I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
It is an absolute nightmare, but you can gain some privacy back with ublock origin, an adblocking DNS on your phone, Firefox, a VPN, and ditching all things google/meta. As I type this out, I am reminded how much effort it takes to claw back your privacy…yeah OP, I’m with you, the modern internet is a profit-at-all-cost cesspool that can eat a moldy potato!
Ditching google is the most difficult part, especially when iPhone is so locked down :(
I’ve primarily been an iphone user over the years and was recently hand me downed an older pixel. Using grapheneOS and firefox, I was surprised to see there were only about a dozen extensions available, good ones, but not all of them like I’d assumed. Then I discovered chrome on android has zero, is that right? I cannot believe that there are so many people that use a mobile browser without an adblocker. On iOS safari, I have dozens of incredible extensions (basically countless through the app store) that make the internet useable again. I’m happy to see safari opening up.
You can get any extensions you want on Android with Firefox Beta (or Nightly) by creating a custom collection at addons.mozilla.org
Firefox on mobile has piles of apps generally now. No need for a list or nightly or beta.
There’s only a subset of addons available normally, this method lets you make any addons you want available on Android. This is what I’m referring to: https://www.androidpolice.com/install-add-on-extension-mozilla-firefox-android/
You can put Google-free Android forks on your phone or tablet. My phone is LinageOS with minimal Google footprint and my tablet has no gapps at all.
I use Gmail, Tasks, Drive and Calendar for the sake of convenience, since I could self-host all of these.
Do banking apps work?
Of course they work. Though if you’re rooted, you just need to install/flash a module named “Magiskhide” which will basically hide the apps your want from your root, as a lot of banking apps consider a rooted device not secure enough… (even if it completely is but whatever)
I’ve been looking into custom roms but for a bit but it will take a while before I feel confident enough to try it. I want to try it but I’m afraid that I will get locked out certain services like banks or ms365 for work. I’ll look into this Magishide tool.
(sorry for the late reply) Custom ROMs are something else and are in no way necessary for rooting the phone. You can totally root your phone with Magisk while staying on your manufacturer’s ROM, or flash (install) a custom ROM without rooting the phone and not being locked from anything your Android phone can already do. But you won’t have full access to your phone if you don’t root and will eventually need at least some degree of power over it, which is why most people root their phone too. But custom ROMs alone are also great, you can check if there are good ones (or if there are any) on xda-developers by searching your phone on it. But be careful and follow the instruction to the letter: you won’t be able to blame anybody for bricking your phone (look for hard brick and soft brick) as all authors clearly state they’re in no way responsible if you fuck up something and your phone doesn’t work anymore. The best thing to do as a beginner is to search deeply on the internet for days if not weeks in order to feel more confident and more importantly understand what is a ROM, what is a recovery (TWRP being the main one), a bootloader, etc, so you know what you’re going to do.
Consorsbank does. No Magisk required.
How so? You can just use an iPhone without running any Google apps on it, right?
For mobile adblockers I recommend AdAway: https://github.com/AdAway/AdAway
Firefox mobile now supports extensions like uBlock Origin, although that only works for the web and not the whole phone.
I’m down to using Facebook in Firefox again. And reddit very occasionally too. Gostery,AdBlock, privacy possum, so many addons available for Firefox.
When you say Google/Meta, do not create a vacuum for people to fall into the Apple fake privacy rabbit hole. Androids can be used without a Google account. Apple devices are practically impossible to use without Apple account.
It’s sad, 10-15 years ago it was as simple as Adblock :/
Now it’s nearly unavoidable and/or requires quite a few changes to your native device to make it more secure
Yeah, for all of Jobs’ “vision” cell phones were really just a way to profit of of free information.
Be more optimistic friend.
Government will continue to do surveillance but they can be constrained by the legal system. Corpos will build ai to sell you bullshit off whatever data they can get on you but you can block their ads and leave their platforms. Encryption is math and can’t be stopped by a law. UK law makers won’t be able to enforce their law even if it’s passed.
It’s cheaper than ever to run your own server, and will continue to get cheaper. Manage your own digital footprint and work towards decentralizing the web. Don’t worry so much about other people, they’ll come around eventually.
This is being made increasingly difficult every day, with huge corporations openly discussing the advantages of killing the open internet as it is today: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/blob/main/README.md
The endgame seems to be to turn you into a mindless, agency-less zombie slave to these corps with your input being ads delivered to your (sub)conscious, and your output being you mindlessly doing whatever the ad wanted you to do. This is as much psychological – and social – divide-and-rule as it is technologically damaging, so even if you don’t know (or want) to run your own server, you will end up being affected, fractured and sharded against your own community all the same.
A sample case in point: It is getting more and more difficult to run your own servers when you are forbidden to spend your own money from your own electronic devices to pay for goods and services without being surveilled (and pounded by ads).
Most payment apps rely on device attestation “security”, that requires your mobile device be “compliant” to someone else’s rules, standards and endgames, to the effect that if you want to change your own bought-and-owned device in a way your ad-masters disapprove, you will be prevented from making payments from your device – and more significantly thereby, from participating in your community, economy and society unless you bend over to one of many private corporations that want you just as bent and broken as the rest of the people they already have.
This is pure, unadulterated evil at your doorstep, ringing your doorbell.
I know I probably sound far more pessimistic and hopeless than things actually are, but that is better than being asleep at the wheel. I do not wish to rob you of your optimism (I am actually happy that we still have it), but unless we see our world for what it really is today, it will be far more difficult to know and drive what it may become in the future.
Here is another example of how hard some people have worked to turn your own devices against you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
Thanks for the video link. Very interesting. This is how all computers will be built eventually. So seize the means of computation until we can…
This is absolutely not a “this is fine” comment
But the US “intelligence agencies” have been spying on the US and the world for 2 decades now pretty openly. Yes it’s worse that other countries are joining or ramping up spying, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing this is a new development. The evil fuckos who up at the 3 letter agencies and equivalents around the world know where true power resides and they know methods of controlling people. The fact that France is doing this stuff should be a sign to the French (and everyone) that the government fears the people. A government which fears the people demanding that it serve the people is no longer legitimate. If the French ripped apart their shit from the root it would be justified… as an outsider. They’ve done the proper procedure of ask, then demand… now force. But Americans got out shit to sort out which tbh is incredibly more fucked up so I will leave the French alone in that respect
What happened to the ethos of the original internet cultures that were so dominant. It’s like large swaths of that generation grew up and sold out to become the oppressors. And the other portion are being crushed by that system.
The EU is very much hit and miss. I do appreciate them putting Google, Meta, and Apple in their place, and some on the legislation regarding smart phones they have passed. But ultimately they want to have all your data for “security”.
Still, I think the situation in the US is a bit worse.
Yes, they are unfortunately not as opposed to surveillance by governments as they are by that of megacorporations. While I appreciate that they are trying to keep the likes of Google and Meta in check, I also very much dislike the several attempts to enforce data retention and essentially encryption bans.
That the Data Retention Directive was eventually annulled by the Court of Justice of the European Union gives me some hope that the legal system within EU can withstand these attempts, but maybe I am being too naive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
I also recently noticed that everything get’s more and more hostile towards the user. I observed so many apps and Websites that have hidden some big features behind a paywall recently - as if they don’t already make enough money with data collection and selling. First they make you comfortable with these QoL Stuff and then they steal it away, holding it in front of your face and want you to pay for it now, something that was free for years. It’s filthy…
I bought a lifetime license for the Spark email app. I even sent them some extra money when I learned their engineers are in the UK. Then they pushed out an update that removed the feature that caused me to buy their app in the first place, locked half of the other features behind a subscription, and said that since it’s an “update”, the previous lifetime subscriptions don’t count. Mother fuckers! Fuck the Spark team. I uninstalled it, gave them a 1 star review, and installed Fair Email. It’s a better app in most ways, is completely free, and is privacy focused. The only thing is that it’s missing the one feature I paid for, which was to be able to long press an email, tap “search for all emails by sender”, and then bulk action them. It was really useful for bulk deleting all Amazon confirmations and stuff like that.
I’m concerned about when governments get ahold of usable quantum computers.
We’ll always be one step ahead of the bad guys. Fortunately we have places like this where like-minded people can gather who understand the dangers.
AI has entered the chat
Honestly it’s one of my personal reasons for disliking AI. I (let alone most of our kids) don’t want or need a reason to think less, let alone own less of my content. FFS.
It truly sucks. but seeing decentralized/open-source projects - Lemmy, I2P/TOR, Linux, etc. warms my heart. It helps me see there’s truth out there and pushes me forward down this path.
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it’ll look either
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more like where the vikings live
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more like where Americans die
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There’s a reason why I’m structuring a home server build right now, I’m so tired of this internet, I just want to enjoy my things and not feel like an asshole supporting these companies. I don’t want to live in a dystopian net, even though we’re slowly approaching it. What will I do about private messaging? Who knows, I might have to make my own app to encrypt my messages before sending them through another app.
