Are you assuming that Google, which, as far as I’m aware, is an international company providing service to a multilingual userbase, has less than 1% non-native English speaking users?

I mean, I don’t care much how Google advertises itself, even companies I do like sometimes make an unlucky promotion and that’s fine, but I do find the arguments in this comment thread to make some wild assumptions.

That just expands the question: do they not know about other countries?

Many of us have certain connotations with google, and while we know the game in our native language, it’s not the first thing we think about when thinking “Google says: I spy”.

PIA being owned by the same scammy company as ExpressVPN does not necessarily mean that it itself also is bad, but one should keep an open eye on them.

Like I said, I haven’t found any evidence that ExpressVPN sells their customer data, even though it might be likely.

Thank you very much, we should always strive to back up claims with relevant links and data, no matter if it’s common sense or how trivial it might seem.

While the quote and linked paper give a good picture of the VPNs and their controversies, such as ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, and PIA being under ownership of a less-than-trustworthy company which also happens to be specialized in malware and surveillance, I did not find anything that directly supported @spudwart@spudwart.com’s claim.

The only controversy (except questionable ownership) I could find in the article was a few paragraphs lower regarding the Andrey Karlov assassination, where ExpressVPN denied the existence of logs but investigators somehow still managed to extract a serial number of a computer(?) after a datacenter raid. Not sure if I got that right, but it would fit the established profile from this comment chain:

ExpressVPN, on the other hand, told investigators it did not have any logs or customer data on a server in Turkey, which was raided by Turkish authorities, according to Hurriyet Daily News. According to the site, authorities said the server was used to hide details regarding an assassination of a Russian ambassador. ExpressVPN released a statement about the incident.

It’s almost midnight here, so please correct me if I missed something.

Oh, and nice paper, has a good, natural flow and appears to keep technical jargon to a level where anyone should be able to draw well informed conclusions.

Thank you for the heads-up. Do you have any articles about this?

Expressvpn is about 10$ a month, so 5$ would definitely be an improvement.

Dunno about Bluetooth, but isn’t Expressvpn pushing their new password manager? I imagine it’s a separate app, but if not, then it would make sense to have camera to read 2FA QR-codes.

Edit: from their site:

Keys comes included in any ExpressVPN subscription and is built right in to our apps for iOS and Android.

Yup, that’s got to be the camera. Still not sure about the Bluetooth though.

It was a message along the lines of “Your friend Ekky has started using Telegram, say hello to them”.

Not sure if it was a notification or a message, but that was very uncanny and definitely felt scammy and abusive. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an app behave this way, though usually the app asks first.

Wait what? I thought Telegram pretty much was Discord but for people who prefer phones over computers.

Wasn’t there also a controversy where some people believed that telegram was private and secure, but that only was for a very limited subset of their features?

Disclaimer: I’ve only ever installed telegram once for one single person, but promptly removed it afterward for sending out messages to some of my contacts on its own, so I have no clue how it actually works. Feel free to correct or educate me.

Have you tried enabling the “annoyance” filters of ublock? A lot of stuff isn’t activated by default.

Please don’t hang me up on this, but I’m pretty sure that “I don’t care about cookies” defaults to accepting some/all cookies, while ublock blocks them.

Both get rid of the banners, but if you also want to get rid of the cookies themselves, then ublock might be better.

Edit: Or rather ublock blocks the banner, which means that the site can’t legally put a cookie on your PC.

Shut down the computer and disconnect it from the internet, if you haven’t already done so.

With another computer (or your phone) download Spybot (i think it’s still considered one of the best free tools out there) and move it to your pc, let it run its scan, and check the results.

Oh, and like @Fazoo@lemmy.ml stated, this isn’t foolproof, so if you want to be really sure, then follow their advice instead.

Can’t say how this “hacker” got you with the provided information, but if he can put a file on your desktop, then he can likely see your files too. It wouldn’t happen to be one of your friends pulling a fast one on you?

Isn’t Monero “some crypto bullshit”? Or is there a privacy related tool with the same name that I’m not aware of?

Well, then it’s great that you decided to add these missing points in your comment!

I had a funny experience not too long ago. Not sure what to make of it, and it might have been a freak coincidence.

A few friends and I were talking on discord, with one friend streaming his Steam discovery queue, not sure what game to play next. At some point we started talking about 2-D platformers, and after some time one of us pointed out how it seemed that we were seeing more platformens than before. One thing led to another, and we started screwing around talking about NSFW content. About 3-5 recommendations later, that one friend started getting porn game recommendations, and not long after about half of the games recommended were 18+ and kinda stayed that way.

Obviously correlation does not prove causation, and it might have been a myriad of reasons such as him playing a trick on us, but I might be interested in knowing what Discord REALLY does with all this data it has access to.

On your VPN, choose a location within your country. There is little sense in choosing another country, if you want the website to think you are in your own country.

Of course this assumes, that your VPN has multiple exit nodes.

I second this. Using it with Pcloud. Syncs just fine, and even if it does not fully sync from one computer, I haven’t had it corrupt while using the files.