I was making an independent statement on privacy needs.

Outside of having privacy for privacy sake, If someone lives under any amount of tyranny, they need privacy. How many countries can you be legally charged based on social issue Google searches? Such as “how to know if i’m gay?”, “where to have an abortion” after being raped, etc.

Except… Capitalism. The more productivity, the more profits for companies and more work load and work hours for the employees. Tech does not buy you more free time in a capitalistic society, at least, not in the way we’re currently utilizing capitalism.

You just reminded me of an awesome short story I read a long time ago

I don’t know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility

See, this is why I love SciFi. “Amazing! I wonder how this will go…”, questions the average person. “Here’s 50 books and movies that will show you how this will go…”

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Huh, TIL.

Someone who wants to buy google stock on the cheap?

I haven’t, I use my phone as a medical device, so I haven’t taken the grapheneOS plunge yet as I’m not sure if the medical app would work. Yes, you’d have to wipe your phone to install GrapheneOS. For authenticator, if the app you used doesn’t allow exporting them, you have to disable 2 factor on all services and websites that use the authenticator 2 factor codes, switch to the new phone and new app, and re-enable on all services to get the new authenticate code. Pretty shitty, that some authenticator apps don’t give you a way to export (I don’t think the google app allows you to, correct?)

Pretty close to Michael Crichton’s book “Next”. Without the persons consent, they steal the cell line of someone who’s cells naturally fight off cancer, create a cancer fighting drug, and then patent it, so the company legally owns that persons cells, and has a legal right to them with or without the person’s consent.

Oh boy. First off, unless you’re a high profile activist, a high profile government agent, or a high profile hacker, your threat model isn’t really targeted to you specifically. For a regular person, you usually just want to try to keep some amount of privacy on the internet and not be the lowest hanging fruit for bots and scripts.

Any of the big name Linux distros will all be fine, Ubuntu, Debian, fedora, Linux mint, etc, etc. With exception of arch, its fine, but make sure you’re in a position to update regularly, and possibly deal with some breakage and fixing after an update with arch. (don’t use it for server)

Anyway, these are the things I do, if you’d like to take inspiration:

I use LUKS for full disk encryption on my laptop. Not because of paranoia about the government, but because its nice to know if you’re in a cafe working and someone steals your laptop while you get up to go to the restroom or something, your data is safe from prying eyes.

I use an opnsense firewall for my network, for flexibility and control over my devices and connections.

I use an openWRT WiFi router,again for flexibility and control over my WiFi connections.

I use a Firefox based browser, (firefox, fennec, ice raven, etc) its hardened enough I’m sure there’s some crazy hardened version of chrome or whatever, but for the safety of the web, I like supporting a browser that’s not chrome, there’s really only 3 big players and one of them is Google, they alllmost have a monopoly on the web. All the other browsers are using Chrome’s rendering engine except Firefox and I think safari.

Use Ublock Origin firefox or chrome extension for ad blocking

For a phone, I’d probably use a pixel device that supports grapheneOS, but right now i’m just using LineageOS, again in use Firefox for android with ublock origin extension.

For passwords, I use keepassxc, and sync it across my devices with syncthing

Oh, and don’t use google for your search engine.

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Very true, and Its also kinda too late. (at least in the USA) we have an election coming up in 9 months that has been raging since the last election with misinformation surrounding it. Kinda too late to pull all those Facebook memes and fake articles and go “just kidding! That was all lies!” Everyone who’s been spoon fed that crap has already made up their mind on who they’re voting for, you’re not gonna change it last minute, damage had already been done.