Proton VPN has a free plan that is fine if you just want general privacy from your ISP. If you want to do more like torrenting or circumventing geoblocking, there are probably cheaper options although Proton VPN does have significant Black Friday sales (which I think you just missed, unfortunately).
I see no reason to overpay for this when all the features it offers are included in iodéOS, which it uses. You will save a lot of time, money and potentially risk by installing iodéOS yourself on a supported phone of your choosing. It is super easy these days now that all non-Samsung phones support their automatic installer.
I was pretty sure he said something to the effect of “privacy doesn’t matter/doesn’t exist” a few years ago but I can’t find the interview I’m thinking of. All I can find is this video on the topic from The Hated One, which isn’t referencing the interview I’m thinking of.
You focused on the wrong part of my comment. The issue isn’t that you have Google accounts or use YouTube, it’s that you seem to have very little understanding of how much data is being collected about you through these avenues. Instead you focus on some conspiracy theory about phone microphones which is still yet to be proven despite years of technologically illiterate people telling us that “the only way they could have known that is if they were listening to me!!!”. I don’t understand how you get to the point of posting in a niche privacy community whilst still being so completely clueless and misinformed.
I agree that this circular echo-chamber effect is problematic, particularly in forums like reddit and Lemmy where early user voting often determines the tone of a discussion. Too many people assume a comment is correct or incorrect based on its score, or the number of similar comments, rather than whether a credible source was provided that supports whatever claim was made. It’s particularly bad in privacy and security communities because so many of the people involved have a higher level of base paranoia that makes them vulnerable to conspiracy theories and misinformation.
You can read this reference to closed source in the most charitable way as alluding to the whole motley of things that render it less accessible.
Not when they use the conjunction “so”. If they’d used “and”, then sure - there could be any number of reasons. Using “so” as a conjunction like that in the sentence gives it an equivalent definition of “therefore”, so it’s like saying “Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it’s harder for users to investigate”, which is clearly an inaccurate statement.
In any case, OP has attempted to shift the goalposts many times in some kind of weird gotcha attempt instead of just admitting they were wrong or worded their argument poorly. If people want charitable interpretations of their misleading or inaccurate statements then they should behave in a manner that deserves them. Going full redditor ain’t it.
(Vivaldi is closed source, so it’s harder for users to investigate).
Please show me where you explained that Vivaldi’s source code is harder to investigate because “users need to download a 2 GB repo” or a “tarball dump”.
Is English your first language? Do you understand the definition of “so” in the sentence you typed?
But that’s not what you claimed. Direct quote from the article (bold emphasis is mine):
Vivaldi users point out that the built in blocker is noticably worse than uBlock Origin, with some guessing that Vivaldi doesn’t fully support uBlock Origin filterlists (Vivaldi is closed source, so it’s harder for users to investigate).
You clearly implied that the reason Vivaldi’s source code regarding ad-blocking is harder for users to investigate is because it’s closed source. This is not true.
This article has some misinformation in places. Like it claims Vivaldi’s ad-blocker cannot be investigated further because the project is closed source, but the only closed source part of Vivaldi is the UI (approximately 5% of the total code). The ad-blocker C++ code is published along with the other 95% of the browser’s code.
My guess as to the “why” is that it’s just another example of enshittification. Podcasts were essentially a bubble that everyone was trying to get in on, but the amount of low quality (not just production but also content) flooding the market devalued it significantly and listeners and subscriptions began declining. Everyone is trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of it now, which means there are even more ads on top of all the ads and cross-promotion that come baked into an episode.
The XDA forums don’t have anything listed for your device. You can still improve your privacy by disabling applications (or uninstalling them through Universal Android Debloater) and replacing them with FOSS alternatives where possible. If you don’t already use F-Droid and Aurora Store (or equivalents), switching to those app stores instead of using the Play Store for everything will help you to change your app drawer over time. Take note of Aurora Store’s privacy report section that lists known trackers bundled with applications, it’s a very useful feature that is often overlooked.
I limit as much as I can through a combination of privacy-respecting apps and fewer apps (if I can reliably use the web browser for something, I will) and then use custom DNS filters (NextDNS) to minimise further leakage. I also disable any pre-installed applications I don’t need (you can remove them with Universal Android Debloater but I don’t need the extra storage space). I also use a VPN at all times.
If you want to stick with Chromium-based browsers, you could try Vivaldi. I am a Firefox user myself but Vivaldi is my backup browser for those rare occasions where I have issues. 95% of the browser is open source, with the remaining 5% being comprised of the closed source UI. Vivaldi has a pretty reasonable privacy policy, an inbuilt ad-blocker and is a 100% employee owned company. It supports all major operating systems and has a sync feature so you could use it as your main browser across all devices if you wanted.
Signal…what? The Android version hasn’t supported SMS for 2 years at this point.
To me it’s much more of an ethical concern than a practical concern. Digital privacy is a human right (privacy is listed under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The only immediate ways in which I can uphold this right and contribute to a fairer society is through exercising my right to vote and making ethically superior choices as a consumer. So for me, it’s less about avoiding the government or big tech for practical reasons like surveillance and scams driven by data breaches (though of course these are still valid concerns for many) and more about supporting those who I believe are doing the right thing (or are at least an improvement).
If we don’t support the better alternatives then they will never grow enough to achieve mainstream success and challenge the current establishment. I know some people here hate Proton, but that is a great example of a privacy-focused tech company which has grown significantly because of consumer support - to the point where it has a full suite of products that do a much better job of competing with heavyweights like Google than a tiny, unsupported startup would have had. A company like that might not even have survived without its early adopters, and then the next one to come along would be even less likely to receive investment in the early stages due to the history of failure within the sector. To me, being privacy conscious is all about being part of a positive movement; supporting people and companies that are doing the right thing and refusing to accept problematic behaviours and practices I see in the world.
I know for some people, particularly minorities, privacy is a real world concern and I fully acknowledge that but I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by trying to sell it to everyone in such a scary way. Humans are not very good at perceiving or responding to threat until there is actual undisputable evidence of it in their immediate surroundings. So when you tell these people that they’ll lose all their money to scammers or that their government is going to unjustly target them they don’t actually believe you or take you seriously. They think you are insane. The better sell, I think, is to show people that this is a positive movement and worldwide community that they can be a part of.
EDIT: I was going to add this yesterday but forgot. I don’t know if anyone here has seen The Social Dilemma - the big reason that documentary went viral was not just because it gave a very detailed and scary overview of all the problems with surveillance capitalism and the attention economy, but also because it finished on quite an optimistic note. They told viewers “we know this is all really scary for you but we have smart people working tirelessly to change things and build a movement that we want you to be a part of”. It left people feeling engaged, like they still had some level of agency over the situation instead of paralysed with fear and just totally abandoning all hope.
I never said it’s not happening and I’m not sure why you’re suggesting otherwise. All I said is that it is a vague reason to have this level of paranoia about your privacy. It’s like having a super strict diet because you’ve read that certain foods contain carcinogens and will increase your risk of cancer. Technically it’s true, but the only people who should actually be concerned about this are people with pre-existing risk factors or whose excessive/unusual lifestyle places them at extreme risk. Nothing you have said in this thread suggests you are any different from any other regular person in the world, so I don’t feel you should be as concerned as you seem to be.
Yes, you are worrying too much I’d say. Your concerns are valid and real hut you are overestimating the likelihood of something happening to you if you make a mistake or compromise and that is causing you unnecessary anxiety. You don’t have to choose between perfect privacy or caving in completely. Everything you do will help, but not necessarily to the degree required to justify sacrifices to your personal life or mental health. If you have a very specific concern about your government targeting you based on something you are doing, maybe it is worth it, but vague reasoning like “hackers with AI” is not worth this level of paranoia.
As I said last time this was shared, the article isn’t really about TikTok - that is only used as a recent example of why these big proprietary datasets are problematic. The main point of the article is really to explain why we need an alternative and how it could work, using the example of Getgee. I wish more people would read past headlines, especially for interesting articles such as this one.
I can’t definitively say, as that depends on your financial institution. There is a community list here with apps that have been confirmed as compatible or incompatible. You could also try searching the Plexus app, which is a larger community app compatibility project. My credit union’s app has worked on every deGoogled ROM I’ve used, including iodéOS, and I’ve never experienced the problems others mention.
iodéOS is available on the Fairphone 4 and also has a very easy installation process. You just plug your phone in via USB, download the installer and follow the on-screen instructions.
Reddit then disallowed access to all other providers, unless they can promise they won’t use the data for AI purposes.
That’s what they said publicly, but even search providers like Mojeek that have no AI capabilities appear to require some sort of “commercial agreement” to allow reddit scraping moving forward. It seems to me that Google was attempting to further distance itself from the competition with the agreement and that reddit went along with it because, in some way, it makes financial sense for reddit too.
The major difference between those two for the majority of users will be the UI. /e/OS really targets iOS users who are concerned about their privacy and/or want to transition to Android. The UI has a lot of similarities to make that easier. LineageOS is much more similar to “stock” Android.
For a comparison of privacy and security features, you can check this chart.
That’s not true, I have been a customer for several years and regularly receive offers on my current plan during the big sales. The problem for me is that they lowered my VPN Plus monthly rate to $5 a while back and the promomotional offers usually reset to a rate higher than that, so even though I would save more in the short-term I am locking myself into a longer and potentially more expensive contract with them in the longer-term. I don’t know if this is bait from them or an oversight - I did notice that the most recent Black Friday promotion said it would reset to my discounted price at the end of the promotion so maybe they’ve changed it. I still didn’t take them up on it, though.