I legitimately do not, and have never had, any of the usual social media.

“Well that can’t be right. Highly suspicious. What do you have to hide?”

And just like that we’re at silly made up hypothetical situations to drive fear and an agenda. That’s not even worth entertaining.

It’s all hypothetical until it isn’t anymore. You’re literally the slowly boiled frog.

That’s like piling all your paperwork on your office desk in a giant tower in the order they came in and arguing that’s just as good as sorting them into files and putting them in the cabinet.

Can’t be late if it doesn’t arrive at all.

Mine used to say “can you make the picture on my screen go away?”. The “picture” was always a pop up with very clearly written instructions or questions like “would you like to save before closing?”.

So they actually, provably, lost the ability to recognize writing.

That reminds me, a customer at a place I was working front desk for once managed to shove their money into a small gap between the cash slot and the outer case of a vending machine. I’m talking paper money and it was completely gone, so they really had to work to achieve this. Of course they got mad at me for being unable to open the case or get a technician to do it on a Sunday morning.

show me what you were doing

Nothing! I did nothing! Things just happened!

My mother once threatened to evict me (was still living with them) because I asked her to back up her important files for me to carry them over to the new office computer I had set up for her.

She flat out refused to even attempt it or answer any of my investigative questions. This woman had been using windows computers for work for over 20 years at this point, but the thought of opening an explorer window apparently terrified her so much we got into an actual shouting match over it.

If your friend is an EU citizen, they might have some luck with a GDPR request to delete all their data.

They also might not. Meta technically would have to comply, but there is no real way to know if they did.

What’s the purpose of bass players?

Well, somebody has to wake up, wash, dress and feed the drummer before practice.

Become unavailable on non-private messengers. Explain your reasons if asked, but stay stubborn. (And yes, it will turn out that a subset of people you know don’t give a shit about staying in contact with you.)

Nope. You cannot.

Of course they are. You can pay or consent to tracking.

You called bullshit on it being common on the continent, I provided examples from the continent.

At least one German outlet has been shown to still track you after paying. Just a bit less. So they use a rubber with a few holes poked in.

the user can simply choose not to read the article, so there’s an option where they don’t get fucked.

We are rapidly nearing a point where you can’t read online news from any major (ergo “widely considered somewhat credible”) source without one of those schemes. So I’d argue that the alternative is to just not get access to online news, and that may be considered too much pressure to still consider consent as voluntary.

Sadly, newspapers are not considered “platforms”. A platform is a site that publishes user generated content, so lemmy or facebook. And not all platforms are large platforms too.

So while this is a good first step, it doesn’t cover all online services.

www.spiegel.de

www.faz.net

www.sueddeutsche.de

www.heise.de

www.golem.de

www.derstandard.at

www.repubblica.it/

It’s not a grey area, it’s clearly illegal (consent has to be given voluntarily. If you can’t use the site without paying, that’s not voluntary). Agencies so far just decided to look the other way and play dumb. There are lawsuits ongoing.

German news outlets all do it. The data protection agencies have sadly so far ruled it’s ok (there are still ongoing lawsuits afaik).