VPN + DeGoogled Privacy Android ROM would be the most practical. That way you should br free from most if not all cross device tracking.
In general having a seperate device for that stuff makes total sense.
Get some sort of device that is compatible with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS, like an older Pixel
not sure what would be best to handle verification.
You also have to be careful to use totally new accounts for everything on this new device, different number, different email, different device, different sim etc
the only thing that can really stop it IMO is mainstreaming decentralized social media and messaging services.
You’d need to effectively replace Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp etc… The only thing that totally keeps us from 1984 is that all these platforms for now have decided to be relatively free and impartial (compared to how bad it could be). But that could change at any time if the powers that be decide to on a whim. They could completely ban all privacy, pacificsm or any kind of political opposition tomorrow.
I don’t understand how everyone can be so blind to the surveillance that already exists.
Literally all your communications or purchase or browsing history, 90% of people’s photos and contacts, everything you ever say near your phone/smart devices, your health data with devices like fitbit, cm resolution spy satelites, 4D maps of the entire globe being created via services like Pokemon Go, phones create and store in the cloud high resolution 3D maps of your face, mesh networked devices like Alexa now surveil without you even having internet access, your home and your exact location down to a meter are already being live spied on. Not to mention full remote access to all your devices.
Sometimes with a thin veneer of privacy on top of it, like Apple pretends to have.
Basically the only part of you that the surveillance state doesn’t constantly surveil already is your butthole.
Even avoiding just 10% of this surveillance in your daily life is almost impossible.
I don’t think the tools on privacytools.io fit your requirements (maybe globaleaks) but this site is a good start
https://www.privacytools.io/blogs https://www.privacytools.io/private-hosting https://www.privacytools.io/secure-whistleblower
Also some of the privacy messengers here (like Briar) have blogging/forum features similar to Telegram, but you can’t access them via a browser, so you would have to get everyone to install those apps:
https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-messaging
But realistically speaking like the others suggested: Tor, I2P, Zeronet, etc…
I have a Xiaomi, I love their hardware and the fact that it’s bugged by a foreign nation rather than my own. But Xiaomi software is garbage and flashing is an absolute pain. I looked at what rom support modern Xiaomi devices have and I am not impressed. It’s almost all half baked or not privacy oriented. I’ve been struggling with one of said ROMs for years.
I am sick of flashing one-off ROMs without proper support or OTA, and constant system level bugs.
I’d love to have a manufacturer with open-source/open hardware focused cheap high performance repairable hardware and with privacy ROMs as a first-class citizen. Like a Fairphone if it was good.
But sadly all of these devices end up with bad support too in the end.
I think the main issue is that most ROM developers today only buy the most high end flagship devices, since those are the only ones that get any decent support. I’m guessing that’s because they all got high paying tech jobs now.
Yeah the fact that Pixel Phones are the defacto standard for privacy phones is absurd. It’s guaranteed chock full of hardware surveillance tools you can’t remove with custom roms or kernels.
Outside of the Pixel lineup, custom rom support is almost non-existant in 2024. it’s wild, you can get the same or better hardware for half the price.
The technology mostly exists. The most important question is always how do you get people to use it.
The only way I see people using decentralized solutions is by having one interface where you can watch decentralized content as well as YouTube. That way they don’t loose any of the content or convenience.
No one ever bothers to open up two apps for videos, that is why a single app solution is the only way.
The unique selling point of decentralized video plattforms atm is 1) you can watch what is banned on YouTube 2) you are not beholden to the YouTube algorithm for conent.
So if we can sell that to users and not have them loose any convenience or UX, you can slowly start replacing YouTube.
Monetization is also an important point, but others have addressed this.
That’s the point of the repuation system.
It’s a very hard problem, I’ll give you that.
What you need is, each instance and community collects reputation in the federation. then users posting on those instances can collect reputation on those. basically by not being banned or massively downvoted. Your reputation is weighted by the reputation of each you collected it from instance.
Each users identity is tied to some key that collects reputation, that you generate new identities from from for each instance/community/post. Like how some credit card services give you a new credit card number for each new website.
Admins don’t know who you are, but they can see and verify your reputation.
Then instance/community admins can decide if they want a different weighting. For example, to completely disregard the reputation by some instance or make one you like 10x more important.
You could get an ordered list of posts or pseudonymous users based on the reputation. Untrustworthy users will glow like a christmas tree.
That would be one way to do it. It’s hard to make it water tight, but any improvements would be better than the current fediworse.
It doesn’t have to be.
You could keep the general structure and functioning while improving privacy.
For example, by obfuscating post history, anonymous posting or assigning a user pseudonym per instance/community, auto-deleting old posts/comments. All optional features of course. Let instances/communites decide which of these features they want.
Keep the structure of Lemmy with it’s Reddit-like-ness and instances, but give users, instances and communities more control over data privacy.
Sure it’s harder to implement, you need some minimal-knowledge reputation system, but there is nothing fundamental preventing that from being possible.
The nice thing about federation is that one instance/community can stay the same data-leaking privacy mess, if they so prefer. While others could operate analogous to 4-chan (or anything in between).
they’re not doing it to get you to turn it back on, but your mom who you turned it off for. drives me mad how often I have to redisable privacy nightmares everytime my mom asks me to help her with her phone.