Proton the privacy company… “follow us on reddit”?

I think I’ll cancel my services with them now. Thanks for making it easy. Idiots.

every website I’ll ever visit and have visited in the past might be a threat

In that sense, you are right. However, there are ways to cloak your IP address and location.

Privacy is a massive rabbit hole depending on what threat you are trying to protect yourself from. Sometimes, the effort (and the stuff that breaks along the way) isn’t worth it.

If location implies an area extending 300 km in either direction, does it really matter? To most people, not really.

Location could also imply IP address-based location, and not necessarily GPS.

Seinfeld is a more “family friendly” option.

But Curb Your Enthusiasm can be put on an endless loop, and I’d still laugh my ass off at every episode.

Time feels way faster as you get older.

It’s also pretty grim that the people you know are either dying, dead, or have a life altering illness that comes out of nowhere. I feel like there’s a funeral in my family once a month, rather than once every decade.

Great list, but what the hell are these doing there?

Cloud Storage

• Dropbox - Syncs files across devices with version history.
• Google Drive - Enables real-time collaboration on Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
• OneDrive - Integrates with Microsoft Office for document collaboration.

But glass is easy to sterilize at the point of purchase and refilled. There are “zero waste” stores that do something like this already, so there’s nothing to bring in other than bulk product (instead of 100 cans or bottles).

Doesn’t work everywhere in our current, high-profit, low-care business models.

I don’t disagree at all. I wish we had more options.

More glass with compatibility with mason jar lids would be a win for everyone. You can recycle 5them if you want, reuse them easily, and they can remain in circulation for a very long time.

The only caveat with glass is that you have too many idiots breaking them on sidewalks, bike lanes, and parks.

It’s not really the metal that’s bad, but the coating on the inside of the metal (in contact with your food/water), that raises concerns.

Glass is best, but food/water in glass containers are often considerably more expensive.

Much of DOGE’s work is avoiding oversight and transparency…

How can any voter be OK with this?

If you’re a BowFlex user, however, you might be surprised to learn that the company, in its privacy policy, also grants itself the right to collect and share data on how you smell.

WTF??

Also, data collection like that should be so clear, obvious, and only enabled through an opt-in, so nobody should ever be “surprised” to find out about it!

Tonal, for example, says it stores video recordings of a user’s workout as well as data about the position and movements of their head, arms, hands, feet, legs, and torso.

Broooo???

I absolutely hate how every product is designed as a trojan horse for data collection.

So many of these features can be offloaded to local-only processes, and it kills me that users are paying for equipment, often paying for a subscription to use the platform, and then have their data used as another revenue stream.

Many others can be run on a variety of servers, with a variety of apps.

Yes,but smaller market share means less optimistic future, or not enough incentive to continue the project, or harder to convince someone to use it.

Sure, but most people these days are expected to have email, and signing up isn’t any more complicated than that. It’s not that hard.

Signing up isn’t the hurdle… Convincing someone they should install a second app for messaging when nobody they know uses it would be a bigger challenge.

Google and Apple teaming up would effectively eliminate basic SMS, but that likely wouldn’t solve issues like privacy or data ownership.

You send them the video in OP. Or try to send them literally any video via SMS.

Dude, I went on a mission to convince the people I know to move away from corporately owned email and to use a private provider. It was excrutitingly difficult, and I don’t think a single person switched.

Family would constantly “not get it” and continued to email my old email address, too, like they thought this was a phase. lol. It was insane.

Personally, I find switching messenger providers to be more difficult than email, so I’m not hopeful that someone would convert without having some strong motivations first.

I mean, Signal (the messenger that Privacy Guides recommends) only works with Signal, right? And if I recall, it was difficult or not even possible to back up your texts from one device to another.

SMS, especially for anyone who isn’t tech-savvy in the least, “just works” without any setup.

How do you convince people to move away from that?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t, I’m saying it doesn’t appeal to the majority of people.

And don’t forget that when those apps eventually die, or the company behind them goes sour, you have to switch EVERYTHING again, and hope that everyone you know does, too.

This has NEVER been an issue with SMS. So for all the bad, it does one thing really well: convenience.

As much as I’d love to move to a secure message platform, this definitely falls into the “more trouble than it’s worth” category, and that’s disappointing.

I can vouch. Been a user for years with multiple accounts.

They actually seem like an ethical company above just one that values user privacy.

What would be the point of AI replacing people to create art?

The essence of art is that it came from the mind and talent (or skill) from another human being. It’s a thread connecting our humanity through time and space.

No one will be looking back at AI art the same way we look back hundreds or thousands of years at paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, or even real photographs.

We might enjoy some AI generated content for the novelty, but it’s soulless.

We adopted a yellow-headed amazon (parrot) in his 40s. For months he was shy and kept to himself.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, he began whistling songs, cat-calling, saying his name, asking for a cracker, etc. He had like an entire repertoire!

Most unexpected, funniest thing that’s happened with any of our pets.

Close second is a cat that would play fetch, like a dog!

That is WILD! This technology could be put to good use, but corporations are abusing it to build profiles on their users so they can weaponize the data.

Random photo I had saved (of a Da-Brim cycling accessory):

Don’t forget that every self-driving car is a 360 camera that’s able to capture real-time photo and video for the car’s manufacturer (and whoever they want to sell this data to).

This would include images inside your garage, even when the car is off.

And they have microphones that can record conversations inside the vehicle, too.

These vehicles, in my opinion, are in many cases more privacy invading than phones.

And with Elon in government, with his BFF President at his side, concerns over deregulation and weaponizing these of moving spy devices seems like a future reality.

And honeybees even often outcompete native pollinators, which is bad for biodiversity.

Of course, Texas has to incentivize this type of destruction:

"In Texas, the law qualifies people who own between five and 20 acres of land for tax breaks if they rear bees for five years. "