I can see why your friend would assume you could hack their phone based on how specific these steps are.

randomizing can make you stand out more as an outlier

I’m sure, but if you have a specific set of colors matching a specific picture on your phone that nobody else has, I imagine that would be more easily traceable than if it were automatically switched out every once in a while. Granted, the other aspects you mentioned might be enough to just render the effort redundant anyway.

Basically Android will change its UI coloring to align with your background image, and 3rd parties get access to knowledge about your designated UI colors, right? I get how that can be a privacy concern.

What happens if you set your wallpaper to automatically change every other hour or so? Does android allow that?

While I think most of us forum users are, I get the impression that the biggest proponents of activity pub and the fediverse as a whole aren’t even seeing privacy as even relevant. It’s a lot of talk of businesses having their very own instances to interface with the public rather than needing to rely everything on the whims of Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Nothing with regards to the implications for surveillance, identity theft, spam, privacy or security.

Right now, we’re relatively under the radar because the fediverse hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet. But I think it will, and once it does, everything we’ve ever posted will just get slurped up by data trawlers and the flood of spam will be inevitable. We’ll be juggling social media accounts just like we do with emails.

I don’t know if this is relevant, but I’d like to someday have my own kbin instance hosted on my own personal server exclusively for family. I imagine the instance being able to federate content from bigger instances, allowing members to follow people they like on microblogs or participate in federated forums from this privately maintained instance. But if anyone wanted a thread or magazine to be available to users from outside the instance, they would have to specifically opt-in to that option when creating it, and it would only apply to that one thread or magazine. Any other instance would just see our humble little family instance with only that one thing to federate. The rest of the instance would be an ecrypted enclave specifically for family accounts, and completely invisible to the fediverse.

This is the first I’ve heard searXNG. This is really cool!

No. Some will, most won’t.

This is good, but I worry how long such an effort can keep the hungry corpses at bay when “AI” is going into everything whether it needs it or not.

The name is blatantly misleading. The very definition of the term “incognito” means having one’s true identity concealed, so I can’t blame anyone with comprehension of the English language for being misled at a glance. However, like anyone else here, I do not expect this to lead to any actual progress toward more privacy.

Is there an ELI5 for what NextDNS is/does? I downloaded and enabled it because I see it recommended often enough, but I have no idea what it does for me or if there’s anything else I need to be doing with it.