Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data • Hacker News Board

Re: Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data

#101

Post by akimbostrawman » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 11:48 AM UTC

ChicagoDave wrote: post #92

akimbostrawman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead of meta getting your browsing data, your AV gets your whole PC data that they will sell too.

According to Malwarebytes' privacy policy, they do not track user location information and only collect minimal data necessary for functionality, like license key validation, and do not store or track your online activity when using their VPN service, prioritizing user privacy; however, they may collect anonymized data for improving their software through analytics.

>only collect minimal data necessary for functionality

>however, they may collect anonymized data for improving their software through analytics.

So they do not unless they think of a plausible enough sounding excuse. anonymization with the massive amount of unique data a AV can collect is also nothing more than a empty promise.

it's truly mind boggling that in current year any vaguely tech literate person would believe a for profit proprietary software company would not data harvest the shit out of any bit they can because of worthless text on a website they could change or circumvent at any time or just ignore without any real repurcussions (pity fines don't count).

Re: Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data

#102

Post by pickledoyster » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 9:38 AM UTC

lokimokitako wrote: post #26

pickledoyster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon. Not in my country, where Facebook owns basically the entire messaging space through Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I have been able to switch my default search engine, email provider, mobile OS, office suite, etc. from Google no problem, but the network effect has been too strong to get most of my friends out of Meta's ad netwo…

Can you use signal?

some of us do but the adoption is too low for any meaningful network effect

Re: Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data

#103

Post by the_gipsy » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

oefnak wrote: post #86

the_gipsy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not solution to the network problem, but you can bridge/puppet Whatsapp, Instagram, telegram, to matrix.org.

How can you bridge WhatsApp to matrix? Can you still send pictures?

As sibling said, using the mautrix bridges. I started with just bridge mode I think, and then switched to puppet mode, which seemed to integrate much better. Pictures and everything work fine.

However, you have to maintain a homeserver, which is not for everyone. If wouldn't have one already, I would just pay the element.io service which includes bridging (but I haven't tried it out).

Re: Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data

#104

Post by Gormo » Mon, Feb 17, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

k310 wrote: post #100

Gormo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that companies made computers difficult to use for whatever reasons, be they catering to “power users”, business or just plain inattention to the non-techie user. I don't think that's quite accurate. "Power users" are simply the users who bothered to learn how computers work. Dumbing technology down to the level of people who couldn't be be so bothered is precisely what's lead to all of the centralization…

I remember when "power users" were the ones who wrote reviews (free publicity). The classic story is Jerry Pournelle, who started writing but became hooked on personal computers themselves, and I would read his stories of the evolving hardware and software. It became clear that vendors would feed him new products so that they could score in the articles he wrote. [0] > Along the way, he began to write, but wasn’t abl…

IIRC, Jerry Pournelle was was still writing hardware and software reviews right up until the very end, well after Byte. He was publishing on his own Chaos Manor blog, which was always a great read.