Apologies I must’ve replied to your comment accidentally, I was meaning to post it as a general comment in the thread. It’s interesting though, there’s a middle ground somewhere but people shouldn’t need to take extreme steps to not be recorded everywhere they go. The only thing we can be certain of is that the government and companies aren’t going to give us privacy back. We have to be proactive ourselves. I just wish it didn’t have to be this way

It also keeps spamming you with notifications to update to Tahoe even on old Macs that don’t support it

inb4 the wEll yOu hAvE nO eXpEcTaTiOn oF pRiVaCy iN pUbLiC comments

I hate this argument that people use. Technology has fundamentally redefined what it means to be observed. Someone casually glancing at you in public is a completely different thing to having your movement tracked, permanently stored, and linked to you wherever you go. People absolutely have a right to expect a degree of privacy even in public settings

Sure, i’m more paranoid but I don’t believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.

I mean things are dire but it’s not as if nothing has improved. Even just 10-15 years ago most websites weren’t using any encryption (or if they did it was only for login pages). Anything you read or sent could be seen by your ISP or someone snooping on the network. Encrypted messaging basically didn’t exist or was very niche. VPNs weren’t nearly as widespread either. Go back another decade and Tor Browser didn’t yet exist (publicly) so there was no easy way to hide your location or stay anonymous online. Governments and companies have clamped down, yes, but our arsenal of privacy tools has never been bigger.

The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape

You can block a lot of this dynamic tracking with NoScript. This will break some websites but it’s worth the inconvenience of a messed up page or needing to find an alternate site

Gone back to paying for nearly everything in cash (good for budgeting I find too, can’t make impulse purchases if I only have enough money to buy what I came to the shops for). I also got a couple more friends to switch to Signal and make some other privacy-related changes. Slowly getting there

Depends where you live. I’m in Australia and phone companies aren’t allowed to activate a number without tying it to an ID. So criminals just use stolen IDs and regular people don’t get privacy. Also YMMV but virtually every service that needs phone verification won’t accept VoIP numbers anymore

Tutamail is the only service I know of that still doesn’t need anything but I don’t expect it to last. Email providers that don’t make you verify anything end up being used for spam and then websites just start blocking their domain from being used for account creation