YouTube is Google. Asking how to use Google without losing your privacy is asking how to swim without getting wet.

Use PeerTube. You’re asking this question on Lemmy, so surely you’re comfortable with the whole Fediverse thing.

You don’t have a disability. Just saying.

Doing anything online that requires you to break strict anonymity… breaks your anonymity, hence your privacy. The two should be separate subject matters, but the corporate surveillance model ensures that if anything can be traced back to you, your privacy is as good as gone.

You say you do Facebook… There’s your answer.

Funny, I wanna ping 8.8.8.8 every microsecond forever, and make as many machines as possible all around the world do the same…

I’m a bit confused by your question: it sounds like you want to advertise yourself and your work. Why don’t you let AI scrape your information? If I were you, I’d want a chatbot to spit out my details when someone asks it to name the name of someone who does what I do.

I’m violently anti-AI, but this is the one use case I would happily feed it information: to use it as an amplifier to spread public information I want to broadcast as far and as wide as possible.

So basically it’s UserLAnd with accelerated graphics instead of VNC.

I don’t know what it is with Mozilla, they’re both the only saving grace of the open-source browser world and the most stupid internet company at the same time. And they’ve been both for decades, with a budget that could have allowed them to be and to do so much more…

Privacy used to be priceless. It still is for my generation. I work my ass off to maintain my privacy, which is harder and harder in this increasingly dystopian world, and I lose out on more and more services and conveniences everybody else enjoys as a result. But privacy is non-negociable for many people my age.

For younger folks, sadly they were born in the dystopia - or an early version of it - and they never lost the privacy they never had. For a lot of younger folks, not enjoying true privacy is their normal. Many of them are waking up to the obscenety of what Big Data does to all of us, but of course it’s harder to wake up than to resist someone trying to put you to sleep.

And finally, the assault on privacy is so relentless and comes from actors with so much more clout and resources that many simply give up, because it’s just too much. I’m one of those who refuse to drive and take the bus because cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance. But most people are not willing to accept that level of loss of quality of life and it’s fully understandable.

I rock a Fairphone4 running CalyxOS. Apart from the hardware switches on the Purism phone, I don’t quite see what I’m missing out on privacy-wise.

The camera does not take influencer quality photos

That’s actually a selling feature.

I gave $20 to the friendly wino who lives in the dumpster down my street. He’s reported a income growth of 1000% for today.

In other news, CNN says the best news source is CNN.

You’re a rude patronizing prick, that’s for damn sure.

And boomer is telling you it was mainstream. Very much so. The only reason it wasn’t as developed as it is today is because computing wasn’t as developed as it is today.

open source wasn’t really a thing in the 90s and early 2000s

Truly written as someone who wasn’t alive back then and just makes stuff up.

Open-source - which was called free software back then - was very much alive and totally a thing since forever, and especially in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I learned all I know with free software in the 80s. Linux came out in 91 and was a pure product of open source: Minix - the forerunner of Linux - was a fully open-source OS created in 87, and GNU had been around since 83.

Please read up on things you don’t know before posting nonsense.

Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs?

Ironically, that now includes you 🙂

What’s privacy-focused ChatGPT? Is it like diet butter?

Hint: if it doesn’t run on your machine, it’s collecting monetizable data.

Privacy isn’t a cutesy. It’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, just like not doing stupid shit when you’re a teenager, you get to find out how important privacy is years later when the stupid shit you did years before comes back to haunt you and it’s too late.

The problem of course is that Big Data has made it exceedingly difficult and painful to maintain your privacy. Because of course the last thing they want is for you to have any. It hurts their bottom line.

Because of the corporate surveillance collective, in 2024, if you truly want to maintain your privacy, your life becomes significantly crappier than if you didn’t bother. But that doesn’t mean privacy isn’t as important today as it’s ever been.

Ain’t you glad you gave Reddit content for free and they’re reselling if for millions?

I think privacy and social media are inherently at odds

It doesn’t have to be.

I’ve spent decades online on Usenet, IRC, Slashdot and elsewhere before modern social media, and today on (some) social media sites, and nobody knows who am I because I’ve always been super-careful to keep my online personae and my real identity totally separate. It takes a bit of paranoia, but it’s possible to have an online footprint that’s watertight and completely divorced from real-life.

I have many, many online identities and none of them tie back to the real me. But Big Tech sure is aggressively trying to deanonymize me, and it takes a lot more care and effort than it used to to make sure that they never do.