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Cake day: Aug 30, 2023

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Yup. I was driving in the car with a few people for work. We were talking about a music video a couple of us had worked on, and we were explaining who daddy yankee/bad bunny was, and we mentioned daddy yankee did the song “gasolina.”

We live in the US, the conversation was in English, but fuck if “estacion de gasolina” didn’t show up on our route.



Well, we already experience that psychological torture. After 2002/2003, and then especially after 2012, this concept has already burdened our everyday behavior. Browsing behavior, phone calls, texts, emails…every single way we communicate, even face to face meetings with phones in our pockets are open to surveillance. And it’s been shown that it’s been used. Over a decade ago, thanks to Snowden. Now? Things have surely gotten worse and I would bet the farm on behavior very much having changed due these facts.



I…responded to your comment.

While i agree with the sentiment thats a ridiculous comparison. Thinking you have nothing to hide from the government is not the same as thinking you have nothing to hide from random entities on the internet. You already give the government all of that stuff when you literally just exist. Go get a social security card or a drivers license. Absolutely asinine to try to compare the two.

And I said “increasingly the entities are the problem.” And you challenged that. And continued to. Hence where this conversation ended up.


In the privacy community, you’re confused as to how big tech is violating your privacy?

Fuckin Forbes knows it. Establishment democrats know it. But you don’t?

Your cars are spying on you. How is this news?

lol this is literally the next article linked in my feed after I submitted this comment. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/30/texas-meta-facebook-biometric-data-settlement/


…google, Microsoft, Facebook…need I go on?

In the early 2000s, the issue was primarily the government. Patriot act made sure of that. And yeah, it’s still an issue with regards to the amount and types of data they’re storing and who the government is currently comprised of, but in 2024, the much larger privacy issue is from private data holdings. All those random fuckin apps you have, every cell phone carrier, every goddamn car now. Your data is the product now. And capitalism is the problem.


But increasingly, the data you need to care about not being private isn’t from the govt. airs from those random entities. And their security is godawful.


I use aura, but mostly for credit safety and ease of access to freeze/unfreeze my credit report. Got it after the experian hack ordeal. They have a ton of other services, including a data mining record deletion service and a call monitoring service. I would recommend it for pretty much everything I’ve listed. It’s made my life a lot easier, put my mind at ease. I also work a job where my personal info gets put in a lot of hands I basically have no choice but to trust. So this was kind of a necessity for me. Look into aura’s cheapest plan, see if it includes the data mining removal stuff. The extra layer of security for me is worth it, no question, but the added benefits of this, for example, and the spam call blocking just seals the deal in my opinion.


Exactly. It shouldn’t be “what is privacy worth,” but more like what should you get in return for consenting to volunteer your privacy? Because right now the system is backwards. We are expected to give up privacy, are expected to have none. And we spend money and time to try to get it back with almost no guarantees.


But the point is there’s always been a way to avoid ads, even while browsing sites with ads and browsing YT. Personally, if that ability entirely disappears, i hate ads, ad-voice, and the concept of advertising so much that I will stop and close a whole tab if an ad plays. I’m in the minority though. Because, I think you’re right, a lot of people just don’t even think about it and mindlessly consume. I can’t. When Reddit fucked us and showed us our opinions and feelings didn’t matter, I left. I will do the same to YT.


Apple has been trying to be the next advertising giant. They’ve been growing their advertising revenue and plan on doubling it this year. They went from $4b ad revenue to $7.5 2022/2023. And if you remember correctly, that was right when you started seeing all their “apple cares about your privacy!” ads and got into it with Facebook. They’re not out here to protect our privacy. They’re trying to take the advertising revenue from the other ad giants and corner that market for themselves.

Think about it. They have gotten people locked into their OS/ecosystem. They basically hold the advertising golden ticket. They’re not here to make your digital life more private. They’re here to get your data for themselves, locking out the competition. They aim to bring more people into the gate and shut it behind them while extracting all of our advertising milk with their more advanced data udder sucking machine. The pasture looks nice, but when those gates close, the skies darken and the farmer corners you with that look in his eye.

I don’t know where that metaphor came from. But that’s how I see it in my head. The moo cow with the pretty eyelashes and the shiny bell around her neck is pulled into a false sense of security by the smiling farmer at the gate, but that shit turns dark real quick when she’s locked in.


I gotta say, I’ve been anti-social media since its inception. People used to bug me about not being on instagram or Facebook. But…when I was traveling I just kept in contact via email or via text with the people I actually wanted to stay in contact with. I don’t think I’ve ever really noticed a huge hassle.



Um. I dunno what to tell you. I went through two android phones when I started the job. This was back when the screens were only really big. So maybe that was contributing more. But I couldn’t make it though half of the day before both android phones were dying. I can tell you as a person who exclusively used android phones since I had a smart phone (with one, maybe two exceptions I got as hand-me-downs), I’ve never felt any sort of “social pressure” to switch to an iPhone. This is an entirely new concept, because smart phones came out the year I graduated high school, pretty much. And I had never experienced it. Ever.

So are you sure this is a real thing? Not just one of those internet things that people swear they heard someone else say they knew someone who experienced it? Because I’ve been there for pretty much the whole thing. But maybe I aged out of that kind of stupid status shit and this only happens to kids in high school. Because I truly can’t imagine it happening anywhere else. Though I’ve never worked in an office setting, adults acting like clique-y it’s schoolers seem to flock to office spaces, so maybe that’s another reason why I’ve never had this happen to me.

Either way, don’t tell me why I got an iPhone. Who tf are you


I’m no fan of apple as a company, but I used android phones for a long time. Mostly because I didn’t want to jump on the apple train. But once I changed jobs and needed to be on my phone a lot more often, I switched to apple for the battery life. I was stuck carrying around an external battery with my android phones. Also, the longevity of the hardware. I’m still on an old iPhone and it still mostly looks and still operates as if it were a more current gen. I always buy used, and I would go through an android phone every year to two years or so. I changed to an apple phone about four years ago and I still have the same one.

I get it, the weird thing I only recently learned about iMessage being some status symbol for teenagers or whatever? That’s fuckin dumb. But there are reasons beyond stupid ones to use apple stuff. Fuck the company, though. I mean…fuck Samsung. And google. Fuck pretty much all companies. But brand loyalty for anything other than fitting your requirements in the product is weird.


Oh I misunderstood your comment. I thought you said in your American high school or some such…maybe I just skimmed your comment lol


You never learned about east/west Germany? Post-war reconstruction? The Berlin Wall? German reunification? Etc?



That’s…what the article is about. The pay or consent trend is starting in Europe because of EU laws that forced companies to give people an option to opt out of tracking. Now the EU is looking at another way to force tech companies to offer a realistic option for avoiding tracking.

It kinda seems like you didn’t read the article at all.


I have aura for credit and data privacy stuff. My brother actually got it, I’m just a hanger on in his family plan, but I recently learned they do this data broker deletion automatically. I just started using their spam call blocker, which at first seemed like garbage, but then after it really started working properly, has been great. I just get a notification instead of my phone actually ringing, and it’s a silent notification.

My brother is in IT, so I’m just trusting that he’s done the legwork, which he always seems to do. He warned us about the Lastpass breach before I learned about it in the news. Now I use bitwarden for password stuff.

I’ve been wanting to get serious about my privacy, I’ve always been overly conscious about it, avoiding social media, trying to make my phone as safe as possible, reading privacy policies and reversing course on apps I wanted to use when their shit sucks…i want to get into more technical…hosting whatever…tech-mumbo-jumbo keeps my home network safe—is that self-hosting? Custom firmware…whatever. I’m not super technically proficient, but whenever asked I choose the most strict settings and go into all settings I can find to lock down my shit. To the point that it constantly breaks so many functionalities that I’ve just learned to live without lol


Wow, how incredibly annoying. They discuss “the proper way” to protect your privacy throughout the entire article, clearly making it known that the researchers had the process and we’re seeing if people could figure it out and then…they don’t share it.


They have a fair amount of ads in nyc.


This comment screams “why worry if you have nothing to hide?”

I mean, I’m sure that wasn’t your intention, but that’s the sense I got from it. I think they were trying to find out from someone more knowledgeable on the subject why a privacy-centered cell company, selling a phone that doesn’t track you with bloatware, and the extra layer of software, as mentioned above, isn’t standard.

I mean, I think the answer is money and pressure from regulators. Any time a privacy issue comes up, they start handwringing about “a safe haven for terrorists” and shit.

Also, while more people are becoming concerned with their privacy, it’s met with a lack of technical knowledge from most people. The question definitely hints at a lack of technical knowledge, but most people don’t possess that that aren’t in IT/tech themselves. I think that’s completely understandable.



So obscene, right! Put some pants over those things. Gross.


Piped has always been hard to play on any of my devices. It’s really hit or miss, but fails way more often than it succeeds.


There are already talks of military use, reading all your texts, eliminating jobs with no plan to support those who lost them, AI driven cars killing people, taking all creative work from humans and leaving the menial tasks…that’s nowhere near a complete list and it’s already dystopian.

The thing is, when private companies are the ones that hold the tech and monetize it, shit is going to get dystopian before you can say “artichoke.” Capitalism is dystopian. Late stage capitalism even more so. And we are fast approaching a new frontier in which these same evil tech companies will wield this unbelievable power. I get it. There are good uses. But when the end goal is profit, our best interest comes second, if not last.


NOW privacy is a lie, but I don’t think the concept of privacy is a myth. On every single privacy policy, the first line is “your privacy is important to us.” But scroll down and actually read the relevant paragraphs and you’ll see your privacy is the least of their concerns.

You’re right, people on the whole generally don’t give a shit about their privacy. Look at the Snowden revelations. The country kinda went, “…eh…” and shrugged their shoulders. But there are plenty of us who wish that weren’t the case and do our best to stay private now. We are all complicit in handing over all of our most private data. Because we buy things and just click on the “accept” button.

But it didn’t have to be this way. Because privacy can exist. And did exist. But we signed it all away for cheaper tech and more “convenient” functionality.