Used Pixel 6, 6 Pro, 7 and 7 Pro can be found for reasonable prices these days. One of those in good condition would be a better buy because you’ll still get security patches for a while. Last time I looked, the third party OSs for Pixel phones only supported them for as long as Google did.

Ecosia was affected too. It’s Bing with trees.

What are the main problems of Matrix? I have searched around for this but not found anything concrete. I use Element with E2EE and haven’t had any real problems with it.

Slightly off topic, but it turns out Android has a different VPN vulnerability:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/dns-traffic-can-leak-outside-the-vpn-tunnel-on-android

Even if the phone doesn’t know who you are, the shop that sold you the phone or the SIM, or the credit card company you paid with, can know who you are. So you’d have to use cash. Even without these, your movements can be tracked through a burner phone and informed guesses made about who you are (e.g. if the phone has been at your home or with your friends).

Turning off your phone doesn’t necessarily protect you from tracking either:

https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-powered-off-api-pixel-9-track-switched-off-3425472/

Easiest, as others say, just not to carry a phone.

For a distro that just works, Linux Mint.

I discovered that it doesn’t work if the baby’s other parent is an avid Facebook user.

23andme already got hacked and 7 million people’s private data was compromised:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/05/23andme-hack-data-breach

The problem with YouTube is that even if you manage to block ads, you find most of the videos are ads too.

76 percent of cybersecurity experts use ad blockers.

I’m a bit worried about that other 24%. How expert are they if they don’t recognize the risk?

Dunno, but it needs more of the hammer treatment.

And spying is privacy.

It’s still Microsoft. Here’s what they say about privacy anyway:

• Individual

• Business

That would mean taking a stance on an issue, which might alienate some voters somewhere.

Climate change only affects westerners? Things are going badly for the world.

Either this hasn’t launched yet or it’s for the USA only, since the links just take me to the regular Mozilla Monitor service.

No Vivaldi either.

You have to blink a key exchange first and then do your mental encryptions. It keeps your brain and eyelids strong.

If they’re honest then Vivaldi really sounds pretty good for privacy:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

But they’d certainly win a lot more trust if they went open source.

I use both Firefox and Chrome-based browsers and I haven’t come across any major differences in functionality. What are all these things Chrome can do that Firefox can’t?

You’re the kind of user software developers dread.

Choose a Firefox-based browser instead for open source.

Is “favorite” the one you use or the one you know you should use?

On Lemmy any comment you post gets federated out to other servers, so it’s available to anyone who sets up a server. So by design it is not possible to control who gets to see or archive your comments. I could set up a server to permanently archive every comment it sees, and if your server sends me your comment it goes into my archive. Probably people are already doing this for data mining. It’s not clear that you could bolt some kind of privacy control on to this architecture, which is fundamentally designed for sharing.

Your location can still be triangulated from cell towers. But maybe fewer companies have access to that info.

I think they recommended Only Office, not Open Office.

My favourites are the ones that let you set a 35-character password and, presumably, happily hash it and store it in the database, but then provide a login screen that requires passwords to be 20 characters or less.

Microsoft Pluton is a kind of TPM with additional features:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/pluton/microsoft-pluton-security-processor

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2020/11/17/meet-the-microsoft-pluton-processor-the-security-chip-designed-for-the-future-of-windows-pcs/

Funnily enough, they don’t advertise preventing users from opening unapproved media files as a feature. So that could either mean they’re sneaking it in, or that the image is not genuine.

“When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithm,” Haley said during an interview with Fox News Tuesday. “Let us see why they’re pushing what they’re pushing.”

When they deliver a list of network nodes, interconnections and weights, I’m not sure it will answer her question.

It misunderstood your question.

Something about the way YouTube comments are ordered makes each thread degenerate into nonsense after a while, if it wasn’t nonsense to begin with.

I can think of a third option. Send me $20 and I’ll disclose the secret.

It wouldn’t be such a problem if they at least offered an API for connecting to the device for third-party apps. But everything is locked down to guarantee obsolescence on software timelines even if the hardware lasts.

Yes, that’s true. Recently though, the ones responsible have been Tories. But I agree. There’s a general tendency in the governing culture of the UK to override basic rights in the name of expediency or convenience for the government.

Who gets to define what the country’s values are? Who defines which activities undermine them and its institutions? You could plausibly argue that the present Conservative government is working hard to undermine the country’s values and institutions. You could argue that introducing this very bill is an attempt to undermine the country’s values and institutions.

don’t take too kindly to hundreds of thousands of Muslim terrorists, and Islamic terrorist supporters marching through their streets

Hundreds of thousands of terrorists marched through the streets? Lol.

“Better than the US” is a bit too unspecific to judge. If you mean for privacy, the UK is certainly on the bad end of things.

Tories.

It’s my preferred distro these days but I don’t see it as being particularly stronger than any other distro for privacy. It depends how you use it. (That said, I’d trust it over Ubuntu just because of Canonical’s corporate culture.)

If I were looking for a seriously private OS I’d probably turn to Tails, Whonix or Qubes (which includes Whonix).

Is “vood” a typo for “good” or a term I don’t know?