this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Vivaldi use it's own sync server since ever, Google don't permit Google sync for other browser than Chrome itself, it's a degoogled Chromium and no really need of extensions, due to inbuild blocker and other tools, even Dark Mode for websites and Page Filters. It has less relations with Google than Mozilla, where your account data is shared with Alphabet (a no-go for me). But yes, it's the only Chromium usable related to privacy. Vivaldi's business modell isn't based on ads or third party investors, It is the only EU Browser, apart the KDE Konqueror, on eye level to the US (Chinese) hegemony of big Companies (my Main reason to use it)
Where are you? Brit here.
Feels like we're fighting a losing battle to people who you simply don't care about privacy, who use the built in browser of the OS; the default.
Strangely, when I asked them for their home address and peccadillos they always refuse/walk away. They even ask me to turn away when they enter passwords. What's that about?!
Spain here. Yes, most listened argument "I've nothing to hide" or "Companies already knows all about you" and similar BS. You can't do more than warn them, explaining that online privacy is synonymous with security, if they don't pay attention, well, Darwin approves.
Data that companies sell to others puts it outside our control, we do not know how they treat and protect it or even continue to spread over the Internet.
Greetings to Spain!
To my mind, 'they' are going to get hold of your personal information, habits, pecadillos eventually. I don't have to intentionally make it easy for them.
The lack of engagement by the public at large with the right to privacy; most people seem to have given up, resigned to being completely owned.
It is not that difficult to prevent private and important data from being leaked. It's not about becoming invisible, just slow browsing with TOR behind a VPN with difficulties on many web pages. We must differentiate between private data related to the person and the activity, this naturally must be hidden or spoofed as much as possible, and on the other hand technical data, necessary for the pages to be able to display the content properly (screen resolution, public IP to display the correct language, operating system, desktop or mobile, etc.). This is data that does not compromise privacy when it coincides with millions of other users. All other can be blocked with a good ad/trackerblocker and some common sense to avoid the existing traps and dirty tricks used by the compañies.
Thanks for the dirty ticks reference. That's going to be fun to read! May give me an idea.
Much of my browsing these days is on account-based web pages and apps, so it's unavoidable, but I use addy.io to avoid a single email address and try not to enter any identifying data like full name; and use one-time credit cards. I do what I can to minimise anything resembling a tracking file being on my PC for any length of time if it is downloaded at all (pi-hole, uBlock Origin, cookie autodelete, VPN, i2p, blah blah), but it's a losing battle as we all know.
I'm trying to only interact with LLMs locally, and be generic with my queries for Perplexity (my current fav engine). With LLM being trained on all our data without our agreement, it's a concern.
OpenAI say that they're not making a profit on even their pro plan. You know what they say about free services and being the product.
Try Andi, it's the most private (active privacy protection, anonymous, no account, no ads, no cookies, no logs, random proxie, own reader mode, watch YouTube videos sandboxed in the search results, apart the best in accuracy in an independent AI benchmark. I use it since 2 years as main search by default. https://andisearch.com/