freedickpics

• You have to hand over a huge amount of personal info about yourself & others to estate agents when renting a property - which they then sell to advertisers & you have no opt-out
• Similarly, landords can require you to use a proprietary app for rent payments, which of course collects & sells your private data too
• Burner phones are effectively illegal (telcos are required to collect & retain ID of every phone number they register)
• Telcos and ISPs are required to collect & retain logs of all your activities for a minimum of two years
• In some cities police can detain & search you & your property for no reason, and require you to remove any facial coverings
• It's illegal to refuse to hand over passwords to cops (6 years jail is the max term I think)
• Police can hack your device, take over your social media, delete or modify your data for an investigation, or survey any digital device if they "think it is likely to be used by someone subject to a warrant" (this particular bill was announced and then rushed through parliament in less than 24 hours to give the public as little time as possible to protest it
• Some social media sites (including github(wtf)) are now required to age-verify all users beginning next month. Which will obviously lead to mass leaks & breaches of private data which the gov will turn a blind eye to

This is Australia. I hate it here

This shit should be strictly opt-in. As much as I hate overbearing governments, they should've stepped in and made it illegal to use already collected data for a new purpose without first obtaining permission. What about people who lost access to their accounts or who've died or something?

As much as I'd enjoy getting to work with more Macs I don't think workplaces will deploy them at scale for the cost alone

What's the alternative? Linux on phones is basically dead besides a few hobby projects that will never have enough of a following to be a serious contender to the duopoly

It's a sign of rot in our culture. People feel entitled to know everything about others around them. It's the same mindset whether it's trawling through security camera footage or stalking someone on social media or irl. Technology has accelerated the trend and reinvented voyeurism as a mainstream hobby

At this rate we might finally see the year of the Linux desktop. I don't know anyone who likes Windows 11 it's been bad enough to convert even die-hard Windows fans to Linux

In what sense?

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Whether it's companies, gov or cops they'll spin any lie to get what they want

Shoot the cameras down

They'll never stop trying until it gets passed

Not stupid, just uninformed. A lot of people are confused by how things like targeted ads work and because of that they just accept it as inevitable. They think "This website knows what I searched for on another website because it's all linked. That's how the internet works" and once you break down how the tracking is actually done, they realise it's not infallible

It's the same thing as people not knowing how planes stay in the air or what makes a car engine work. Nobody can be an expert on everything. I don't mean to give you a lecture btw, I just think it's counterproductive to dismiss people. But of course there are exceptions and some people just don't want to know

I was talking to a friend the other day and she mentioned she'd searched for a product online and then started getting ads for it, and asked how often it'd happened to me. She was very surprised when I said never and I explained that I'd been using an ad blocker for the last 15 years. And by the end of our conversation I'd walked her through setting it up on her devices and now she's one step closer to regaining her privacy

I often find people really aren't happy with their privacy being undermined but they don't realise there are things they can do about it. They'll say things like "well it's happening to everyone else too" as a coping mechanism but it's not something they want. More education is critical