Let’s be honest, opt in telemetry features will collect so little data they might es well not exist.

Considering that ot is supposed to reduce user tracking by tracking ads directly, it’s a net gain for everyone.

Or have a public social media account and a ‘business’ one I use to share my own music or something? My dual-boxing MMO accounts?

Wanna bet that you are already breaking TOS with both of these things? And I don’t mean SimpleLogins TOS, but the one of the social media platform and MMO. Most big platforms only allow one account per user, no matter how the account is used. Sometimes you can create a business account, but that’s still linked to your private one. Same goes for pretty much any online game, you are limited to one account per person.

I don’t think that there is any sense behind these limitations, but simplelogin isn’t concerned about that, they only care about the legality of your actions and limit their service accordingly.

Technically yes, but the Google and Googlegetmanager scripts are used in so many cases that you want to keep them active permanently.

Considering that most VPN adresses are linked to suspicious, if not outright illegal, activity, its quite reasonable to assume that they end up on automatic block lists.

Proton pretty much always complies with government access requests, and they never claimed otherwise. They, however, don’t have access to the content of your emails due to their encryption, meaning the data they give to governments is restricted to what you give them. They can at most give out your name, payment information, and backup mail if you voluntarily gave that info to them.

If YouTube decides to mangle the original content to fight back… then maybe that’s finally the impetus people will need to switch platforms.

Switch to where? Everything that’s not just a different youtube frontend is either shit or doesn’t pay the creators. Federated FOSS sites aren’t an option either cause once an influx of users outside the tech bubble happens, the server capacity will hit ground bottom.

Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

It’s hard to say what really is the better option. You can’t completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.

I’d be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.

But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that’s it. They don’t care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.

The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google “valorant cheat .exe” and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.

This is not a ban and it was never meant to be. They just force tiktok to sell the US market to a US company. Said US company will continue the platform just like it is at the moment, just with a bit more of that sweet American propaganda mixed into it. Tiktok won’t be gone, all that data will just go to the NSA instead of the CCP, that’s all they wanted.

Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn’t inherently malicious, unlike the latter.

I’d, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that’s besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn’t exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.

What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That’s purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.

Their goal isn’t to completely shut this down, Google is fully aware that that’s impossible to achieve. They just want to annoy enough people and make it complicated enough so that the userbase doesn’t grow any further.

It also depends on your definition of cyberbullying. Is a mean comment under one or two posts already enough? Does it have to be consistent? Does it have to be from the same Person?

I don’t want to undersell Cyberbullying, it definitely is a problem, but a lot of these surveys have vague questions that can be interpreted in massively different ways, both from the person that answers them and from the researchers that formulated them.

To keep it short, there isn’t really any privacy.

Servers are public and Private messages are stored without any envryption. If you delete your account then the messages stay and can still be found with your unique ID (just like Reddit). From what ive read Discord also stores your HWIDs and monitors your running processes (with a valid reason considering their game integration). Some say they only store that locally, others claim something else, haven’t seen any proof for either side so far.

The problem really boils down to the fact that people treat discord as a private messenger instead of a public forum despite it clearly beeing the latter.

Can they find out?

No, not really. The Metadata doesn’t have a “pirated” flag and something like the product key doesn’t get saved. Microsoft themselves probably know due to their telemetry but even they can’t be bothered about it. I would bet that even you send a pirated document to the Microsoft CEO, they wouldn’t notice or even care enough to look for it.

But as always there is the important rule of “don’t fuck with work stuff, ever”.

It’s already questionable why she is editing company documents on here private PC without either a dedicated and remotely managed work particition + VPN or an O365 online work account. These documents fall under far stricter data safety regulations and the way it is right now, she is personally liable for any data leaks.

Windows asks you a few times to update now or later, gives you a timer of three hours and offers you to open the closed documents again without having to use autosave.

I don’t like the forced updates either, but if you lose anything to them it can be classified as "on purpose ".

That wouldn’t hold up in court, not even in the fucked up pro corp system the US has.

Besides, they don’t need to take any photos, they already know pretty much all your habits and interests without taking a major risk.

In the case of CSAM they really have to care, if they want to or not. Otherwise the instance gets shut down pretty fast and the police will have a not so nice chat with the admin.

the only goal of tiktok is china data collection and propaganda

Data collection yes, propaganda no.

Tiktok doesn’t exist in China so pro chinese propaganda for their own citizens isn’t possible. For everyone else the algorithm will push what you interact with. Looked at the cat video half a second longer? The rest of your home feed will be cat videos.

Yes it is biasd towards propaganda due to its polarising nature that creates engagement, but it doesn’t push a specific type. It can be left or right wing and pro or contra China/USA, depending on your engagement.

I still wouldn’t recommend the app. The sheer amount of time it tries to phone home is scary (but Google play services is even worse in that regard) and the echo chamber it creates as well as the doom scrolling it pushes will slowly destroy your mental wellbeing. But what i cam recommend is fiddling around with the algorithm in a containerised environment.

Incomprehensible/overcomplicated ToS already get declared as void every now and then by a competent court, so they aren’t really enforceable.

They should be forced to have a simplified part and a jurist part.

This will never work. Most of the time they are this complicated to cover any potential loopholes from every angle and point of view.

Offering a simplified version will just lead to some idiot exploiting a loophole that doesn’t exist in the juristic version and once that case goes to court we have the issue of what version counts for the average consumer.

If we preface this by saying only the juristic one is legally binding and you have to read it either way, then the simplified one lost its purpose.

Who is the simplified version even meant for? Pretty much no one reads ToS, the only ones doing so will have some kind of business relations. Be it the ToS of their Software or their supplier, they will need the juristic version either way.

Besides all that, most Software ToS are at least comprehensible if you take a few seconds to think about what you read.

I also wouldn’t mind Biden shooting him. Maybe the Republicans then change their minds about gun controll.