It merely says “go European”, not “go domestic”. Of course you can join!

When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?

Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.

“If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?

Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.

Ah, the third option.

Is that Motorola’s EULA or buying throug a carrier?

Cloased source does for privacy and security what sweeping problems under the rug does: it mitigates them, a bit, but then when they inevitably do hit, they hit hard.

About that. I heard somewhere wordpress.com and wordpress.org are seperste entities, one for-profit and the other not, but Wikipedia doesn’t mention why they share the same name.

Thank you for the correction!

The english word “free” actually carries two meanings: “free as in free food” (gratis) and “free as in free speech” (libre).

Ollama is both gratis and libre.

And about the money stuff: Ollama used to be Facebook’s proprietary model, an answer to ChatGPT and Bing Chat/Copilot. Facebook lagged behind the other players and they just said “fuck it, we’re going open-source”. That’s how and why it’s free.

Due to it being open-source, even though models are by design binary blobs, the code that interacts with them and runs them is open-source. If they were connecting to the Internet and phoning home to Facebook, chances are this would’ve been found out by the community due to the open nature of the project.

Even if it weren’t open-source, since it runs locally you could at least block (or view) Internet access.

Basically, even though this is from Facebook, one of the big bads of privacy on the Internet, it’s all good in the end.

Tenacity is a telemetry-free fork of Audacity for a start

Well, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They are a large player, so they are under a bunch of scrutiny.

But at the end of the day, WhatsApp clearly states it takes all this information. They only claim to keep your messages end-to-end encrypted.

I wonder if this applies to text messages only, or to things like voice memos, images/videos, gifs, etc. as well.

WhatsApp doesn’t let you send documents if you don’t give it full access to your files. Sure, maybe they pinky-promise don’t do anything but this is Facebook we’re talking about.

The same caveat goes for photos and videos - you can’t even send a photo if you don’t give it the camera permission and gallery access, something it clearly doesn’t need just to send a single picture.

Additionally, WhatsApp loads previews of websites. Sure, on the privacy violations list that’s pretty low-priority but I’d still like to not have a link contacted before I can take my 3 seconds to look at it and decide wether it’s worth clicking. Especially since a lot of my contacts send obvious scams (“send this message to 10 contacts for a chance to win a free iPhone” type bullshit mostly).

Revoking WhatsApp’s contacts permission will not show peoples’ nicknames - it will only ahow numbers. Yet you have to give yourself a nickname on WhatsApp, so they clearly have some interest in your contacts. Otherwise they wouldn’t block it outright when it’s an already implemented feature to show nicknames for numbers not in the contact list.

All quite suspicious if you ask me. Although I don’t work in cyber security so it’s clearly just incoherent rambing from me.

AFIAK privacy laws are still the same as before we left the EU

I can confirm

Depends. According to the GDPR for any processing of PII you need consent from the data subject or a reasonable basis why you have to act upon the data (your servers communicating with an IP adress is neccesary for your service to function). Saving the adress isn’t, so you need consent or other legislation under which you’re required to store it that trumps the GDPR. That’s the so-called “overriding legitimate interest”. It doesn’t mean “interest = money”, “data = money” therefore “data retention = overruling legitimate interest”.

Keeping leaked data or scraping it from public sources is still problematic since you do nees consent.

If you’re approached as a 3rd party by someone with data who sells them to you you are obliged to make sure the data you’re given has been aquired with consent. Often times checks aren’t in place, and ultimately, if you’re given “bad data” by the intermediary you cab always claim they kenw they should’ve notified you but didn’t.

If you’re scraping leaks, well, there’s no one between you and the data subject who can take the fall. You’ve knowingly collected “bad data” unilaterally.

Yup, it affects all chromium browsers AFAIK

A question: What is preventing the site using one huge cookie for all purposes, thus preventing fully functional use of the site without also enabling all other forms of tracking?

The GDPR was enacted in 2016 and came into effect in 2018. The UK left the EU in 2020.

I don’t think they repeales it. And besides, it applies to EU citizens regardless.

Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well.

The problem isn’t that it does it well, it’s that it did it well and it doesn’t anymore.

They dominate the market and can afford to make the search AI-inflated bullshit without any revenue losses.

Another part of the problem is the integration. Some google websites are rendered inoperable on Firefox, while others are made to have a worse experience.

A third part is giving its services preferential treatment onstead of having thekr algorithm be unbiased towards in-house services.

Edit:

Once upon a time the best browser game in town was Internet explorer. Similar stuff happened (actually even less blatant then Google). Microsoft basically controlled Web standards. The biggest sin they did was bundle IE with Windows, at least according to the US suit.

I’d look at it in regarda whether or not Google can get your data (or more somply), do you volountarily connect to Google’s servers: if not (Piped/VPN) I’d count that as being degoogled. If yes (Invidious etc.) you’re still getting the video from Google servers (albeit without ads) but Google still gets their grubby hands on some info about you. By ‘volountary’ I mean if you block connections to Google with e.g. Noscript and keep google enabled (be it tag manager, gstatic, fonts or user-facing services like Youtube). If you have to enable gstatic or tag manager on a few sites because they’re broken, I’d say that’s involountary since it’s not your reliance on Google showing as much as it’s the developers’.

Being 100% disconnected from Google servers is outright impossible these days.

The only correct choice.

It didn’t create the system, and it doesn’t have the power to replace it.

But it does support the system by being a part of it