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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • I really think that’s a separate issue, which needs to be discussed as a completely separated issue. I agree ads by their nature are manipulative, they serve the website and the advertiser not the user. I think that once ads are non user-tracking then we can have a discussion about advertising ethics and deceptive advertising (online ads have always been terrible even before they were privacy invading) but you can’t have that discussion when it’s mixed in with privacy issues. Only once you take away the privacy issues then we can have the conversation about ad-pollution versus website revenue.




  • I find they’re a pain to use and I only have one out of social pressure, and privacy or not I’m constantly confused on why they’re so popular.

    I just use a throwaway account and have the rule of not putting in any data that I don’t want to be read - which is barely anything any way because I do all my computing on my Linux laptop. I figure if they’re collecting location data and recording me then they’re just associating it with “random guy x” because I’ve never given it anything else. I should look in to one of the de-Googled Android distributions but I have so little interest and energy in anything to do with it, if it could be made totally private I would still rarely use it.



  • Only issue is I recently opened another account because theyre leaving lemmy eventually and currently my posts dont federate and all my subscriptions are pending.

    Nothing’s concrete yet. I have accounts on several instances for their various advantages, but Beehaw is what I’ve settled on as my main “default” for now. The Subscribe Pending is a bug, I don’t think it affects your posts federating so they’re separate issues if that’s the case.






  • For power users, I recommend to use a plugin like NoScript though, to block Google/CookieLaw’s hidden JS spyware on the site (they’re on 2/3th of the web tho).

    https://noscript.net

    Beware, NoScript will break some sites, and will require you to manually enable/whitelist JS (JavaScript) sources for sites + CDNs to fix this again.

    Can you not use uBlock Origin to block 3rd party scripts? Enable advanced mode and add * * 3p-script block to My Rules.

    I ask because I want to keep the number of extensions to a minimum.




  • I was playing a degree of devil’s advocacy there because I was interested in how the person I replied to would respond.

    I don’t think it needs to be as intensive as that, I think a small amount of education would go a long way. Like teaching school classes how to install an operating system on a blank machine as a basic entry point - that would do wonders for gaining a basic appreciation for ownership over computing.






  • Completely agree. Now my hot take for this thread:

    If governments some time in the 90s had decided from the start to ban computer hardware from being sold with pre-installed software then we wouldn’t have this problem. If everyone had to install their own operating system from scratch, which like you say isn’t hard if it’s taught, it would have killed the mystery around computing and people would feel ownership over their computers and computing.