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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2021

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  • Hmmm maybe not, but i guess for me its part of doing my part to stop big tech from using our info.

    The big question here is how does big tech use our info that makes it important to keep them from having it? Here, political orientation has a large impact on importance, for example:

    Ads: Nobody loves ads, but some people tolerate them more than others. Liberals might see them as a necessary evil to provide services at a good cost. Libertarians might say they have the right to use their own hardware as they please and block them out of convenience. Progressives might say that they promote consumerism, and leftists might go further and say that they are one of the ways capitalists keep their control over society. So since data is used for targeted ads, that’s one area that can be argued based on political orientation.

    Product improvement: Overall depends on their view of the company’s impact on society. Conservatives and leftists both see big tech as it exists currently as morally corrupt, others may see them as providing a useful service. If they think that big tech has a positive influence on society, then they are probably okay with their non-security critical data being used to improve the product, otherwise they might be more likely to want to avoid that happening.

    Finances: Data can be used to personalize prices for large expenses, which is something that threatens everyone. The cost of healthcare, housing, education, and transportation is a major concern across all political orientations (and is why the Democrats lost the election by not doing fucking anything while the Republicans kept telling people that they would fix it by cutting government spending). However, people might also think that there’s nothing they can do about their data being used to make things more expensive or that if they try to resist that then it will cost more for them, so that’s an obstacle that needs to be considered as well.

    Law enforcement: If the person is a target of the Trump administration and knows that, then their data being used against them is one clear motivation if they don’t think it’s too late to do anything. Otherwise, it depends on how much the person trusts the government and current law enforcement.

    So overall, I would consider where they fit in this political categorization and use the reasons that align best with this. Challenging their political stances is also an option but requires a lot of other things to consider and probably won’t work well since a lot of it is rooted in fundamental values that are difficult to change.


  • They need to have a reason to care. Are they or people close to them in danger if they don’t put effort into increasing their privacy? What steps do they need to take to switch to alternatives, and does what they gain from taking those steps outweigh what they lose? Is your advice oriented around the context of their own lives, or are you telling them to do things because a bunch of people on the internet told you to?

    These questions themselves are also very contextual, especially with different political orientations. For instance, if someone distrusts the government, then their definition of “danger” may include the government reading their conversations, which in this case it is a lot easier to convince people to switch to FOSS or more secure platforms like Signal (and I’ve convinced nearly everyone I know to use it, both conservative and progressive/leftist, because they distrust the government and large tech corporations). Whereas if someone thinks the government is alright, then they won’t give a shit. So I’d say that considering and discussing their political beliefs and making sure they align with valid reasons to make changes is an important step before telling them how they should do things.


  • I used to never close tabs and they would accumulate as I kept doing more web searches and other activities. Now when I need to do stuff I usually open a new window instead for different tasks and if I need to free up RAM then I start closing other windows for tasks I’m not doing anymore so it closes all of the related tabs at the same time



  • sudoer777@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlAI sucks
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    2 months ago

    While AI offers transformative potential, significant criticisms highlight its drawbacks. Current systems often perpetuate biases embedded in training data, leading to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, law enforcement, and lending. The environmental cost of training large models—like massive energy consumption and carbon emissions—raises sustainability concerns. Automation driven by AI threatens job displacement, exacerbating economic inequality, while opaque “black-box” algorithms undermine accountability in critical domains like healthcare or criminal justice. Privacy erosion, through pervasive surveillance and data exploitation, further fuels distrust. Though AI’s capabilities are impressive, its unchecked deployment risks deepening societal inequities and prioritizing efficiency over ethical considerations.



  • The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you’re able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they’re worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you’re going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).

    For instance, in the US if you’re a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you’re biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it’s convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you’re working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you’re a minority, there’s not really much that can be done that doesn’t severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you’re being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you’re an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn’t touch anything else you own and doesn’t cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other “paranoid” security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you’re trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.








  • Right now I use mainly Firefox, not because I like it but because it comes with my distro (whereas LibreWolf requires Flatpak) making it work well with the PWA project and it supports weird hacks necessary to install Widevine on my system so I can listen to Tidal. I also have LibreWolf installed with data set to delete on close and set up to proxy over Tor and I2P using privoxy and has LibRedirect installed which is set up to redirect to the corresponding onion/i2p domains. I was trying to install Zen Browser using the Guix package manager earlier but had problems, but I might try again later.

    On Android, I use Vanadium for sites I stay logged into, Cromite with auto clearing history for other stuff, and Ironfox for Kagi and to use plugins like LibRedirect.