Well we went full circle. YouTube and Netflix killed the tv because they were young rebels that challenged status quo and had no ads, and ads on tv went very long. Now YouTube, Netflix and all others just went to shit because of annoying and long ads, or paying extra to skip ads, gathering of usage data, spying on users, selling data, censoring, and building huge monopolies. Time for the next thing.
Huh? In which country do you use LinkedIn? I created an account in Germany two years ago and did not have to do this.
LLM usage is a part of it, but it’s not the only thing. They are moving more and more in a direction that they use your usage data for marketing I feel.
For example search suggestions, where they started tracking in which location you are searching for what and tell that third party advertisers, so that they can show you ads depending on your information. Additionally they also state very clear that they will handle personal information and location data and give that to third parties if you use advanced search.
Another example is the “new tab” in which they show ads and sponsored content and track how you interact with that for showing you better ads.
There are a lot of other features which will track behavior or usage, but you have to actively use them.
Then there is the debate about the “you grant us non exclusive, worldwide” rights to use your uploaded and typed in data discussion. Yes, they need to have rights to handle my data I input, but together with the ads stuff this smells fishy. Maybe more so because this is the first ever Terms of Use and all of that has been working without that in the past.
In the meantime they set usage reports and studies active per default. You can disable it, but you have to know about that option.
All of that is far from other browsers like Chrome and Edge but they seem to slowly change in a more ads-driven way. Firefox was basically surviving on google money the last decade, and that may stop, so we have to be extra careful.
Well, Firefox tries really hard to go to shit as well with their new Privacy Policy and their first ever Terms of Service.
You could use regular Syncthing for any device other than iOS. And for iOS you could use Sushitrain/Synctrain: https://github.com/pixelspark/sushitrain
Sushitrain/Synctrain might be what you looking for. It’s a libre and new app for putting syncthing to iOS: https://github.com/pixelspark/sushitrain
I get that some things like screen resolution and basic stuff is needed, however most websites don’t need to know how many ram I have, or which CPU I use and so on. I would wish for an opt-in on this topics: So only make the bare minimum available and ask the user, when more is needed. For example playing games in the browser, for that case it could be useful to know how much ram is available, however for most other things it is not.
I know that it has that in theory, but my Firefox just reached a lower score on https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ (which was posted in this threat, thanks!) than a Safari. Firefox has good tracking protection but has an absolute unique fingerprint, was 100% identifiable as the first on the site, as to Safari, which scored a bit less in tracking but had a not unique fingerprint.
It would be nice to hammer a manually created fingerprint into the browser and share that fingerprint around. When everyone has the same fingerprint, no one can be uniquely identified. Could we make such a thing possible?
But why would any browser accept access to those metadata so freely? I get that programming languages can find out about the environment they are operating in, but why would a browser agree to something like reading installed fonts or extensions without asking the user first? I understand why Chrome does this, but all of the mayor ones and even Firefox?
Hmmmm, money
What happened 2023?
Return it. If you hold on to it (even if you block the ads and all) it will signal the manufacturer, that this practice is fine.
I very rarely ever did. And when I did I made sure I trusted the studio and knew enough. But even with this preparation I was burned most of the time preordering.
Nowadays I notice a game I like and I wait for 1-3 years, then pick it up DRM free, with all the extensions and fully patched for oftentimes 15€ or so.
Honestly, I am really happy we passed that transparent bubblegum-toy style. My hope is that we move towards physical buttons again, at least where they make sense (cars for example).
Now do another 10 or 20 parties more and maybe america could finally become a democratic country.