Yeah, that’s what it should do if matching was central to the product. From the app owner’s perspective, optimizing for retention makes sense if they’re trying to pad their users numbers, e.g. if they’re raising funding. I’ve also seen filters hidden behind a paywall, which made navigating some a time sink.

What is this “vid-eo chimera” you speak of? Some ancient technology from the Mayans? /j

I’ve aged myself, haven’t I? lol

Hmm if it’s a smartphone, their location can still be tracked even if they’re not recording videos for social media. Even if it’s not a smartphone, their location can be triangulated.

I’ve never attended a protest, but one of my younger siblings has. I agree with the author here: don’t take a smartphone with you. If you need to go to a protest, and it’s a charged topic (i.e. people have been fired or detained for it), take a dumb phone and make calls once you’re considerably away from the protest’s meeting site. Or, buy a burner phone for use only at the meeting site. If video footage is that big of a deal, take an old-fashioned video camera to record.

Thanks and agreed. An extra point (possibly more harrowing) is misrepresentation: just because there’s tons of data on you doesn’t mean that it paints an accurate - or even correct - picture of you. Instead, it paints a picture of what was collected, from where, and some of the error rates of the data collection method(s).

I’ve seen and experienced first-hand the inability to make sense of data to accurately represent a situation/person for various reasons, not all of which are tied to not having enough data. Except instead of waiting to examine unsubstantiated assumptions, they assumed their presumptions were valid and proceeded to run head-first into action.

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything” - that is disturbing. “On paper”, someone could reference some data from here and there, omit some, include some that they think/presume related to you even if tangentially, presume even tangential data is relevant in some way, summarize it, and hand it over like “see our analysis confirms/denies what you want us to confirm/deny”. See also this post analyzing the mishandling of generated LLM content.

Privacy isn’t about protecting (or “hiding”) what you don’t want others to know. I’ve learned that it’s also about protecting your identity from misrepresentation.

it was an auto perm ban for my 3 accounts

👀 that’s insane. I guess moderation has become stricter for some reason.

Shoutout reddit for banning me,

That’s good to hear since rage-baiting was becoming common on the platform. I didn’t know Reddit banned people though. Do you mean banned form certain subreddits or from the whole platform?

Yeah, it was prevention - to my knowledge there wasn’t a comparable internet-blocking feature in Android at the time. I have a dumb phone from way back that I switched to, and I shut off my smartphone. For desktop, it was primarily site blocking extensions like Block Site, and willpower to develop a habit. I’d still use the internet for things like banking and - since I was re-studying CLRS - SO and reference collections, but I trained myself to a hard cutoff of not using it besides the purposes I switch it back on for. The rest is on paper: my books are physically with me or loaded on an e-reader.

I should clarify that I had taken last year off to recover from burnout, and I was freelancing. I think that helped a lot with being able to detach for that long.

This is wild. Another problem with fudging what used to be a trail is what that means for fingerprinting people online. Especially given recent attempts to take down the Internet Archive. I’m not saying forum histories are/were iron-clad “paper”/e-trails, but they can and do get used for cross-platform profiling.

Anecdotal, but I can see this. Last year, I took a 2-3 months off of what I now call recreational internet use (e.g. keeping up with the news, forums, etc.), because my mental health and cognitive abilities have deteriorated a lot. The result wasn’t just improved mood but also regaining cognitive skills that I thought I had lost forever. Brain fog also lessened. A year later now, and the improvements are stable and still there, even though I do use the internet recreationally again. It’s still not where I used to be before, but it’s a work-in-progress anyway.

It’s not far-fetched, infinite growth and all.

Since Kobo e-readers have public library integration where I live and I no longer have an Amazon account, the Kindle I bought is just sitting there. If it pans out into a subscription model and Amazon also cans other forms of side-loading, honestly Kobo + physical books would be my only go-tos: why pay extra to borrow from Amazon when my taxes already go to a library system from which I can also borrow books? I’ve transferred the books I had on the Kindle. Maybe it can be reused with a pi should it come to.

Thanks, I’ll take a look!

Why would it be bad idea to use both? According to Tor+VPN, provided you connect to VPN first, it should be fine.

I used to use Tor to surf surface + deep webs, but not the dark web — basically a substitute for the common browsers but without the incessant tracking and attempts at personalization.

I do agree that a VPN + Tor, disabling JS, and avoiding identifying forms are up there in terms of safety measures. I’d add that using Tor on Android is also iffy, but I’m still looking into it.

True, though, we do need a quicker solution with a lower barrier to adoption ASAP. Carbon capture could be a good long-term approach to augment CO2 management, provided we figure out the details of CO2 solution “loads”/proportions, costs, maintenance, and capture locations.