Let’s be honest, opt in telemetry features will collect so little data they might es well not exist.

Considering that ot is supposed to reduce user tracking by tracking ads directly, it’s a net gain for everyone.

Or have a public social media account and a ‘business’ one I use to share my own music or something? My dual-boxing MMO accounts?

Wanna bet that you are already breaking TOS with both of these things? And I don’t mean SimpleLogins TOS, but the one of the social media platform and MMO. Most big platforms only allow one account per user, no matter how the account is used. Sometimes you can create a business account, but that’s still linked to your private one. Same goes for pretty much any online game, you are limited to one account per person.

I don’t think that there is any sense behind these limitations, but simplelogin isn’t concerned about that, they only care about the legality of your actions and limit their service accordingly.

Technically yes, but the Google and Googlegetmanager scripts are used in so many cases that you want to keep them active permanently.

Considering that most VPN adresses are linked to suspicious, if not outright illegal, activity, its quite reasonable to assume that they end up on automatic block lists.

Proton pretty much always complies with government access requests, and they never claimed otherwise. They, however, don’t have access to the content of your emails due to their encryption, meaning the data they give to governments is restricted to what you give them. They can at most give out your name, payment information, and backup mail if you voluntarily gave that info to them.

It was a bit of a hyperbole, I have no idea about the exact amount.

Let’s say you charge your 2000mAh battery every day and your PSU is 10% more efficient than your charger (the difference is most likely not even this big).

2Ah × 5V x 356d= 3.56kwh

3.56kwh × 0.1 = 356Wh

356Wh would be the difference per year, that’s about 12ct per year.

Now estimating the power usage for fediverse messages is very hard to do since it depends on a lot of different factors (your device, cellular or WiFi data, amount of hops needed to reach you, general state of your nearby network, your instances infrastructure).

The only even remotely similar thing I could find was emails with pictures producing about 20-40g CO2, which only slightly increases with more recipients, and Reddit usage comes at about 2.5g per minute. Comparing these two numbers just shows that all estimates done are pretty much useless for us since we have no idea how they are done.

But if we go with a low estimate of 0.1g (slightly above SMS and somewhere around spammail level) per user seeing it and a few hundred to a thousand users seeing this even if they just scroll past, we reach the CO2 equivalent of 1kWh pretty fast without even talking about long term storage and future indexing. Not to mention that comments produce something too since they need to be federated, albeit not so much as the post itself.

So while 10 years was a bit much, 2-3 years would be very much in the realm of possibilities, but no one knows or can even properly estimate the actual numbers.

Not to discourage such thoughts in the future, but your single post asking here probably used up more electricity than what you would save over the course of the next ten years.

Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

It’s hard to say what really is the better option. You can’t completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.

There is nothing that Valve could change about this with the current way games are licensed.

All your Steam account is is a collection of lifetime leasing contracts between you and the seller. Steam already forces third parties to give you liftime access even if the game is pulled from the store page, but that contract gets voided once one of the two parties ceases to exist, be it the buyer or the studio that sells the game.

Legally binding the games to your account instead of you also isn’t possible since in most countries you either have to be a real person or a registered entity to form contracts.

Not really, it still doesn’t answer the question as the main thing is still unclear.

Is the first chicken egg the one the chicken hatched from or the first egg a chicken laid.

Both can be argued as correct.

Proton upheld their claim of privacy, no Emails were disclosed. But they never promised anonymity cause that’s something they simply can’t do under the Swiss law. If you willingly give them your other mail addresses or contact details, they have to comply. Sure they could have denied the Spanish authorities, but it takes less than a week to get a court order for things like this.

No, it’s not. You paying them money won’t stop them from collecting data about you. It only stops them from selling it to show targeted ads.

Don’t get me wrong, I despise meta for it and think they should be prosecuted for that immediately, but that has nothing to do with the article or what the EU is saying.

Mixing these two things just cause you hate meta will get us nowhere. Their data collection of non-users is straight up illegal, but the pay with money or data model is something that especially news sites have been using for a long time now.

Their goal isn’t to completely shut this down, Google is fully aware that that’s impossible to achieve. They just want to annoy enough people and make it complicated enough so that the userbase doesn’t grow any further.

If there is any benefit to it depends on how discord sells your data.

The baseline assumption is that they just collect and sell everything as is, considering how shitty their privacy policy is and the general track record of corps following gdpr guidelins. With that barely anything changes.

If we belive the claims in their policies, then things get a lot better. Only aggregated and anonymized information is shared for marketing. Apart from that only their direct partners get more personalised information. Sadly, Google will probably get a lot of it since they are one of Discords cloud service providers but it should still be less then them collecting it themselves.

Now if we also assume they are following all GDPR laws, than even Google should only get very restricted information about you needed for their services.

What they really do with your data is anyones guess. I assume its somewhere between 1 and 2, but there is no proof I know of. The only benefit I really see is that it’s a lot easier to just block the one Discord API instead of 500 individual brokers.

“Hardmode” is just a fancy name for blocking all 3rd party scripts, which there aren’t even any to block here in the first place. What does happen is that two of the three Discord domains get flagged and blocked:

One is Discord.gg which is the Websocket to get and sent events, so it’s needed for functionality.

The other is Discordapp.net which is pretty much their media server.

If you block all 3rd party scripts, frames and connections, then yes, your number of blocked items will shoot up into the hundreds. But if you knew what you are doing and just took a look at what was actually blocked, you would realise that it all was just requests for media and profile pictures. Even with fully enabled hardmode, there wasn’t a single request from a 3rd party advertiser or data broker, not even Google.

Your arrogance for using hardmode is completely unfounded if you don’t even know what it really is blocking. All you are doing is looking at a number go up and are patting yourself on the back for it.

I’m not really sure what you did, but it certainly wasn’t just opening discord.

I just tried it and there isn’t a single third party script in the browser version according to Ublock and noscript, there are only three scripts activ in total, all from different Discord subdomains. Maybe a few more if there are media links in the chat.

If you look through the blocked connection requests they are also all made from the same source, namely the Discord science API, their internal data collector.

The Discord homepage has a Google integration and a few embedded YouTube videos, but it’s hard to find a website that doesn’t have some form of Google scripts.

Heck I don’t even want to defend Discord here, but ia call bullshit on your story.

You haven’t worked in any customer support position, and it shows. The amount of slurs hurled at them is far greater than anything found in a few github comments.

To keep it short, there isn’t really any privacy.

Servers are public and Private messages are stored without any envryption. If you delete your account then the messages stay and can still be found with your unique ID (just like Reddit). From what ive read Discord also stores your HWIDs and monitors your running processes (with a valid reason considering their game integration). Some say they only store that locally, others claim something else, haven’t seen any proof for either side so far.

The problem really boils down to the fact that people treat discord as a private messenger instead of a public forum despite it clearly beeing the latter.

Even then the snippets you can find in the replies are more usefull than most forums ever were.

Windows asks you a few times to update now or later, gives you a timer of three hours and offers you to open the closed documents again without having to use autosave.

I don’t like the forced updates either, but if you lose anything to them it can be classified as "on purpose ".