Nothing wrong with that, right? As Bob Dylan says, everyone serves someone.
if OP doesn’t have the passion or time for DIY, the reality is an ecosystem awaits.
Sometimes you just want to pop a QR code, screw your light in and then have your smart speaker / phone just so it’s thing.
the key is who will offer what OP needs without farming data for resale, or, worse, criminal enterprise.
Honestly, I think it boils down to our ecosystems. There are other mail + calendar providers out there. When children are involved, I think it’s worth a few bucks to get a custom DNS, a privacy-focused email/calendar provider, and give children the space to grow up in a world that collects as little metadata as possible.
I agree.
I feel like certain providers are better than others. It is worth investigating imo.
Some providers use in memory security devices so that if the device was stolen, it would be useless.
Some offer 100% in country services designed to meet in country security & privacy needs , albeit at a higher price.
All privacy and security is a risk / reward scenario. What is the risk of an event, what is the personal reward for mitigating that event, what is the cost to do so.
Personally, I think the most important thing to do is try, and not gatekeep.
A bad actor is a bad actor and no amount of privacy practice is going to stop them.
Also worth asking genuine questions as it’s not like Google is going to roll out step by step avoidance practices to escape the various metadata machines, both theirs and their competitors.
I like privacy based practices because it is form of self reliance, one that requires a community to succeed!
Maybe / maybe not
Companies pay to place their product that may or may not sell, c/o inventory discount.
Remember, in a perfect world, advertising to someone who will neither purchase more nor less is wasted advertising.
Marketing is not about what you want, but influencing you to do things that you aren’t doing already, or to keep you doing something you are about to stop.
100% data driven marketing is not about reaching people who are or will be consuming, it is reaching people who aren’t => selling things to people who don’t want to be sold. Keeping sold is a diff matter.
That’s what makes this big data so discouraging, if I look at a beer, it is more likely marketing teams will try to reach me on lateral data topics (would you like a gym membership?) that have nothing to do with beer vs “hey here’s a coupon for 5% off”.
I am going to a bit counter culture here
Let your freak flag fly in university, as long as it doesn’t hurt others or yourself.
With luck, your friends will accept that you are a privacy weirdo but also respect what you do.
Avoid evangelizing as nobody likes a preacher, a vibe of ‘you do you’ keeps it light. You will find your peeps.
Bruh
a vpn can totally MiM if they force you to use their cert.
upstream server ssl <-> vpn client ssl <-> vpn MiM <-> vpn server ssl <-> you
Even with no MiM, VPN is going to know where you are going and how long you are there, and any unencrypted comms (UDP / torrent, funky http URL) are just … there.
I would assume consumer “privacy” VPN traffic is easily monitored by state agencies since there are fixed points of entry & egress?
Any corporate VPN worth its salt is totally MiM all traffic; usually spells it out in the sales brochure.
Personally I would use my own cellular Wi-Fi hotspot over a third party VPN. A VPN … unless you are running your own … is just a giant honeypot for snagging everything you do.
The only way you know it’s not happening is you don’t.
An in country cellular service at least can be assumed not to sell your data to a cyber crime group.
remember wifi devices have an attenna, instead of removing the chip, soldering resistors to the antenna (or replacing it w/resistors) will drain it of power (more or less). no attenna power, no signal to connect; no signal to connect, no wifi.
though honestly tv wifi does a pretty good job at dropping signals on it’s own. most tv’s have a wifi OFF capability, always assumed that … worked?
What a business license is paying for, typically, is privacy / protection for its proprietary information; Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc are all going to be good enough. Boils down to terms and conditions of the business agreement. Your information as an employee is “protected” but assume your employer is going to know and see all. Never use your work things for personal things.
Apple has the best consumer level privacy options imo; again, it’s not free.
I am surprised that we wouldn’t prefer better AI.
Search engines today are geared to point us to a site where we then search again for our answer.
I am now just realizing I’d rather get a range of answers.
I wonder if that’s where we end up, a massive “wikipedia” of online nuggets of varying degrees of preferential truthiness….
let’s be a bit more optimistic! There may need to be a FSF/GNU-ACLU political angle to sustain individual privacy, or at least, to reign in “big tech” (in US terms, FSF + GOP for the surprise tag team whaaaaa) and the free market (1.0 defn c.o. A. Smith) says if it is better, it can be made and sold to consumers looking to purchase to beat out the inferior product.
the whole reason why people use the internet is nerds said “hey, check out this, it’s super cool”. It’s education…people may know, and not care, and that is ok. People who do care can help those would care if they only knew. Such is the way of any great idea.
I am not so worried. Metaphysical reasons aside, why can’t a proxy do what needs to be done?
There is 0.0 things that can stop an edge proxy that appears trusted from the proxy on out, and but is doing what the end-user wants from the proxy on in. At some level, network traffic is physical…once data enters the physical realm, it is the end-user’s data.
The irony is…if the information was that important & valuable, it could be printed and purchased by consumers, you know, like…it used to. lol.
As long as there is a person in the picture, there is a layer, and in that layer is the opportunity space for privacy & separation.
Ultimately, political machines need citizen metadata to justify their propaganda budgets; combined with fascism 1.0 as defined by Mussolini - the integration of state + business (corporations are people?) it makes for a world where whatever bad looks, expect it to get worse. It will be up to the next generation to see the bigger picture.
Sadly, the joke’s on the metadata generation, set theory says* elements in a set can’t influence elements outside of the set, so all this data is…useless.
We’re all human, individuals, if we were better than human we wouldn’t need metadata to understand the human condition. Since we are human, even having that metadata isn’t enough, we can’t change the way we are–we simply can’t know what we are blind to. Each one of us is a small orbit of ideas just outside a box that contains pawns and kings at the end of the game. We’ll always just be human, either laid back and chil, content to live on Mount Vernon in our old age, or Ozymandius.
Which is why most dictators resort to murder, since murder is the simplest part of us, but ultimately, that just leads to future generations reading desert pedestals.
*no it doesn’t, not really
open source proxy / DNS blocker don’t (or shouldn’t) have commercial agendas & obligations that commercial OS & Browsers may impose.