Just like any other major social platform, it has been used to pretty good effect in organizing protests against various issues.
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.
ProxiTok
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.
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.
It doesnt help that I think conservatives are pieces of shit and I am a member of a marginalized community that they are targeting with hate and discriminative laws.
Stop infecting every single Lemmy community with freaking politics. There’s nothing good in it.
Speaking of your question, it looks like there’s a bad actor. Spamming isn’t something a serious political organization would do. I think you should change your phone number.
I don’t think they use picture analyzing software for tracking. It’s very resource heavy because it uses systems similar to LLMs. You can make very slight changes to your pfp (just one changed pixel is enough) for every website to avoid hash match but it’s not necessary I think. If someone wants to manually find your accounts though then it won’t be too hard for them.
What tactics could be used to move people en masse away from mainstream platforms
Propaganda, advertising and other kinds of informing about the issues of the mainstream platforms.
and more generally, do you think there is a point in it?
Yes. Not just because of privacy issues but also because the algorithm is made to filter what a user can see (making their source of information heavily biased and incomplete) and to addict them to the platform (this shouldn’t be the main argument because people don’t really care about it now but it can be a nice secondary one).
most games are the same price on GOG as other places like Steam
Steam has sales with ridiculously good discounts which is very important for me as a poor person.
Have you not heard of GOG? They only sell games DRM-free, and have similar sales to Steam. Ubisoft particularly don’t seem to like publishing much from the past 10 years though.
I know about GOG but Steam’s integration with Proton and ease of use on Linux are just too good. Probably I should try configuring Bottles manually but I still think I’ll have to spend 2 or 3 days to make one game work through it. My machine isn’t that powerful so the performance will suffer too. Also I really didn’t know someone except small indie devs made DRM-free games nowadays. I only ever saw one (the original Kerbal Space Program) that had a DRM-free version.
If we’re talking in the realm of privacy, it’s technically better than the other popular PC storefronts because they provide an optional offline installer for the game that, once downloaded, can be preserved into an archive and installed at any later date without internet (and can still be used if the game is taken down from the store). As far as I remember, they collect far less private data too, so that’s a plus.
I have a separate gaming machine (if you can call an RTX 3050 a gaming card) so privacy isn’t that much of a problem in my case but ngl I would love to have a better option.
They track information such as your spending habits and how you interact with their marketing messages, and they now also combine all of your personal information they have collected about you to profile you, they also get information about you from third-parties. Quoted from the updated policy: Information from third parties about you, such as identity, preferences and inferences about you…
Man I’m getting crazy strong WD vibes with this one. I can just recommend not using that service anymore. You can mitigate third party tracking but if such an invasive service has something to do with your ID or banking info, it is very bad for privacy no matter what you do.
Of course money is not a real valuable resource but I will fight for the right of not owning digital devices. Forcing it makes no good sense to me and it will pronounce the death of privacy as a word. They will find some proprietary system like Play Integrity (but worse) to lock it in for “security”.
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).