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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • illah@lemmy.world
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    toPrivacy@lemmy.mlGot tracked down for my school reunion
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    3 months ago

    I’ve come to realize most of the privacy hawk arguments are based on imagined risks, and the average privacy enthusiast is an ideologically driven idealist. What is the end goal beyond pumping one’s ego?

    Especially internet privacy hawks are the worst. It just doesn’t really matter at all. Unless you are all cash, off the grid, no phone or bank account etc, you will leave a huge trail. Instagram figuring out I like basketball is the least of my worries.



  • People here trying to make this about masking bad business decisions etc don’t live in Oakland. I live here, it’s really bad right now.

    I was joking with a friend that a lot of Oakland feels like a bad 80s dystopia film…like you know those scenes with hobos warming themselves around a burning oil drum, stripped and burned out cars everywhere, piles of trash, drug addicts and prostitutes wandering around, etc? That’s literally real life in a large part of east Oakland. Like I’ve swear to god seen a half dozen girls at one intersection twerking in the middle of the street on the yellow lines, and one block over is a 5 block long encampment (16th and international/ 12th st).

    Like this shit is on Google street view! It’s not hard to find. Follow this road all the way down to Fruitvale ave, it’s like a solid mile of a 3rd world refugee camp.

    https://maps.app.goo.gl/YTVNJW36gbYTJuY67?g_st=ic



  • I’ve kind of come full circle on all this to where I no longer care. The slippery slope arguments are largely hypothetical imo…Google knows some stuff about me and attempts to show me ads, the vast majority of which I block, so what?

    I pay taxes, have a social security number, my bank and credit card companies know my purchase history, the credit bureaus know my mortgage payment and lender, etc…

    The myth of an off the grid life is exactly that, a myth. And what does it achieve for you other than some vague sense of idealistic pride?

    Google provides tremendous utility to the world essentially for free; its search engine, maps, mail client apps, browser, etc. are tools billions of people use every day. How do they maintain a global network of data centers and localize their products to hundreds of languages…none of that is free. If big companies want to give them money in an attempt at to get me to pay attention to them then so be it, let them finance it. Imagine if only those who could afford to pay could use these tools.




  • Not specific to work but this is a topic I’m interested in. It’s not a great solution, but iCloud has a legacy contact feature, and I back up all my important stuff there for availability to my heirs should something happen unexpectedly. Almost my entire family is Mac (or at least iOS / iPhone) so this works for us.

    Longer term I’d like something more comprehensive. For example I don’t have records or media to share in terms of music or reading habits to pass down…I’d be open to having my Spotify likes passed down for example.

    Anyway, for apps I imagine a similar thing could work, if you had a local environment snapshot you could pass on. But it’s tough as in 30yrs for example you might not even have hardware that could run the software of today. My buddy does digital archival stuff and this is a big part of his work, preserving the associated systems beyond just the code.







  • Honestly never liked Twitter so mastodon was like meh. But as dorky as it sounds Reddit was fun, even went to some of the meetups back in the day when it was smaller, etc. I’m now seeing the light on the federated / dWeb scene more clearly now.

    Totally agree we need a new grassroots web. The classic internet is way too centralized now and is about to become a pit of GPT-generated nonsense clogging up search engines. Stoked to jump in and support these new communities!