inb4 the wEll yOu hAvE nO eXpEcTaTiOn oF pRiVaCy iN pUbLiC comments
I hate this argument that people use. Technology has fundamentally redefined what it means to be observed. Someone casually glancing at you in public is a completely different thing to having your movement tracked, permanently stored, and linked to you wherever you go. People absolutely have a right to expect a degree of privacy even in public settings
There's a pretty comprehensive archive of the sub on archive.org so there's no immediate threat of losing it all, but something better organised to look back on would be great
Sure, i’m more paranoid but I don’t believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.
I mean things are dire but it's not as if nothing has improved. Even just 10-15 years ago most websites weren't using any encryption (or if they did it was only for login pages). Anything you read or sent could be seen by your ISP or someone snooping on the network. Encrypted messaging basically didn't exist or was very niche. VPNs weren't nearly as widespread either. Go back another decade and Tor Browser didn't yet exist (publicly) so there was no easy way to hide your location or stay anonymous online. Governments and companies have clamped down, yes, but our arsenal of privacy tools has never been bigger.
The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape
You can block a lot of this dynamic tracking with NoScript. This will break some websites but it's worth the inconvenience of a messed up page or needing to find an alternate site
Gone back to paying for nearly everything in cash (good for budgeting I find too, can't make impulse purchases if I only have enough money to buy what I came to the shops for). I also got a couple more friends to switch to Signal and make some other privacy-related changes. Slowly getting there
Depends where you live. I'm in Australia and phone companies aren't allowed to activate a number without tying it to an ID. So criminals just use stolen IDs and regular people don't get privacy. Also YMMV but virtually every service that needs phone verification won't accept VoIP numbers anymore
Tutamail is the only service I know of that still doesn't need anything but I don't expect it to last. Email providers that don't make you verify anything end up being used for spam and then websites just start blocking their domain from being used for account creation
It's just a bullshit game of political pride at this point. Anti-privacy pundits criticised the UK gov for "caving to the US" after they dropped the previous order so now they're doubling down on trying to take away their citizens privacy in the name of standing up to the US. How brave. Not that the US gov gives a shit about privacy either
Very late reply but I've been running UBPorts on a Fairphone 4 for a couple of years and the camera works fine (besides very oversaturated colours in photos, but I'm not sure if that's a software issue or the phone itself)
It's also absurdly lacking in features compared to Android/iOS (never mind app support) and the dev team is so small they can barely maintain existing device support. VoLTE is still unsupported in the majority of devices. The OS doesn't even have basic security features like drive encryption
I like UBPorts a lot but I think the alternative/FOSS smartphone market is too fragmented between it and SailfishOS/PostMarketOS that none of them will emerge with enough adoption to be real competitors to the iOS/Android duopoly. Didn't mean to be overly negative. Just my two cents
Security/privacy. With a dumb phone you're restricted to standard phone calls, SMS messages, and (sometimes) email. All of which are ancient standards that weren't built with security in mind. Your network provider likely keeps logs on your calls and texts
You can also take a complete backup of the iPhone using macOS’s Finder (the phone should popup there as a “drive” once connected via cable) and then backup everything to a HDD/SSD via TimeMachine
Just to piggyback on your comment, it is possible to directly back up an iOS device to external storage, but it's not officially supported. You have to create a symbolic link from the default backup location (~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup) to the external drive
This is the real problem. As more and more countries push for laws like this I think sites will just adopt blanket age-verification for simplicity's sake instead of having to constantly keep track of which countries/states in countries require it
inb4 the wEll yOu hAvE nO eXpEcTaTiOn oF pRiVaCy iN pUbLiC comments
I hate this argument that people use. Technology has fundamentally redefined what it means to be observed. Someone casually glancing at you in public is a completely different thing to having your movement tracked, permanently stored, and linked to you wherever you go. People absolutely have a right to expect a degree of privacy even in public settings