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?
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.
Some Rules
- 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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- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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Motorcycling. Nearly all modern bikes have no ability to touch the internet, so you can get into a really fun hobby with practical benefits without being spied on.
I read books. I tinker.
Pirate movies, shows, and music.
That and I play old games. SMB 2 rn.
Minetest in creative mode with Radio Free Fedi’s comfy channel playing in the background 🤌
Cycling is amazing if there are good roads that aren’t much traveled around your area and check your local arthouse cinema, they even still might have paper tickets 😸
Go to your public library and just sit there and read a book
Public library would be less private than just pirating the book. Public spaces tend to be thoroughly captured by stray security cameras (often with terrible Security). Impossible to avoid going outside lol so most likely fine.
You’ll never be able to live your life if you never go out.
Yes, I know that. Some people may need to take extra precautions when going outside. The reason for my original comment is that “outside” does not equal “more private” in many circumstances.
Humans need sunlight and it helps to release dopamine and vitamin D. Important.
You could try jacking off
To porn that you have painted yourself ahead of time.
Paint me like one of your French girls, Jack
You ever search any torrent tracker for anything not very specific? 80% of the results are porn.
Have you tried touching grass? 😃
But seriously, most outdoor activities are like the most private things you’ll do all day.
Never mind the security cameras, and the drones, and the smartphones, and the satellites…
Those things are less-likely to be in outdoor areas than anywhere else.
Where I live, there are security cameras all over the buildings and the lamposts and the traffic intersections and the parking lots, plus Ring/Nest doorbells everywhere. There are more cameras outside the buildings than inside. Everybody is carrying a smartphone and I see people taking pictures or video with them all the time.
Drones and satellites are really only outside.
So I don’t agree with your conclusion.
Where I live there are no cameras, so I agree with their conclusion.
Emulation is a great for offline gaming. You can also find some great FOSS games on flathub like srb2, srb2k and Mindustry. You can also get old books for free on Project Gutenberg and audiobooks on Librivox. In Germany (and other European countries) there is state financed tv which has free drmfree adfree and (relatively) privacy friendly streaming services. Newgrounds also is a treasure trove, especially for music. Also there is piracy
Go read at your local library, you don’t even need to check the books out if you read them there.
Anything that doesn’t require high tech still works really well. Don’t need to worry about tracking software that tries to sell you something with say a horse or two. And as a bonus you get lots of physical activity as well which is healthy.
Unless you do it near a device with gapps installed because these were proven to collect real-time microphone data (may not be the case anymore).
You can make your own open-source games, it’s pretty fun. And of course there are loads of games that have no telemetry what so ever.
“Holy shit this guy programs games to play them what a chad.” - MigratingtoLemmy
“Shorts” rot your brain like maggots. They are like smoking nicotine. You are probably suffering from withdraw of domine.
I think it is healthy to not be constantly entertained. Go outside and be in nature for a while. Maybe you could even meet someone new.
Board games with friends and family. My brother rotates hosting board game night with his friends and it’s great fun.
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.
If you view tiktok content thru ProxiTok, it fails to be addictive because things like autoplay and recommendations are disabled.
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.
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.
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.