Where I am, to receive a package from mail or a private shipping company, you indeed have to show your ID. However, I always order to the online store’s own office directly (usually without even creating the account - instead asking an employee), and I’ve never been asked this. Is it stricter where you are?
Privacy and social media are not really mutually exclusive - if we’re talking about a service like Facebook that follows you around the internet unless you take measures, yes. But if we mean something like Lemmy or Mastodon, it can be fine for privacy if you choose right what you do and don’t expose.
I am really frustrated when this is brought up, since it only shows what they have been collecting so far, not what they’re capable of collecting. The government agencies can force them to do whatever modifications to the server AND to keep completely silent about it. I am still trying to understand whether Sealed Sender would protect from a server collecting and recording ALL the data it possibly can.
I just find the format itself pointless. Not only does that encourage oversharing (including images of your face, which for me is a big no-no), but also doesn’t allow expressing yourself. You can pretty much only state facts like “I cooked pancakes today”. Not express your thoughts and skills, like a wall of text on hidden meanings in Squidward’s music. Even in a simple photo report, choosing how and when to take photos is most of the art, while randomized timing deprives you of that.
I think it still very much depends on how much they’re onto you. The guy from the most famous Proton case seems like a low-level crook, so if he wasn’t so easy to catch, chances are the agency would’ve just went after an easier prey. If you’re a DNM admin, though… Indeed, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I need one because a large portion of the internet is blocked, pretty much everyone around me uses some sort of censorship evasion for this reason. I have a subscription to a VPS rather than a VPN - it allows me flexibility in what protocol to use because some can get censored (already has happened with Wireguard I used to have), as well as allows hosting a variety of services in addition.
I’m just frustrated that Matrix is more popular than XMPP. Yes, it’s about as easy to spin it up, and I was surprised to see it runs fine on my low-end VPS, but it’s noticeably more resource-intensive, and I’m especially worried about the ever-expanding storage. I really don’t like the “store everything forever” model, I think it should be opt-in or allowing you to set an archival period.
Not to mention that a device that would pass Play Integrity is precisely the device I wouldn’t ever consider doing anything private on. Which would defeat the whole point of Signal. It’s already bad enough that it’s so desktop-unfriendly while much fewer phones than computers that can run non-privacy-invasive OSes than computers…
Yeah, absolutely agree that the two browsers’ actions don’t even compare. But I wouldn’t be defending FF either - for example, to my understanding, the PPA did make it into an actual update, and telemetry is not even all turned off by the basic toggles in the settings, with more being in about:config (part of the reason why hardening user.js exist).
Those third-party clients have some essential, basic functionality that the official ones for some reason lack. Signal-cli allows registering from desktop without any smartphone, Molly allows an arbitrary Socks proxy instead of being limited to just Signal’s own proxy solution, tying a desktop client with a link instead of scanning a QR code (thus allowing easy registration from an Android VM), and maybe most importantly for some - Notifications not relying on Google (Molly-Socket allows it to use UnifiedPush).
The issue with this is that it’s a part of an overall picture - that Brave sees nothing wrong with violating users’ boundaries. Brave 100% needs forks that would disable or remove weird non-consensual things added silently in updates, like what Librewolf is to Firefox, except Brave imo pushes the boundaries even more.
IDK how it is where you are, but I don’t ever give my address to stores. Even when buying online, I pick up my orders in the stores’ physical offices (the delivery to your door always costs extra anyway, unlike this). Yeah, that does limit my choice, but I kinda never think about that, just go with the stores that do have offices. Unless we’re talking about the biggest universal marketplaces that are pretty much our Amazon, they usually take cash. Recently, I’ve been ordering there without even creating an account on the websites - just asking an employee to make an order for me to later pick up at the same place.
That is extremely inconvenient and jist feels wrong. There’s no reason a digital file has to be tied to an inconvenient, small-volume media.