That explains it, then. Here it costs around 11 US cents per message. So if you are messaging a lot, they will add up at the end of the billing period.

I could not wait to end university, so that I can stop using big tech products. Unfortunately people only use products they are familiar with. If they are always on facebook, they use that for groups. Good luck finding a local community uses anything but facebook groups.

Edit: at university, many pieces of info reaches you informally. If you are not talking to classmates, you might miss important news as well.

Don’t you get charged for every SMS message? Here in Europe I’m grumpy everytime I need to send an SMS, because I’m being charged for something that is completely free through the internet. Not to mention that due to our local characters, an SMS is only 70 chars long.

Rather an ad platform. You can follow perfect influencers selling you sh.t they get a load of money for.

Can you create an account with a burner email? When I tried it about a year ago, plus some legitimate addresses, it never worked or it straight asked for a phone number. I gave them a temp number, received a code, it ‘ran into an unexpected error’.

It annoys me as well and I rather not visit any website that refuses my visit because of my adblocker. However, ads work with your unconscious and unfortunately, they work on everyone, that’s why the best is to avoid them.

I mostly agree with you and frankly it is enough to have one friend who uploads their contacts to big tech firms with yours included and maybe tags you here and there and you are already uploading data without your consent.

Although what I see recently is that facebook fails to recommend anything interesting to me. I had to keep my account, but deleted everything from the day of my registration and haven’t uploaded a single thing for years.

I highly doubt that this will work in my case, as my wife only watches romcoms, but I’ll give it a try.

My wife sends me products she finds interesting and they all contain the facebook tracker at the end. It is a scientific fact that women are better consumers, hence ads are mostly created for them. My wife hates ads while watching videos, but taps on them during scrolling all the time. Fortunately I haven’t been asked to get her off pi-hole. It is tricky with ads, as you think that they are offering a solution for something, but in many cases they are establishing a desire you did not have before.

There’s also navidrome, if you only want to stream music.

I wish I could buy a second hand pixel phone anywhere here. (Central EU) They might be popular in the US, maybe a couple of them are sold in western Europe, but in this region they are imppssible to find.

On my phone e os came with microG preinstalled. Banking apps work. The only thing not working is payment with apps that want to use gpay. (Udemy, e-scooter renting) I could install google wallet, but I don’twantt any google app on my phone.