And only on mobile.

Still, a decentralized protocol, not a platform, would have a much easier time circumventing stupid laws like this, as well as censorship.

As someone who has most of her socialization on IRC now… Eww, mIRC is proprietary and for Windows. Maybe it’s just me having learned about IRC only a couple years ago and thus not having a sentimental attachment, but why use it if you have open-source ones like Hexchat, Irssi or Weechat?

“And the government officials can sell this data to me. Relatively inexpensive too”.

That’s cool. But I doubt every place they park on the street or in counts as an official “parking spot”.

Just strap them into a stroller tethered to the back of the EV.

They need data collected by Windows themselves though.

Not to mention an XMPP server is lighter than even Conduit, let alone Synapse!

If it is a public groupchat - why not?

What about using a normal, non-Cloudflare VPS for this?

I am mostly weirded out by the position of the zero. In Celsuis, zero is in the point that very visibly impacts the world. In Farenheit? Random winter temperature.

AND there have been news that RCS can be blocked for rooted phones and custom operating systems!

I don’t see them getting better either - so at least I, maybe because I am not educated enough, think the solution is also in learning to rip out the privacy invasions rather than waiting for regulation or privacy-conscious models.

Charging at home is only for those who live in houses though. Or at least have some indoor parking spot.

I am uncomfortable with this as a permanent solution because new cars of today are old cars of tomorrow. Apparently at least in some vehicles, the telematics module is possible to remove with loss of some functionality - seen some videos and posts on that. I think we need an iFixit-like database comparing vehicles on that front - how easy is the unit to remove and what functions it affects. To be fair, the ones I’ve seen were on newer gas vehicles, so idk if EVs usually have that integrated tighter.

IDK about houses, but this would be the case for people in apartment buildings. What should you do? Not even joke about “lowering a cord from your window” because it’s not guaranteed that your street parking is near your windows!

Yea, but a typical cellphone is not as easy to make private as a typical laptop or desktop. Lineage has some tradeoffs and not accessible on all devices, and Graphene needs even more specific, quite expensive hardware!

Signal is annoying to use if you don’t have a smartphone you can trust, since they do not allow registration from desktop. So either an Android VM or Signal-cli. But maybe it was just a one-off bug that the desktop client didn’t bind to signal-cli for me. Still, the fact that you need an unofficial command-line application just to register makes it not exactly user-friendly.

I was referring to him saying “privacy is a thing of the past”. And yes, while laws would be the best course of action, they’re unlikely (and in case of facial recognition - kind of impossible because at least here, the main facial recognition system is operated by the government). My point was that with what he mentioned, there is far from nothing a regular person can do for themselves and their loved ones.

This defeatist attitude, as well as “all-or-nothing” one, is one of the major privacy enemies by itself.

modern cars

You can not own a car at all, have an older one (which, granted, is not quite a universal longterm option), or from what I’ve seen in discussions - depending on the model, a lot of them can have the telematics units disconnected.

phones

Not using a smartphone, leaving it at home or using a Faraday cage (same goes for a dumbphone), using Lineage/Graphene/whatever on it.

credit cards

Cash. Even in a lot of online stores (the smaller ones, not large universal Amazon-like) I’ve shopped at you can order delivery to the store’s office (which is usually at no extra cost) and pay with cash.

Yes, there are a lot of areas where you have lost. But that doesn’t mean you should give up on everything at once then. Privacy is not binary, it is a spectrum.