Lemmy is absolute garbage on privacy

I mean, yeah, it is. But that’s because privacy is not what it’s trying to do. If anything, privacy is fundamentally antithetical to what it does. Saying “Lemmy is garbage on privacy” is a bit like saying “Microsoft Word is a terrible IDE”.

I had one of these with a new account recently. I forget what platform it was, but it wasn’t anything from Meta. Didn’t need to move your face in any specific way, but it was obviously doing some checks for signs of life so a simple photo wouldn’t work. I found a video of some random dude on YouTube just staring at the camera, and I pointed my camera my computer screen while that played. Difficult, considering they only allowed the front-facing camera to work.

Gonna be honest, there’s no price I’d be willing to pay for YouTube Premium.

I used to pay for YouTube Red. I didn’t cancel it because it was too expensive, I cancelled it in retaliation for all the other shitty things YouTube has been doing. If YouTube wants me to return as a paying member, they need to reinstate the ability for small accounts to monetise their YouTube accounts; they need to stop demonetising/restricting educational content that might be related to war, weapons, sex, or sexuality; and they need to change their copyright policy to make it much, much harder to abuse false claims.

then quickly just dropping the pictures

Could even poke a camera-sized hole in the picture. And disguise it by putting that hole over something similarly-coloured.

But anyway, but of it is really that you can be held in contempt for refusing to unlock with biometrics, if they’ve got an appropriate warrant.

I believe the reason the 5th is usually referenced is that this usually comes up in situations where the 4th is already not relevant. Either because there already is a warrant, or because you’re crossing a border (which IMO seems like an incredibly sketchy excuse and would likely not have been accepted by those who originally penned the 4th amendment, but is at least well-established law at this point).

With the court order, you must give the passcode and/or unlock the phone

The thing is, case law has determined that this is not the case. Passcodes are fairly well protected, from what I’ve heard. You cannot be made to divulge them anywhere in the US, because of the 5th amendment, even with a warrant. Case law is more split on whether biometrics should be offered the same protection.

Though again, this is all my understanding of it having heard it third hand from Americans. Mostly from Americans who themselves are not legal experts, though I think I’ve at least a couple of times heard it directly from lawyers.

Most traffic these days goes over secure channels. Any time the website you’re accessing is HTTPS, they can see that you’re accessing that website, but they can’t see which pages you’re on our read what they say, or what you submit.

The exception is if they get you to install their own certificate to allow them to man-in-the-middle you. Laws in some authoritarian countries already require devices have root certificates that allow the government to spy on everything. And the EU is currently considering the same. Which should be a major concern for any European residents.

Also not a lawyer or a US person, but from listening to American tech media, this has been an issue of some debate for a decade or more now.

The trick lies in their 5th amendment right against self-incrimination. Police cannot require you to give your PIN because that would violate 5th amendment rights. It has been ruled in some parts of America (but the ruling in other parts has been the opposite, IIRC) that you can be forced to give biometric unlocks. In my opinion this is kinda silly and inconsistent. It might be in line with the letter of the law, but it’s certainly not in keeping with its spirit.

Ditto. That gave me quite the fright!

So you know what it is? I just tried both volume keys and all I got was TalkBack (Google’s screen reader).

It’s definitely not as bad for sign up, but it’s still a problem because usually after hitting “submit”, the password manager will detect what you just did and pop up something like “want me to save that?”

Honestly, Mozilla doesn’t even have the resources to maintain a proper WebKit-based version of Firefox on iPadOS, when a large amount of the work is handled for them by Apple. (See, for example, the fact that it still does not support multiple windows, a feature that has been available since 2019.) It would seem a mistake for them to try taking on a much larger load of work when they can’t handle what they’ve already taken on.

I think you’d have a hard time legally saying that they have to provide a service to users when that service is paid for by selling access to users via advertising, even if the user refuses to allow that access. It would probably qualify as “necessary for such performance”.

Having the extra option to pay to remove ads (while I think this price is ridiculously excessive) is a pretty reasonable compromise. Although it also feels kinda icky in the sense that it means you’re essentially turning privacy into a privilege for the wealthy. So I dunno, it’s a tricky issue.

I would feel a lot better about it if the price was anything close to how much they actually make from people’s data. Something like $30 per year according to Facebook themselves, in 2019.

But yeah, the notion that people should be entitled to all these online services completely free of charge while also not allowing it to be paid for through advertising is ludicrous.