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?

I just get a separate device with a fake identity and no personal data for games and proprietary software. Short videos are hosted by very invasive companies and don’t have any APIs or anything to make custom privacy-friendly frontends so it’s out of the question (fortunately imo because that things are addictive and can degrade a person in months). Idk much about movies because I’ve never used a paid movie service like Netflix but since they’re paid, privacy is very questionable there.

Unfortunately digital entertainment is very privacy-invasive overall. You can fix some of the privacy issues by the cost of convenience but some things will remain too invasive to be viable in many threat models.

Short videos are hosted by very invasive companies and don’t have any APIs or anything to make custom privacy-friendly frontends so it’s out of the question (fortunately imo because that things are addictive and can degrade a person in months).

If you view tiktok content thru ProxiTok, it fails to be addictive because things like autoplay and recommendations are disabled.

ProxiTok

Never heard of it but if a client with proper profiling mitigation exists, it’s awesome. Though (as I understand) since there’s pretty much no useful content on TikTok (unless it’s a shortened copy of a YouTube video or something), good recommendations are really needed to keep the user entertained so privacy-focused clients without total profiling kill the point of the app.

DaGeek247
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since there’s pretty much no useful content on TikTok

Just like any other major social platform, it has been used to pretty good effect in organizing protests against various issues. https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/nation/2023/12/14/starbucks-why-everyone-boycotting-controversies-explained/71885557007/

I don’t personally use it though. Too scared i wont be able to put it down.

Just like any other major social platform, it has been used to pretty good effect in organizing protests against various issues.

Yea but come on we all know that stupid memes and harmful propaganda of all sorts will be at least 95% of your feed so it will degrade you fast. It’s a nice platform for creation and advertising but not for consumption.

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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.

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  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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