It’s unprovable that revoking consent does anything. I like how they frame it too:

“We aren’t collecting any new data as part of this update,” the blog post says. “This is about using information that businesses already send to us to further improve your experience.”

What am I doing wrong? Why aren’t businesses just gifting me cash? Businesses just funnel data to Facebook for free which Facebook uses for profitable ventures? Jeez. Facebook’s revenue is in the billions. Boy are those businesses being fleeced! just sending free data to Facebook. Imagine if users were spending money on mobile-computers, electricity and data-connections to send data to Facebook for free too! Everyone must be chumps!

That unknowable consent revocation is pretty important. Australia is mulling over law that forces social-media companies to disable algorithmic feeds. Unless you have agents embedded in those companies it’s impossible to discern whether or not your feed has not been modified by an ‘algorithm’. This looks like Facebook trying to get ahead of these sort of implications: “Look you have a toggle! Toggle it! No further questions! You’ve turned it off; you pressed the toggle! What more do you want from us?! We’ll meddle in democracies to ensure you win! Let’s be friends!”

Pet owners are mentally deranged power tripping abusers. Animals can be your friends and you can form symbiotic relationships with them, but “owning” and controlling them via mechanical restraints is immoral and is in fact an abusive relationship. It’s sick. The owners need to be rehabilitated and shown it’s safe to form friendships with other people who can reciprocate their human emotions. Their need to enslave animals for emotional support should be treated as the problem it is.

This isn’t even regulation. The floor is not being distracted by morons shouting “it’s alive!” whilst robbing you and pointing to a computer. “Arrest that computer officer! It did all the bad things!”

No I didn’t.

Well… were they correct? Did you graduate?

This isn’t a good article @ouch. It’s dull, meandering and conflates issues.

Both Apple and Google want your identity anchored to their operating systems.

That’s true regardless of passkeys and why is Microsoft excluded here?

Logging into accounts on devices you own is the ideal scenario for passkeys. When you have to handle a colleague’s computer, it gets much more inconvenient. You could plug in a hardware key, but you don’t always have access to the ports.

What sort of drivel is this? Is anyone reading the article? I doubt it. Sorry, I’m not logging into important accounts on a colleague’s computer, regardless of being unable to squat and plug in a usb-dongle. The last statement even concedes that passkeys are an improvement for 99% of the user-population. It’s an improvement for 100% of the user-population. Like usual this is just drivel generated from friction around ‘newness’. It’s different–which automatically becomes scary for some users. The writing is just not coherent and there’s zero critique on passkey’s design and technicalities, of which there are things to criticize.

Get a physical passkey and if you have more than 100 accounts you have a problem. Buy two and use one as a backup in case you lose your first. Keep it in a safe and if you forget your safe’s combination… well, I guess we should abolish safes too: terrible account recovery support there. Yikes!

Passkey’s themselves can be protected with a PIN–the software I’ve used does not limit it to numbers. It can be your ‘master password’ if you want. This is a technical complaint of mine as all software I’ve used reference it as a PIN (personal identification number), which means numbers only. Except other characters are allowed. I’m not sure what the official spec. states.

You can’t pay for privacy. Anyone selling you something and advertising it as private are just grifting. The most private software is libre-software which tends to be monetarily free, but the private quality comes from the user’s behavior not the software itself. There’s no program or thing you can buy or use that becomes a “privacy blanket” and magically makes you private. It doesn’t exist.

You seem to lack a technical foundation from which you can base decisions of. Read some books about computer-networks. If you’re not interested in that… then you’re not interested in privacy within computer-networks.

But children don’t have credit cards…

You’re just using different words to describe wage-labour.

Let me dust off some British journals where governors debate how many women are needed to be sent to colonies to maintain order.

YaCy isn’t just a peer-to-peer search-engine, it can be run as a non-connected private node as well. The operator decides whether they want to contribute to the larger peer-to-peer network, a private network or as a lone-node as a personal search-engine. However, any search-engine will struggle on lackluster hardware.

Buy a used Pixel and install GrapheneOS. Literally couldn’t be any easier. If you use Google services other than Android it’s a simple matter of well… not using them. It’s not tricky or difficult. No guidance is needed. If they want to do it they will. These sort of posts usually come from people who aren’t genuine. They’re aware of something that makes them uncomfortable about Google (an American surveillance-corporation drenched in blood), but they don’t know how to use computers because the state failed to provide a proper technical education. If they don’t have the motivation it’s pointless. No matter what you say or what you do you’ll always get the same response: it’s different; it’s too hard; but on Google you just did this; blah blah blah.

Their whole framing isn’t grounded in reality. It’s looking at a computer from a consumer point of view: Google does all those things that free-software could do, but it does it better and more! Why would anyone use free-software? They can’t even sell it it’s that bad! No one’s paying people to repackage free-software into a consumer-friendly commodity. There’s a reason why free-software fails in a capitalist-market as a consumer commodity. No one’s buying it. It’s free. Without the influx of capital from sales there’s no capital for marketing.

What ever changes happen usually aren’t worthwhile or they think they’re doing something, but don’t do anything at all. “I removed/don’t use any Google apps on my Google Android.” Ok… you accomplished nothing. Glad you felt like you did something though.

Every other day! I just can’t help myself! A new model is released and the hype machine starts up; updates are released to downgrade performance on older models–I just wag my tail non-stop! It’s so exciting! Those flashy lights and colours! Ooooo! This money belongs in their wallets and everyone’s going to get a hold them! And I tell myself pathetic lies: oh, the battery can’t be replaced… if only it had screws… it’s way too hard to heart up glue and put a new battery in. Besides–all my friends are going into debt too! Plus those new features: it can make phone calls and text! Look! E-mail access too!

There’s blood on their hands. Either they keep the hype up or go to jail regardless of any of their statements being true or not.

America. Not even once. At what cost?

I wake up early to watch the cartoons.

Thread about LG TVs conducting mass-surveillance on consumers just because they can: computers are dirt-cheap and consumers foot the bill: they pay for the malicious- & spyware-infested computers and they pay for the data connections that allow those malicious computers to exfiltrate data back.

User concerned about mass-surveillance.

Your post: that’s completely and technically impossible. I just highlighted how mass-surveillance of a national-population’s location is now child’s play because it’s fundamentally ‘metadata’ that’s generated by the network: it’s how computers work. The difficult part is computing on these large databases, something that technology companies have made great progress in.

Nearly everyone literally carries around an internet-enabled microphone in their pocket; surveillance-capitalists are trying to hot-mic and hot-video(?) consumers 24/7: see Apple’s watch and Facebook’s spyware glasses as the latest attempts to make that behavior socially acceptable. They rapaciously want more data. “They” isn’t a nebulous, unidentifiable term: it’s right here in this thread: LG, Facebook, Google, the FBI, the NSA and whoever else is trying to make a profit out of mass-surveillance. The computers are there collecting data maliciously (as it’s done secretly) and users’ data-connection’s are abused to transmit what is collected.

You continue to ignore all the leaks and literature about America’s intelligence agencies and their global mass-surveillance programs. What even is your rebuttal to Edward Snowden’s leaks?

I guess you’re ignoring the public-news about A.I. companies ‘partnering’ with America’s Department of War and hand waving everything away with a gotcha: oh you’re just talking about a nebulous They™. You’re a contrarian dipshit.

We kill people based on metadata.

—Michael Hayden

The American Government blaming the killing of children on outdated data and computers.

Here’s an article that highlights the duplicitous nature of surveillance-capitalism and its brazenness: Pokemon Go users collected data that will be used to kill people. It was not consensual and it was done in secret.

A static image doesn’t bypass this. Vendors want a real-time selfie–access to a internet-connected camera responding to prompts in real-time, such as “turn your head to the right,” or “open and close your mouth”. It would be trivial on a libre-system to send it a simulated-feed of a puppet-ed prop in such a way that would be indistinguishable from a real human head–if you had capable hardware. This is what intelligence agencies do now, but it’s possible on high-end consumer hardware too. For the modest computer user it would be viable to feed it a simplified–but still meeting the criteria of a “face” as deemed by the computer–puppet, akin to what vtubers use. That’s on a libre-system. A system that obeys the user and that can not be tolerated, because users lie.

They give you a QR code to scan with a mobile-computer, because mobile-computers are the least free of all computers. The majority of mobile-computers are Google’s Android mobile-computer. Google redirects you to a computer that is entirely controlled by… Google. Surprise!

The boot-licking continues. This isn’t something forced on Google by authoritarian, nanny-state governments. This is Google’s will. Google is an authoritarian corporation that profits via surveillance-capitalism. Keep licking their boots and defending them. How dumb can you be?

Google wants to verify your ID.

Google redirects you to a Google Android slave-computer via a QR code, precisely because there’s too much freedom on traditional desktop-computers and outputs can be trivially simulated.

Oh, poor Google for…

…what? Collecting even more data about internet users? This is their bread and butter: surveillance-capitalism.

The unique thing about the Australian-context is that the liberal party began a project: to create a facial-recognition system that would underpin a virtual market of “identity providers”. From my perspective this is fraud, because underneath each identity provider was this governmental-department that would send a “yes” or “no” in response to a query: does this face belong to Johe Bloe. Their system doesn’t even deserve a critique because it’s from the party of blatant grifters and looters, but it’s now what we have and things don’t just disappear, especially when it’s a system that’s been in the works for decades and with bipartisan ‘support’.

Google is an upstanding corporate-citizen providing identity services in a free-market. It’s just capitalism, folks.

Like usual the morons will loudly blame Labor when the fruits of the liberal party turn rotten. The wider, global context is rising fascism which creates an environment where obeying remote prompts to wiggle your tongue and open and close your mouth is deemed ‘expected’ behaviour when all you want to do is watch cat videos on the internet.

Liberate your computers. Hack your mobile-computers and send dummie feeds. It only gets harder from here on. Push back now. It’s rather easy too: don’t use Google. Actively avoid it.

This is pathetic.

Correct. Let’s now have ourselves a chicken dinner winner.

Shift the conversation towards autonomy, dignity and self-respect.

The user’s interaction with the-billion-dollar-company’s software is unpaid labour, which is why they profit and the user suffers. They suffer from having their data stolen; they suffer the expenses fostered on to them; they pay for the computers that spy on them; they pay for the electricity to run the spyware; they pay for the data-subscriptions that facilitate the theft of their data. They cover all the expenses of a billion-dollar-company and are deprived of any profit. They do not even garner a wage.

If one wishes to move towards the point of “my data is worthless” point out the company’s profits or even its speculative valuations. Clearly it’s not worthless. The products that are derived from their exploitation lead to even greater profits for those companies. “A.I.” is a looting of the collective commons. A privatization of humanity’s interaction with computers.

Do they like being exploited? Do they like their batteries draining faster, because their mobile-computer is running software to spy on them? Do they like running out of data because their mobile-computer is forcefully downloading ads and spyware-updates? Do they like ads? Do they like being interrupted by the highest bidder? Do they like annoying notifications that are just ads? Do they like this shitty experience? Are they complete docile slaves? They are less than wage-slaves for they do not even garner a wage! Have some self-respect and dignity!