Once, someone sent me an Amazon link for baby nappies, and fool me clicked on it. Now Amazon showed boomer me baby nappies suggestions for the next six months. AI at its best… These things annoy me, so I try to avoid being tracked whenever reasonably possible.

OTOH, I am old and hope to not live long enough to experience any rogue government or whatever else persecuting me for having clicked on a baby nappies link years ago; so my threat model is short term only. I keep my privacy to a level, where it hopefully prevents as many annoyances as possible, but does not hamper what I am doing online too much. If I was younger, I’d likely do more.

You mean a “contact form?” They’re everywhere.

Yes, I tried to “wget -S” some of that stuff in the Linux console. Yikes!

Yes, personally I use DDG more than Google, but we are in our 70ies, so it would be hard to convince the wife (who has been a dev 40 years ago) to change her habits. I am already looking into SearXNG, though.

I changed the user-agent of my browser to “Error: No browser installed”. Can’t be more unique than that, I guess. That was 30 years ago, though, I don’t think it will hurt me today 😆

That was my first thought as well.

Not sure, whether it is relevant for this thread, but my phone (POCO F3) does not get any notifications if Google Play Services has no access to the internet. I scratched my head for a while to find out, why I never got them on mobile data. Not sure, what it does, if you disable the store.

Nope, Desktop computer with Linux, Firefox with uBlock, noScript etc.

I’ll look into it, thank you!

Also, don’t use YouTube directly, use Invidious or Piped, and this particular issue would be gone.

It’s the convenience. If you want to run a channel, you’re kind of damned to sell your soul. 🙃 The question is for how much you’d sell yourself out completely.

Not sure, if these apps run on a desktop computer, though, which is my main workhorse.

So I may try out Firefox’s sandboxing capabilities. That should take care of cookies, but I am not sure about fingerprinting.

Do you have the Amazon app installed on the same device

Linux pc. There is no Amazon nor YouTube app for that, that I know of.

what prompted you to look up the horses stuff?

Nothing really. I am more interested in dogs, but wanted to know how other animals are trained and possibly learn something new from their techniques.

I could try Firefox’s sandboxing, maybe.

I use DokuWiki for this type of thing. With a few add-ons it is nicely configurable (galleries, discussions etc), could be run from any webspace, and doesn’t need a database. You can have ACLs that make sure that only registered users get access. But it is a bit of a DIY solution, and takes a bit of work to set up.

My oldest “security camera” of this type has been online 24/7 since June 2019 and permanently connected to a charger of the smallest type I could find at that time. The battery still holds a charge when I take the phone down for cleaning. Not sure how old the phone itself is (a small Kyocera), probably a 2014 or 2015 model. So, for my requirements, I’d say, it’s reasonably reliable.

OTOH, you may be right, and they don’t make them like they used to in the olden days, haha.

My cheap and cheerful, but not very secure homebrew solution is a used smartphone, then load any of the motion-detection apps onto it, plus an FTP server app. Then place the phone anywhere within Wi-Fi reach. Run a script once a day on my home server that downloads and deletes the videos from the phone via FTP, and also deletes that footage after 30 days. So the “system” can run indefinitely without running out of memory. The old phones just need to be rebooted once in a while for some odd reason.