• 2 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Twelve years ago Moto X was launched by Motorola, at that time controlled by Google. I had it and at any moment you could say “Hello Google, what time is it?” and it responded. I was constantly listening. All the time. And it was a perfectly normal phone regarding battery life or data usage. TWELVE years ago, imagine how much easier would be to implement that now, with more powerful and efficient chips and bigger batteries.

    From an article about Moto X back then: “If you want to take a selfie, you should be able to simply say “Take a selfie!” In short, your smartphone should live up to its name. That’s the goal with the Moto Voice and Moto Assist software integrated into the second generation Moto X smartphone. And to do that, the Moto X is always listening, for verbal commands from the user and also ambient cues of the context. That emergent behavior is spawned by complex interactions between the software and hardware”

    Only much latter I came to the conclusion that Google was making its first experiments regarding mass surveillance.


  • It gives me exactly the same message but I’m not using a VPN. When I use the external viewer option with mpv using yt-dlp I only get video without audio. I can download the video fine using yt-dlp and then watch it with mpv, but if I try to stream to mpv while downloading to watch it real-time it gives an ffmpeg error: can’t recognize format… weird.










  • We are talking about privacy, not security, like when being individually targeted by the state or someone else, that’s another topic. Privacy-wise the main source of information about you comes from apps that collect all the information available (which is huge), they sell it to data brokers which in turn sell it other companies that tipically try to sell you something or want to know your habits (like your employers). If you don’t use their apps they can’t collect information about you and sell it, and that happens when you migrate to free software. Only location will still be collected because mobile service providers log it and sell it, but there are ways to mitigate that too.


  • Turns out the older your data the less it is worth

    That’s why I think is not the best approach to delete your accounts. Keep an old phone with all your accounts and every now and then watch a random video, make a random search, follow a random profile, and so on with all your accounts. Over time your true profile will become obsolete and buried under fake data.



  • Social Media is not the only problem, it’s far worse than that and you will not solve it leaving social media. Your employers get all the information about you from what is called ‘data brokers’ which are the ones who buy the data collected by all the apps that you install in your phone and sell it to everyone interested, not only companies trying to sell you something, but also employers like the case you posted and also state agencies, who dodge in this way breaking the law by spying you. That’s the big business of data collection. Here an investigation made by german journalists How data brokers sell our location data