I've done what I can to minimize my footprint. I switched to Linux many years ago, and recently switched to Graphene on my phone. I have a Google account, but I only sign in to check my rarely...
I've done what I can to minimize my footprint. I switched to Linux many years ago, and recently switched to Graphene on my phone. I have a Google account, but I only sign in to check my rarely used Gmail account, then i immediately sign out. Well, now I think about it, I do click a like or subscribe to a Youtube channel now and again to help those channels, but that is also rare, and I immediately sign out. So, Google does get some information from me. I doubt I can cut it back much more.
I watch Youtube videos on a browser I've got set to never remember history. I know the channels I like and go to them directly.
Amazon knows more about me than anyone, and I can't see a good solution for them.
Amazon is a tough one because their success has caused local shops near me to just stop carrying as many regular things you used to be able to buy in person. It's super super annoying. That said,...
Amazon is a tough one because their success has caused local shops near me to just stop carrying as many regular things you used to be able to buy in person. It's super super annoying. That said, I deleted my Amazon account coming up on 2 years now and it's been so liberating.
I'm still heavily reliant on Amazon, too, so I sympathize. That said, for the last two years, I have made a habit of doing my shopping on Amazon, and then going thru my cart, item by item, and...
I'm still heavily reliant on Amazon, too, so I sympathize.
That said, for the last two years, I have made a habit of doing my shopping on Amazon, and then going thru my cart, item by item, and searching online for alternate vendors, either online or in actual brick-&-mortar shops near me.
Finding online alternates are usually (~10-20%) cheaper, occasionally the same price, rarely more expensive. Free shipping is usually available, though often only with a minimum order (which has rarely been an issue for me; I buy in bulk).
The main hassle is just the extra time and effort of finding them, and navigating new-&-different payment and shipping processes.
That said, at this point, easily 50% of the stuff I used to buy on Amazon (particularly the repeat purchases), now comes from somewhere else ... most of it, from the actual source companies directly, that also market their stuff on Amazon.
For youtube videos, freetube is a good option if you are patient and slightly technical. You don't have to watch ads and it implements the sponsor blocking (you can configure it to skip sponsored...
For youtube videos, freetube is a good option if you are patient and slightly technical. You don't have to watch ads and it implements the sponsor blocking (you can configure it to skip sponsored parts of videos that have been identified by other users).
The reason it requires patience is that it breaks about once a month and you have to reinstall it. The breakages are caused by changes to youtube's API (I assume many of the changes are designed to ruin apps like freetube). If you use a mac it's a little annoying to reinstall because it's unsigned so you have to go to privacy settings and override the block. (Windows may also work like this but I haven't used it for a few years so I'm not sure)
A difference between freetube and your history-less browser method is that you can subscribed to channels in freetube but the subscriptions are not known to youtube. Also freetube supports playlists and watch later and all that stuff.
Maybe have a look at Grayjay if you want to wacth Youtube and leave as little trace. But I suppose Youtubers won't get money from ads that way (as there are no ads on Grayjay). Well, Linus from...
Maybe have a look at Grayjay if you want to wacth Youtube and leave as little trace. But I suppose Youtubers won't get money from ads that way (as there are no ads on Grayjay). Well, Linus from LTT said some time in the past that buying one water bottle from them will actually give them more money than watching ads on every one of their videos, so maybe support your favorite channels in other ways...?
After receiving one to many fake items from Amazon, I increasingly find myself buying from online e-stores tied to traditional brick and mortar shops like Walmart and Target.
After receiving one to many fake items from Amazon, I increasingly find myself buying from online e-stores tied to traditional brick and mortar shops like Walmart and Target.
I used to give each company a different email but got tired of keeping track of them all. And nowadays, what is email for, other than having a way for businesses to reach you? My friends and...
I used to give each company a different email but got tired of keeping track of them all. And nowadays, what is email for, other than having a way for businesses to reach you? My friends and family mostly use chat and text messages, so email is mostly business notifications.
Yes, I also gave up on this many years ago, mainly because I've never caught a company misusing the unique email address I used to register. What I still do is generating masked emails (using...
Yes, I also gave up on this many years ago, mainly because I've never caught a company misusing the unique email address I used to register.
What I still do is generating masked emails (using iCloud's Hide My Email) when signing up in weird websites. iCloud management is clunky, but it makes trivial to know what masked email belongs to what domain/app/service. I deleted a few in the past to turn off unwanted email messages.
One thing that did happens is that my historical (2006 ish) Google/gmail account (common name+letter) was part of of several breach (plus as a teenager I had a poor email hygiene) and I still...
One thing that did happens is that my historical (2006 ish) Google/gmail account (common name+letter) was part of of several breach (plus as a teenager I had a poor email hygiene) and I still receive regular spam on it. I suspect it the email address got passed from breached email and to stolen email db.
Seems backwards to me. This makes you worthless to the advertisers but quite valuable, at least into the medium term, to Meta or whoever. There aren't enough people about to do it to pull down the...
Do you have to use a big social platform? Click on all of the ads you see or click on some of them, but don't buy anything.
Seems backwards to me. This makes you worthless to the advertisers but quite valuable, at least into the medium term, to Meta or whoever. There aren't enough people about to do it to pull down the system.
Many of these seem aimed more at being unknowable rather than worthless and they aren't the same thing. Their conflation is common in tech land and heading in the direction of one sometimes achieves the other but also often doesn't.
And how much time do you think I have anyway? I'll settle for not seeing the ads in the first place.
My browser adblocker of choice does this for me. For every ad that tries to load in the page, the extension sends a request to the page so that it counts as a click. And it also prevents the ad...
My browser adblocker of choice does this for me. For every ad that tries to load in the page, the extension sends a request to the page so that it counts as a click. And it also prevents the ad from visually appearing on my screen, so from my perspective, it’s the same experience as a regular adblocker anyway. While it’s technically slightly less secure than not loading anything at all, it costs advertisers a lot more, and throws a lot of noise into the signal of what I’m interested in, hopefully making it a bit more difficult to pin down my interests for advertising platforms.
There’s also a section where you can review all the ads that it’s “clicked on” and it estimates the total cost to advertisers (using approximate pricing, I don’t think it can actually access the exact price each advertiser paid). I’ve edited from the default settings to allow much longer history, which means using more MB on my computer for holding onto snapshots but also allows me to see the running total of how much money has been spent to advertise to me. Last I checked, it’s in the high hundreds/low thousands per year, which is a lot more than I expected.
Edit: AdNauseum is the name of the extension, I can’t remember if it’s just Firefox or across other browsers too.
I suppose that given that equation I'd rather the money with the advertisers than meta, tiktok, google or any of the other ecosystem providers. I don't like the system they provide and I don't...
I suppose that given that equation I'd rather the money with the advertisers than meta, tiktok, google or any of the other ecosystem providers. I don't like the system they provide and I don't like how pervasive it is, funnelling more money to them, no matter how "stick it to the man" in nature, is the last thing I want to do.
I've worked for companies that needed to engage with Facebook ads or similar to survive and they were both doing worthwhile things and didn't have any spare money. Them taking a hit so that Facebook can make more money is in no one's interest except Facebook's. Be mindful of which man you're sticking it to.
I think I agree with everything you’ve said here, so I had a think about why I’ve come to a different choice of behaviour. I think it’s because I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like paid...
I think I agree with everything you’ve said here, so I had a think about why I’ve come to a different choice of behaviour. I think it’s because I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like paid commercial advertising as an industry entirely, and I certainly can’t have any impact on the platforms by using adblockers or scrolling past the ads I’m served, so I see “clicking on every single ad” as one of the few tools in my toolkit.
For any given instance, I agree that having the ad clicked on just pushes money from the advertiser to the platform, which isn’t my objective. But in aggregate, every dollar spent on my clicks is a dollar that can’t be used for successful marketing, and is a dollar which is essentially wasted, and hopefully is a dollar which disincentivises commercial advertising in general, which is much closer to my preferences.
I tried to be all privacy concerned with these things and Ive found myself locked out of multiple platforms because of it, so ymmv. My old aol email literally told me I have to pay them to unlock...
I tried to be all privacy concerned with these things and Ive found myself locked out of multiple platforms because of it, so ymmv.
My old aol email literally told me I have to pay them to unlock my account, theres no way to recover an account when you’ve lost the 2fa to it, and so that account and every website depending on it is locked forever unless I wanna give them my birth cert and pay them.
Every other thing I used that 2fa for was easily recoverable, but that was my burner email so I kept it separate from the rest of my accounts.
That's shady behavior of Aol. Anyway, if you set 2FA up, you have a contract with yourself to keep those backup codes safe and readily available in case things go wrong. Privacy is a constant...
My old aol email literally told me I have to pay them to unlock my account,
That's shady behavior of Aol.
Anyway, if you set 2FA up, you have a contract with yourself to keep those backup codes safe and readily available in case things go wrong. Privacy is a constant trade-off between security and convenience. By reducing convenience, you need to be more cautions with security.
I consider reducing usage to be more potent by far. Some of these platforms are defacto neccessary, yes, but it's possible to get rid of a lot of them. And if its not then it is always possible to...
I consider reducing usage to be more potent by far. Some of these platforms are defacto neccessary, yes, but it's possible to get rid of a lot of them. And if its not then it is always possible to reduce usage.
your not worthless, in fact you are a highly valuable commodity to the corporations. You are a digit in a spreadsheet that helps the number go up but as a human you are so much more and have more...
your not worthless, in fact you are a highly valuable commodity to the corporations. You are a digit in a spreadsheet that helps the number go up but as a human you are so much more and have more value to the other humans that pass through your life. Stay dangerous.
I would like to use this opportunity to share what I have done: Moved my email from Gmail to Mailbox.org. Proton is pro-fascist and it and Tuta are both walled gardens. Not a fan. I still used my...
I would like to use this opportunity to share what I have done:
Moved my email from Gmail to Mailbox.org. Proton is pro-fascist and it and Tuta are both walled gardens. Not a fan. I still used my Microsoft email for work but use it and my main email on Thunderbird on desktop and Mail on iPhone.
I have logged out of Google on my desktop, and rarely login unless necessary. I still watch YouTube but have added RSS's for all my favorite channels.
Most other services are on my local servers. I had a ton of servers with a ton of storage back in the US but now I only have two small one's on my desk.
I am really considering alternatives to my iPhone but do not trust GrapheneOS because of the chaotic devs.
I am not saying that I disagree with you, but what makes you say that proton is pro-fascistm? I am a Mullvad VPN and Proton user... I've heard some questionable things about the Mullvad CEO that...
I am not saying that I disagree with you, but what makes you say that proton is pro-fascistm?
I am a Mullvad VPN and Proton user... I've heard some questionable things about the Mullvad CEO that has me questioning re-upping after my time is consumed.
Now I'm bracing myself... What did Proton do? Lol...
I assume it has to do with Proton’s involvement with the “Omarchy” project, which is David Heinemeier Hansen’s pet project to have a version of Arch Linux without the “woke” (which is to say,...
I assume it has to do with Proton’s involvement with the “Omarchy” project, which is David Heinemeier Hansen’s pet project to have a version of Arch Linux without the “woke” (which is to say, involvement of ethnic, gender, or sexual minorities).
What does Linux without woke even mean? Lol. (I know you explained that it means without minorities). It's such a dumb thing to get hung up on. Who cares what someone's background is so long as...
What does Linux without woke even mean? Lol. (I know you explained that it means without minorities).
It's such a dumb thing to get hung up on. Who cares what someone's background is so long as the codebase is free, open source, and secure lol.
I swear to God DHH and his ilk freaking out over identity politics...
As far as I can tell, this is the entire background: In 2024, CEO of Proton Andy Yen makes a tweet when Donald Trump nominated Gail Slater as assistant AG. He then praised the anti-trust actions...
As far as I can tell, this is the entire background:
In 2024, CEO of Proton Andy Yen makes a tweet when Donald Trump nominated Gail Slater as assistant AG. He then praised the anti-trust actions of the Trump administration.
And yeah that’s pretty much the extent of it. Does that make Andy Yen, or Proton as a company, “proto-fascist”? You’ll have to make up your own mind on that one, I guess.
I guess after reading to his statements, it seems that he probably leans Republican. However, he has some criticism of other platforms that I also take issue with. Such as corporate Democrats that...
I guess after reading to his statements, it seems that he probably leans Republican.
However, he has some criticism of other platforms that I also take issue with. Such as corporate Democrats that are obviously feckless and captured by big business (like Schumer).
I don't know if I necessarily disagree with him, that I find it more likely for Gail Slater to "possibly" do Antitrust than I expect corporate Democrats to do it.
However that being said, I think I'm left with some thoughts:
Why say anything at all? It was stupid for Proton to even state a political position.
I don't really think his opinion was "wrong" so much as it was, pointless? Like it's a non-falsifiable claim and there's not really a point in making it? I think everyone knows that both Republicans at large and Corporate Democrats are NOT going to be doing any serious attempts at reform.
If he really wants Antitrust and wants to put his "money where is mouth his" he should be tossing his lot with the one group that might actually do something about it in the U.S., which is the left-wing of the Democrats, the Democratic Socialists. But a businessman will never align with a "socialist" party lol.
It's important to remember that Andy Yen is neither an American citizen nor lives in the US, so he's inherently disconnected from US politics. He's a Taiwanese national living in Switzerland. Why...
It's important to remember that Andy Yen is neither an American citizen nor lives in the US, so he's inherently disconnected from US politics. He's a Taiwanese national living in Switzerland.
Why did he make the post? Who knows. Maybe he thought this was a fairly easy way to gain brownie points with the Trump administration; even though his company is Swiss, he has a lot of US customers. Maybe he genuinely had strong thoughts about Gail Slater.
From a PR perspective it's probably stupid. Probably why this hasn't happened again in the next 2 years.
Is there a point where doing this is supposed to make you feel better? I did all the usual steps that are recommended and even a few of the more extreme ones most people don't do and I just feel...
Is there a point where doing this is supposed to make you feel better? I did all the usual steps that are recommended and even a few of the more extreme ones most people don't do and I just feel like at best I am playing a game of musical chairs. The Sisyphean nature of the struggle makes it hard to get up in the morning. I lay there and think how little data I would generate if I were to just not get out of bed.
In the game of life that is musical chairs, most of the more recent comfortable and happy making chairs I've found are off-line. At that point I do feel better. That's perhaps not as I envisaged...
In the game of life that is musical chairs, most of the more recent comfortable and happy making chairs I've found are off-line. At that point I do feel better. That's perhaps not as I envisaged things at around 1999 when I was most optimistic about the online world but here we are and it largely remains an option.
Offline is so much worse. At a computer you can unplug your router and turn off any devices other than the desktop you are using and know with relative confidence that you are not being surveilled...
Offline is so much worse. At a computer you can unplug your router and turn off any devices other than the desktop you are using and know with relative confidence that you are not being surveilled at that moment. Outside is full of cameras, microphones, and Wi-Fi+bluetooth chipsets on cars, buildings, drones, other people's phones etc. all of which can be used to track you.
My musical chairs analogy was more about things that require plugging into the networks like paying for parking, sms-based 2FA etc. becoming more common. Its become harder and harder to avoid carrying a monitoring device in your day to day life.
I know people like to wax nostalgic for the past but I 100% would feel better if I lived in a pre-smart tech world.
I’ve already basically done most of these things as a matter of digital hygiene basically for as long as tech companies have started doing cross-site tracking. The main exception is the “use tech...
I’ve already basically done most of these things as a matter of digital hygiene basically for as long as tech companies have started doing cross-site tracking. The main exception is the “use tech from non-US companies” because, let’s face it, it’s mostly trash designed around whatever idiosyncratic opinions about technical architecture the maintainers felt like fixating on rather than what makes a scalable and usable product for non-technical end users.
I really don’t think that this gossip level reporting is a good source to say that all software from Europe is shit. Politico is basically reposting a shitpost here; every platform where people...
I really don’t think that this gossip level reporting is a good source to say that all software from Europe is shit. Politico is basically reposting a shitpost here; every platform where people communicate are going to have complaint threads on them. And honestly, shame on Politico for this; it’s bad journalism. We never actually find out what’s actually wrong with Element Pro or why they’re complaining except that “buttons” (in big bad scare quotes no less!) are in the wrong places! Crime of the century! But does that mean that they are on different places altogether, or are they just a few pixels away? We’ll never know.
I've done what I can to minimize my footprint. I switched to Linux many years ago, and recently switched to Graphene on my phone. I have a Google account, but I only sign in to check my rarely used Gmail account, then i immediately sign out. Well, now I think about it, I do click a like or subscribe to a Youtube channel now and again to help those channels, but that is also rare, and I immediately sign out. So, Google does get some information from me. I doubt I can cut it back much more.
I watch Youtube videos on a browser I've got set to never remember history. I know the channels I like and go to them directly.
Amazon knows more about me than anyone, and I can't see a good solution for them.
Amazon is a tough one because their success has caused local shops near me to just stop carrying as many regular things you used to be able to buy in person. It's super super annoying. That said, I deleted my Amazon account coming up on 2 years now and it's been so liberating.
I'm still heavily reliant on Amazon, too, so I sympathize.
That said, for the last two years, I have made a habit of doing my shopping on Amazon, and then going thru my cart, item by item, and searching online for alternate vendors, either online or in actual brick-&-mortar shops near me.
Finding online alternates are usually (~10-20%) cheaper, occasionally the same price, rarely more expensive. Free shipping is usually available, though often only with a minimum order (which has rarely been an issue for me; I buy in bulk).
The main hassle is just the extra time and effort of finding them, and navigating new-&-different payment and shipping processes.
That said, at this point, easily 50% of the stuff I used to buy on Amazon (particularly the repeat purchases), now comes from somewhere else ... most of it, from the actual source companies directly, that also market their stuff on Amazon.
I download YouTube videos using yt-dlp to watch them on the TV via Jellyfin and follow my favorite channels using RSS. You can go further!
For youtube videos, freetube is a good option if you are patient and slightly technical. You don't have to watch ads and it implements the sponsor blocking (you can configure it to skip sponsored parts of videos that have been identified by other users).
The reason it requires patience is that it breaks about once a month and you have to reinstall it. The breakages are caused by changes to youtube's API (I assume many of the changes are designed to ruin apps like freetube). If you use a mac it's a little annoying to reinstall because it's unsigned so you have to go to privacy settings and override the block. (Windows may also work like this but I haven't used it for a few years so I'm not sure)
A difference between freetube and your history-less browser method is that you can subscribed to channels in freetube but the subscriptions are not known to youtube. Also freetube supports playlists and watch later and all that stuff.
I'm trying this out. We'll see how it goes, but for now it seems to be working ok.
Thanks for the idea.
Maybe have a look at Grayjay if you want to wacth Youtube and leave as little trace. But I suppose Youtubers won't get money from ads that way (as there are no ads on Grayjay). Well, Linus from LTT said some time in the past that buying one water bottle from them will actually give them more money than watching ads on every one of their videos, so maybe support your favorite channels in other ways...?
After receiving one to many fake items from Amazon, I increasingly find myself buying from online e-stores tied to traditional brick and mortar shops like Walmart and Target.
Walmart is no better on the cheap items than Amazon is. They sell absolute trash online too.
I used to give each company a different email but got tired of keeping track of them all. And nowadays, what is email for, other than having a way for businesses to reach you? My friends and family mostly use chat and text messages, so email is mostly business notifications.
Yes, I also gave up on this many years ago, mainly because I've never caught a company misusing the unique email address I used to register.
What I still do is generating masked emails (using iCloud's Hide My Email) when signing up in weird websites. iCloud management is clunky, but it makes trivial to know what masked email belongs to what domain/app/service. I deleted a few in the past to turn off unwanted email messages.
TAP Air Portugal suffered a breach about 4 years ago. I knew it before everyone else because I received spam from the unique addresse I created.
I had one or two experiences like that in… what?… seven years using different email addresses.
For me, didn't worth the trouble.
One thing that did happens is that my historical (2006 ish) Google/gmail account (common name+letter) was part of of several breach (plus as a teenager I had a poor email hygiene) and I still receive regular spam on it. I suspect it the email address got passed from breached email and to stolen email db.
Seems backwards to me. This makes you worthless to the advertisers but quite valuable, at least into the medium term, to Meta or whoever. There aren't enough people about to do it to pull down the system.
Many of these seem aimed more at being unknowable rather than worthless and they aren't the same thing. Their conflation is common in tech land and heading in the direction of one sometimes achieves the other but also often doesn't.
And how much time do you think I have anyway? I'll settle for not seeing the ads in the first place.
My browser adblocker of choice does this for me. For every ad that tries to load in the page, the extension sends a request to the page so that it counts as a click. And it also prevents the ad from visually appearing on my screen, so from my perspective, it’s the same experience as a regular adblocker anyway. While it’s technically slightly less secure than not loading anything at all, it costs advertisers a lot more, and throws a lot of noise into the signal of what I’m interested in, hopefully making it a bit more difficult to pin down my interests for advertising platforms.
There’s also a section where you can review all the ads that it’s “clicked on” and it estimates the total cost to advertisers (using approximate pricing, I don’t think it can actually access the exact price each advertiser paid). I’ve edited from the default settings to allow much longer history, which means using more MB on my computer for holding onto snapshots but also allows me to see the running total of how much money has been spent to advertise to me. Last I checked, it’s in the high hundreds/low thousands per year, which is a lot more than I expected.
Edit: AdNauseum is the name of the extension, I can’t remember if it’s just Firefox or across other browsers too.
I suppose that given that equation I'd rather the money with the advertisers than meta, tiktok, google or any of the other ecosystem providers. I don't like the system they provide and I don't like how pervasive it is, funnelling more money to them, no matter how "stick it to the man" in nature, is the last thing I want to do.
I've worked for companies that needed to engage with Facebook ads or similar to survive and they were both doing worthwhile things and didn't have any spare money. Them taking a hit so that Facebook can make more money is in no one's interest except Facebook's. Be mindful of which man you're sticking it to.
I think I agree with everything you’ve said here, so I had a think about why I’ve come to a different choice of behaviour. I think it’s because I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like paid commercial advertising as an industry entirely, and I certainly can’t have any impact on the platforms by using adblockers or scrolling past the ads I’m served, so I see “clicking on every single ad” as one of the few tools in my toolkit.
For any given instance, I agree that having the ad clicked on just pushes money from the advertiser to the platform, which isn’t my objective. But in aggregate, every dollar spent on my clicks is a dollar that can’t be used for successful marketing, and is a dollar which is essentially wasted, and hopefully is a dollar which disincentivises commercial advertising in general, which is much closer to my preferences.
I tried to be all privacy concerned with these things and Ive found myself locked out of multiple platforms because of it, so ymmv.
My old aol email literally told me I have to pay them to unlock my account, theres no way to recover an account when you’ve lost the 2fa to it, and so that account and every website depending on it is locked forever unless I wanna give them my birth cert and pay them.
Every other thing I used that 2fa for was easily recoverable, but that was my burner email so I kept it separate from the rest of my accounts.
That's shady behavior of Aol.
Anyway, if you set 2FA up, you have a contract with yourself to keep those backup codes safe and readily available in case things go wrong. Privacy is a constant trade-off between security and convenience. By reducing convenience, you need to be more cautions with security.
I consider reducing usage to be more potent by far. Some of these platforms are defacto neccessary, yes, but it's possible to get rid of a lot of them. And if its not then it is always possible to reduce usage.
You mean instead of the regular kind of worthless that I already am?
your not worthless, in fact you are a highly valuable commodity to the corporations. You are a digit in a spreadsheet that helps the number go up but as a human you are so much more and have more value to the other humans that pass through your life. Stay dangerous.
Booooooo, It's called a joke.
I respect the effort, but I am absolutely not chatting with AI agent emails until they hit billing walls. How much free time do you think I have?
Me neither. I read that list as suggestions, so it's ok to skip some items.
I would like to use this opportunity to share what I have done:
I am not saying that I disagree with you, but what makes you say that proton is pro-fascistm?
I am a Mullvad VPN and Proton user... I've heard some questionable things about the Mullvad CEO that has me questioning re-upping after my time is consumed.
Now I'm bracing myself... What did Proton do? Lol...
I assume it has to do with Proton’s involvement with the “Omarchy” project, which is David Heinemeier Hansen’s pet project to have a version of Arch Linux without the “woke” (which is to say, involvement of ethnic, gender, or sexual minorities).
What does Linux without woke even mean? Lol. (I know you explained that it means without minorities).
It's such a dumb thing to get hung up on. Who cares what someone's background is so long as the codebase is free, open source, and secure lol.
I swear to God DHH and his ilk freaking out over identity politics...
As far as I can tell, this is the entire background:
In 2024, CEO of Proton Andy Yen makes a tweet when Donald Trump nominated Gail Slater as assistant AG. He then praised the anti-trust actions of the Trump administration.
And yeah that’s pretty much the extent of it. Does that make Andy Yen, or Proton as a company, “proto-fascist”? You’ll have to make up your own mind on that one, I guess.
I guess after reading to his statements, it seems that he probably leans Republican.
However, he has some criticism of other platforms that I also take issue with. Such as corporate Democrats that are obviously feckless and captured by big business (like Schumer).
I don't know if I necessarily disagree with him, that I find it more likely for Gail Slater to "possibly" do Antitrust than I expect corporate Democrats to do it.
However that being said, I think I'm left with some thoughts:
It's important to remember that Andy Yen is neither an American citizen nor lives in the US, so he's inherently disconnected from US politics. He's a Taiwanese national living in Switzerland.
Why did he make the post? Who knows. Maybe he thought this was a fairly easy way to gain brownie points with the Trump administration; even though his company is Swiss, he has a lot of US customers. Maybe he genuinely had strong thoughts about Gail Slater.
From a PR perspective it's probably stupid. Probably why this hasn't happened again in the next 2 years.
Is there a point where doing this is supposed to make you feel better? I did all the usual steps that are recommended and even a few of the more extreme ones most people don't do and I just feel like at best I am playing a game of musical chairs. The Sisyphean nature of the struggle makes it hard to get up in the morning. I lay there and think how little data I would generate if I were to just not get out of bed.
In the game of life that is musical chairs, most of the more recent comfortable and happy making chairs I've found are off-line. At that point I do feel better. That's perhaps not as I envisaged things at around 1999 when I was most optimistic about the online world but here we are and it largely remains an option.
Offline is so much worse. At a computer you can unplug your router and turn off any devices other than the desktop you are using and know with relative confidence that you are not being surveilled at that moment. Outside is full of cameras, microphones, and Wi-Fi+bluetooth chipsets on cars, buildings, drones, other people's phones etc. all of which can be used to track you.
My musical chairs analogy was more about things that require plugging into the networks like paying for parking, sms-based 2FA etc. becoming more common. Its become harder and harder to avoid carrying a monitoring device in your day to day life.
I know people like to wax nostalgic for the past but I 100% would feel better if I lived in a pre-smart tech world.
I’ve already basically done most of these things as a matter of digital hygiene basically for as long as tech companies have started doing cross-site tracking. The main exception is the “use tech from non-US companies” because, let’s face it, it’s mostly trash designed around whatever idiosyncratic opinions about technical architecture the maintainers felt like fixating on rather than what makes a scalable and usable product for non-technical end users.
I really don’t think that this gossip level reporting is a good source to say that all software from Europe is shit. Politico is basically reposting a shitpost here; every platform where people communicate are going to have complaint threads on them. And honestly, shame on Politico for this; it’s bad journalism. We never actually find out what’s actually wrong with Element Pro or why they’re complaining except that “buttons” (in big bad scare quotes no less!) are in the wrong places! Crime of the century! But does that mean that they are on different places altogether, or are they just a few pixels away? We’ll never know.