IMHO XMPP is far more architecturally sound

I lost track of the technical status of IRC long ago so maybe it can do this too. XMPP at least, can support true E2EE, not just end to server. My mates and I use that for normal chatting, sending our vacation pics around, photos of our kids with their new puppy, things like that.

It’s worked well. Free of big-tech. Hopefully free of snoops and mass surveillance. I’m 100% sure any three letter agency could get in, if one ever cared to hear us prattling on about microbrews. The point is to opt out of the information dragnet, not to be all Jason Bourne.

XMPP has been the cat’s pajamas so far.

I have heard that called “sludge”. As a generic term for that tactic.

If you are over 18 click yes

Years ago, I heard of a guy who failed one of the voluntary “enter your age” checks because it thought he was 7 years old. He was actually 107, but the system only considered the last two digits.

A Gemini reference in the wild!

I looked a couple years ago. Briefly toyed with it, made a page or two. I like the ethos, and am about 99% on board. I only wish it had inline images. I feel like that omission alone would greatly hurt its adoption and relegate it to not just niche, but super-ultra-niche.

Oh, nice. Canada & USA have cooperated closely for a long time on regulations for cars, so manufacturers only need minor tweaks to sell into both markets. Hopefully that’ll help.

Oh, I see. I thought maybe I did it by accident somehow!

I bike everywhere when I can. I’ll join the fuckcars group, now that I know about it.

I’m pretty new to Lemmy and noticed that my post was crossposted to fuckcars and privacy@programming.dev. I have no problem with that, but I didn’t do it on purpose!

I mostly agree. But sometimes if a single jurisdiction gets regulation in place, it can be cheaper for companies to produce a single model to comply with all of them, rather than make multiple models. Even if they do make multiple models, it still means there is a supply of privacy-spec cars.

California in the USA has been more privacy friendly than most states. If California would crank up some car privacy regs, maybe work with the Europeans and Canada on a common legal standard, that is a huge foot in the door! It means people in other US states could buy a California-spec car. If the momentum builds enough, maybe companies would say screw it and sell the privacy-spec cars everywhere. That happened in the past with car safety regs. It went from auto companies whining about it, to the same companies featuring it as a selling point. Look how well our cars do in crash tests!

I agree car privacy is going to be a hard fight. Auto companies will fight dirty to avoid privacy regs. But we can push on this. A groundswell of public support can’t hurt.

They could have made it a lot cheaper as a coupe.

Maybe if it sees market success, they’ll branch out into other body styles. I want a car too, not a truck.

have joked … that if I have to buy a new vehicle I am ripping the whole dashboard out.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Slate seems to be the only brand currently that intends to deliver vehicles with zero connectivity required.

Do you mean these guys? That’s the first I heard of them so thank you for that! I thought it would turn out to be a European make, but they’re on my side of the pond. A zero-connectivity electric car would be the dream. I like the idea of electric cars but so far they have all been even more wrapped up in telematics than internal combustion cars.

And if you reconnect to get them, there’s no guarantee your car doesn’t suddenly dump all your personal data obtained in the meantime onto company servers.

It’s a good point. Also I wonder if OBD-II can do that. A person could disable the port, but that may make it hard / impossible to get the vehicle serviced.

For sure. We’re in a difficult place. Arguably the ultimate solution has to be regulatory, but we don’t have that yet. All we have is whatever the community can figure out on its own. The more surveillance gets integrated into complex automotive systems, the less approch-able it is for average people to yank a fuse or unscrew an antenna coupler.

is the realization that sooner than later, we won’t have the choice of not using spyware riddled device anymore, as there will not be any alternative left.

I too worry about this. Right now surveillance is so profitable that it gets built into even the lowest end models of devices. It can be difficult or impossible to disable.

What gives me a little hope is the 10% principle. If privacy minded people hold just 1% market share, we can be ignored. We are not a market force. If we can get 10% of our population to prioritize privacy and security when buying tech products, we become a market segment too big to ignore. Thereby it is important for all of us to reach out to our friends, family and neighbors, to help them understand why privacy matters. And what we all lose when we give it up.

or light bulbs

So that no one thinks you are engaging in hyperbole -> https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/smart-lightbulbs-spy/

Does that mean it’s the same as reddit??

No. The words you write here are available to any and all, so those are not private. They effectively can’t be. Even if lemmy was gated behind a login wall.

Yet who you are can be more private. I say more, not completely, because privacy is not black and white! It comes in shades. Reddit, facebook, and other big social media sites go to a big length to associate IRL IDs with accounts. Even when you can use a pseudonym. Their profit model is coupled to this.

Privacy aside, IMO there are plenty other advantages from Lemmy being a non-corporate system. I do not see it as perfect. I do see it as an important step away from the worst abuses of big-tech social media.

Edited to improve clarity.

Yah. And in almost no cases does that technically need to be the case. It just actually is the case. Surveillance capitalism. It’s common now the company makes more money from your data than from selling you the device. Even for big ticket devices like cars!

Companies are also very, very good at making people want it. I advise my friends against giving their new IoT shiny any internet access. I am rarely successful. You all know how it goes. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

Offline single purpose devices still work fine. I have two digital cameras, big and small, that use a USB cable to my PC. An unconnected mp3 player. An alarm clock with no connectivity that isn’t a phone app, it’s a thing with a big ole snooze button. It wakes me up fine.

there are too many frictions overall.

That was my experience too. I can’t remember now what my objections were, but I tried it and did not like it or want to use it.

I am now self hosting XMPP + encryption server which I have got some of my friends to install clients for. Oh, they bitch nonstop about how it isn’t as nice as whatever big tech app they are used to. But they use it, because I am not going to talk to them on $TrendingSurveillanceApp.

That reminds me of a quote I heard once. Probably from Cory Doctorow but I cannot remember now.

“Everyone wants you to have privacy… just not from them.”

I think I need to buy a graphene phone for that though, my android I don’t think is capable of loading a different OS,

I have no experience with it, but they have page here which lists compatible devices, and recommended devices. The recommended ones are a subset, because apparently some older devices lack hardware security features.

Agreed. I don’t carry a phone today, but I am considering getting a dumbphone + Faraday pouch for emergencies.

And yah, “smart bikes”… eww.