*logs on the server of app creator.

Yes. For me reasons of VPN on Android (even with Google) are following:

1. Most of greedy apps are trying to collect info about your location. Because in most of the cases you will restrict direct access to the location data, apps will try to do it through IP. VPN resolve this problem at all.
2. A lot of greedy apps or websites are trying to do fingerprinting to identity your logs. While it is possible in theory to do fingerprinting by fuzzy matching all-logs against all-logs, the task is so computationally heavy that the only way is to try to do fuzzy-matching (aka fingerprinting) within the locations. VPN allows you to hide your location.

Of course one may say that VPN does not provide a 100% protections from fingerprinting, I think there should be applied the same approach like in cyber security: the goal is not to protect yourself by 100% but to make attack so expensive that it does not make sense. VPN makes fingerprinting so hard that noone will really do it until you are a journalist, intelligence officer or something like this.

Does anyone know a good alternative for Hypatia?

As I understood, the main concern is that such a hyper fast eye gaze is similar to the psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched.

Our finding that sensory processing of gaze direction is facilitated by the act of being watched is consistent with evidence suggesting top-down cognition can influence the earliest stages of gaze processing (Teufel et al. 2009). Also, eye-tracking studies indicate that a social presence can significantly alter where attention is allocated (Risko and Kingstone 2011, Nasiopoulos et al. 2015). In light of our findings, an enhanced and specific allocation of attentional resources towards self-relevant social information seems plausible. Importantly, our results rule out that being watched leads to a non-specific attentional boost, as non-face stimuli did not benefit from this effect; instead, our results support the idea that this is a specific effect directed towards face information. This is consistent with clinical observations of social-specific attentional biases and a hyper-sensitivity to eye gaze in mental health conditions like psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched (Rosse et al. 1994, Hooker and Park 2005, Corlett et al. 2009, Tso et al. 2012, Langer and Rodebaugh 2013, Chen et al. 2017, Langdon et al. 2017, Stuke et al. 2021). Future investigations should explore in detail the effects of surveillance and the sense of privacy on public mental health, as these can have profound social implications (Aboujaoude 2019).

For me an AI topic is the hottest

I would refer to the recent FTC questions to “algorithmic pricing practices”. Long story short it was about some companies are using browser data, accounts data, etc. for “smart” pricing. Your brother may not care about someone watching him but I don’t think he wants to pay for the same goods more than others.

It is an interesting question… It seems to me I compared it and I chose Island. But I cannot remember why :D

UPD. I chose Island/Insular only because it is updated more frequently:

• The latest release of Insular was at May 20, 2024 and frequency is ~ a release per two months
• The latest release of Shelter (on F-Droid) was at Dec 12, 2023 and frequency is ~ a release per year

Island work without root. It is based on a “work profile” feature of android devvices. It is not a complete privacy, but at least it allows to separate google apps from other apps.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.oasisfeng.island.fdroid

A nice way to understand how much your data costs

I’m starting to use more cash for daily spendings. The rise of surveillance pricing is terrible, better to hide qt least some of information from my bank.

Privacy is a spectrum, not dichotomy. It is enough, imo, to reduce the amount of usage of google/amazon services significantly instead of blocking it.

That is what I need! Unfortunately, it is for US only… Is there, maybe, something similar in European region?

Unfortunately there are a very small amount of places when I can pay with crypto… I do not want to face also questions from AML officers. I’m not a journalist in the dangerous country or political activist, so Monero looks like an overhead for me.

It is based on files in org format. But it is not related anyhow to org-agenda and planning. It is an only obsidian-like note-raking system with web+mobile+desktop and some blogging capabilities (public/private notes, etc.)

OrgNote. The project is still quite raw but the developer works hard and the overall idea and philosophy behind the project is perfect for me. Fully compatible with emacs org-roam, most probably compatible with logseq. There is a “fully managed” free version with PGP support or an option for a self-hosted server.

Project: https://github.com/Artawower/orgnote Manifesto: https://github.com/Artawower/orgnote/wiki#manifesto

It is always a tradeoff. It could be cool to see some analytics of visits, but I’m not ready to go self hosted for that. My blog is just a hobby, not a work, no monetization, etc.

Automatic AI-powered screen lock for when your phone is snatched. Theft Detection Lock is a powerful new feature that uses Google AI to sense if someone snatches your phone from your hand and tries to run, bike or drive away.

Does it mean, that “Google AI” will running 24/7 in background, measuring how I use my phone, with an access to accelerometers data and location data?

That is absolutely crazy. I wish the strength to go through that for Alexey Pertsev!

This one? https://umami.is/

Interesting, thanks! I didn’t think about it. But for a personal blog (without any kind of monetization) it is not an option, unfortunately, due to hosting/infra prices 😞

Organic Maps is nice, but working with GPX files is still very terrible. It has no direct way to import GPX files created on desktop, you can only open them from the disk, and they will look very strange, not like routes but like a bookmark. But as I see, Magic Earth has even worse capabilities for GPX.