Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:

Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.

The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

I shit you not. This used to be a thing.

Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.

If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.

Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.

To evade taxes of course.

Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?

It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?

It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.

I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.

I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.

But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.

Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.

Someone is making money off of the surveillance and that someone knows someone else in the board of education. That’s why it exists. It has nothing to do with sudent safety.

Sure it is. There’s a button labeled “Manage exceptions” that does exactly that.

It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.

For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂

tl;dr: your money does not go to Google and the ppl you get it from would have purchased it anyway. The device just ends up in your hands instead of the land fill or being recycled

It all depends on how you look at it. You choose to see it as your money saving an object from the landfill, and I choose to follow the trail of my money going all the way to Google’s pocket ultimately.

But those two outlooks are not incompatible: they both hold true. You just choose to disregard the latter while I can’t get past it.

Really?

Say I buy a pack of gum at the supermarket. The supermarket got my $2. Then I resell the pack of gum to my neighbor for $1.50. Who do you think has my neighbor’s $1.50 in his pocket? Me or the supermarket?

Hint: it’s not me. I’m still down $0.50 from the moment before I bought the pack of gum. And even if I had sold it to my neighbor full price because it’s new and unopened, it’d like I never bought it in the first place and my neighbor did.

Nobody talked about Calyx

I did, and you replied to me 🙂

if you wanted to avoid anything primarily made by Google you’d have a Linux phone

That’s true.

Unfortunately that’s not possible: I live in a country that delegates secure authentication to banks, and banks only supply 2FA apps that work in Android or iOS. If I had a Linux phone, I’d still need another phone with Android just for the purpose of banking, interacting with social services, logging in my work hours, getting notifications from the post office…

That’s the misery of Android: Google is such a pervasive monopoly that even if you want a fully deGoogled OS, the basis of it has to be 95% made by Google anyway because the rest of society goes along and reinforces their monopoly. And at some point, even someone like me has to make compromises to simply live normally.

I would gladly buy a Linux phone and I’d even put up with their quirks (I tried one once so I know they’re not as polished an experience as Android). But I am also a practocal man and it’s just not an option.

I think GrapheneOS should come with a no-compromise-security branch that only supports Google Pixel phones and an “ordinary security” branch that supports a wide variety of less-secure but non-Google hardware for people who can’t stomach the idea of buying a Google phone.

GrapheneOS would reach a much wider audience, and not everybody needs perfect security. I for instance am a low-value target and I have no need for GrapheneOS-level security.

If you buy second-hand, you give money to Google.

Someone bought the phone the first time and gave their money to Google, and you reimbursed part of that money to that buyer. In the end, Google gets your money. Maybe not full brand-new retail price, but what you paid for your second-hand phone goes indirectly into Google’s coffers.

Buying anything Google, second-hand or not, supports Google’s business. Given the choice, I refuse to support Google in any way, shape or form.

Example Fairphone, which has horrible update schedules

Fairphone’s release schedule and Calix’ release schedules are two different things. CalyxOS is updated less often than GrapheneOS for sure, but it’s updated a lot more often than Fairphone OS.

I am aware of the shortcomings of my choice.

But my priority is to not give a cent to Google: what am I supposed to do then?

I argue that GrapheneOS gives Pixel phones more value, thereby supporting Google. That is not great.

And it still doesn’t support anything that isn’t a Pixel phone.

I respect GrapheneOS very much. But the fact that you need a Google phone to install a deGoogled Android ROM is one contradiction I just can’t get past. I hate Google and I’m never going to buy their hardware and give them money for the privilege of escaping the Google corporate surveillance.

I’m aware of the technical reason why GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones, but that irony is just too rich for me. So I use CalyxOS on a very much non-Google FairPhone4, and while it’s formally slightly less secure than GrapheneOS, at least Google got none of my money and that’s a lot more important than security to me.

Pray tell, what possible benefit can Lemmy communities gain from Facebook users?

You do realize most people who joined the Fediverse did so because Facebook and the likes are a steaming pile of shit, right?

What possible benefit is there to the pile of shit coming to splatter itself here uninvited?

It’s not just a matter of blocking Threads users.

Facebook is coming on here to slurp up data I don’t want them to have, and enriching their own Threads ecosystem with Fediverse content they haven’t lifted a finger to create.

Not to mention, when Threads users are able to fully interact in the Fediverse, do you really want that particular bunch to create noise in your communities? I don’t. There’s a reason why I avoid Facebook in all its forms.