that implies you can use crypto without being identified at any step of the way?
…no? It just means that they don’t necessarily know every little detail about you before you start using their service. What comes afterwards is up to whoever wants to track you. Most crypto currencies are pseudo anonymous at best.

I was going to say why is this news now? This was a big thing at the end of 2023. Like they even mentioend it in the article.
The practice first came to light in 2023 when Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice

There is no meaningful data for the OS to capture if it used as a display for externally connected devices.
Except that some of these devices are periodically “screenshotting” the screen and harvesting data from that.
Pair that with automatically connecting to open wifi networks and nothing is truly safe.

The surveillance is mostly done on the inside of the car, not the outside. Parking sensors don’t really provide useful data for them to harvest, but that is why they cost so much to replace. If you don’t care about parking sensors you can just replace your bumper without them, the car doesn’t really care after you tell it “you didn’t ship with parking sensors”.

Is this a school issued computer or your own on their network? Never assume you have any privacy on a computer that isn’t your own. Even if you do get a VPN on there they probably have software on the laptop to monitor your actual screen which is far more privacy invasive than seeing that you accessed lemmy 500 times in an hour.
My solution? Just not care.
I do things that help my privacy, but don’t make my life harder. When investing in a new product privacy is one of the things I try to attain, but if option A works perfectly for me, but has some questionable things in their TOS, and option B just straight up doesn’t work but is great for privacy then I’m going to go with option 1 10/10 times.
My work uses tailscale to get to work things. and I just want a VPN to get into my network at home. Maybe every once in a while connect to something like Mulvad. All 3 distinct programs that have virtually no idea about each other.
With OpenVPN just add as many taps as you need. With wire guard it doesnt way to play nicely with any other Wireguard VPNs running.