving you ads and making content suggestions to keep you on the platform to view more ads. Facebook has never served me a relevant ad, and even with a lot of use still can’t recommend things I’m interested in. Data leaks and sharing is a concern, but that’s a concern with every site. I think when it comes to privacy, there’s far bigger concerns.

Yes-- same with bluetooth or ordering groceries for delivery and giving your home address. There’s always ways to leak data and make it no longer anonymous. However, from my knowledge of how some of these datasets work, they aren’t putting in a lot of effort into truly trying to make sure the joins are 100% accurate because it rarely matters. They generally don’t give a shit about you as an individual. The most common uses of the data are for advertising and mistargeting doesn’t cost enough to justify the time to verify the data.

Paying in cash though can make it anonymous, or by using virtual cards that mask your card id.

Sure, but you can usually register with fake info though. I’ve never seen one really verify much of any information.

Just use one of those email forwarding services that generates unique addresses.

everyone can sign up as “JP Morgan” at “555 Fuckoff Lane”. I’m guessing it might be better if we all standardize to make it harder to connect the sold datasets. If they have address checking we should find some tiny town with 200 people from google maps.

Protip: Many grocery stores allow you to just grab cards without signing up (in the US at least). You can tell them you’ll send it in later.

Then, you can use whatever the fuck info you want and still get the “rewards” so it’s not attached to you. If you use the apps on your phone, make sure they don’t have bluetooth access.

You should care, but it’s maybe more of a question about how much and about what specific things. There are some easy-to-do things, and then there’s others that get exhausting

Some of this depends on why you care about privacy and where you live. It’s a lot of work, and in some places, like the US, there’s a lot of data being sold anyway (credit/debit cards, tvs, streaming services, and stores can almost all sell some of your data and it can be difficult to stop them). Keeping Bluetooth on also enables you to be tracked going in and out of stores and other various locations.

It can be a lot of work, but some things are more worthwhile than others. There are likely some things you’re just going to have to live with.

This. Works for many, but there are some services that recognize it’s a VoIP service and won’t allow it (I think discord was one that won’t work)

Another option is a burner phone, which are relatively cheap. You have to use them periodically or they’ll disable and recycle the number, but you can typically find them for around 25$.

Chrome lost its way years ago. I value not seeing ads or getting personalized content more than I value 99% of the chrome features.

Since Firefox finally fixed that weird memory fragmentation issue, it’s been pretty smooth sailing for me. Inspector & Debugger could use a few performance patches though.

YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

What standard means of seeking information did you lose? You can still visit a library or ask a friend?

I don’t think people remember what using search was like before google. All of the problems you mentioned weren’t even possible 25 years ago.

On other search engines you had to know specialized query languages.

This is all possible because google collects this data from users. They’ve been doing it forever, and it does have some value.

pi-hole or some variant can definitely help in some situations. For example, if you care about your computer OS or your TV phoning home, it may block some of those (with the right list).

It may also block some ads on other devices too, but many places are working around this by tunneling the ad data through their servers.

It depends on what you’re trying to do. What exactly are you concerned about?

Most ‘adblocking’ is only in a desktop browser unless you use solutions like pi-hole or some alternative. Pi hole can help block some apps, services, and other devices on your home network from doing certain types of communicating in addition to blocking certain ad-related connections.

I mean yes, but this has been true for nearly 20 years at this point. Some of this comes back as useful features for everyone. Spam filtering, grammar checking, predictive text, maps route planning, face detection for all sorts of things. The same is true for many modern cars too, security cameras, etc. It all has to be trained on something and to collect more edge cases to improve.

If you care, you avoid their services.

When I see the monero.town domain, I know it’s gonna be garbage.

Exactly. The only other choices here are to buy used with a risk or wait longer to upgrade.

In this particular case, it’s a bit more complicated.

I suspect the majority of 30x0 & 40x0 card sales continue to be for non-gaming or hybrid uses. I suspect that if pure gamers stopped buying them today for months, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to their bottom line.

Until there’s reasonable competition for training AI models at reasonable prices, people are going to continue buying their cards because it’s the most cost-effective thing – even at the outrageous prices.

I’ve met a ton of people that just don’t care. The problem often isn’t that they don’t know companies are collecting a shit-ton of data. That’s really not new or isolated to tech companies.

“If I get better ads and it saves me time, what do I care?”
“I’m getting something for free. What does it matter if they know?”

“It’s too much work to avoid”

German and English are the two I can fumble my way around. Having lived and traveled some, I could fumble some basics in a few others like Dutch. I know a bit of a few others. I can read enough to figure out what’s going on in some contexts, and maybe speak enough to get around, but definitely can’t carry on a conversation in them.

It’s tough. There’s only so many hours in the day, and while I do get to watch some videos on occasion, I sometimes have too many things going on. I used to watch movies I knew well in other languages, so I already knew the context and could piece together words and phrases. I don’t have time for that anymore though.

Ive used pihole and also just removed the network’s settings.

If you want to stream, i don’t know how useful any of these mitigations are. You’re giving them some data to subscribe and use. Even if you share accounts, who knows what the apps collect.

Eh, only 2 sorta well. I’ve tried learning a bit more, but without being immersed regularly I lose them relatively fast. I can still read a bit of some of them, and hear things in movies or tv shows that I understand.

How about you? You have to have a couple you can at least get around with?