Or you use confirmation bias to tell yourself it's an innocuous use case that won't hurt anyone.

Or you use a bandwagon argument like "everybody else is doing it, so why can't we" or "everybody else is doing it so it doesn't make much difference if we do too"

Or you use a library for ads such as the google-ads-api npm package, without checking it, so you don't realise how much data it's collecting on your users...

It's not specific to games, it's all apps that have ads

I switched to /e/ a while ago, they have a feature called advanced privacy. commercial Lemmy clients like Connect and Raccoon have trackers embedded and are blocked automagically. ^I use Jerboa btw^

You can instead use apps which block trackers. I can recommend 3.

Netguard with tracker filters enabled, PersonalDNS filter – a fire and forget DNS filter app, or Adguard android app from Adguard website.

The 1st one needs payment to access some pro features but can also block internet connection to all your apps.

The 2nd one is a simple DNS blocker which can have millions of rules and won't choke under the load.

The last one is not Foss or available on fdroid like the 1st two are, but is much more powerful than the 1st two combined.

Pick your tools and limit information now.

I've been seeing exactly that. Reading through these job descriptions is a bit depressing. I can't virtue signal my lack of morality and unthinking subservience to my potential employer hard enough to make cutoff to become "Director of AI Shilling" or a "Dark Pattern Consent Violation Engineer".

I know the kind of environments that won't work for me. This will always limit the jobs I can and can't work and I'm generally okay with that. I would love some of that bountiful defence contractor money, but I can't ethically justify doing work that harms others or limits their freedom. Advertising tech would have been a good fit for me... if I had no sense of ethics.

It's a tough realization that my gaming consoles, GPS Smart Watch, and fancy modern over-engineered car only became possible because tons of money was poured into building out related tech for defence and surveillance.

I imagine the cognitive dissonance must be really strong in someone working for some of these companies that have monetized governmentally sanctioned or corporately opportunistic civil rights abuses. Then again, we're often kept apart, working in our own little areas where we're safe from having to see the whole horrifying machine.

You should really talk to some real in-the-flesh people.

A removable physical or electronic SIM on a system that has full control of inbound or outbound traffic (linux phone) would still be a whole lot better than nothing. Imagine having a switch to reliably sever any heartbeat signals between the tower and the device at any time.

Yup, the baseband modem does what it’s firmware tells it to, and that’s entirely independent from the phone’s software. And open baseband modems to my knowledge don’t exist.

If the spyware/tracking started and ended at the cell tower it would be a good start. I'm not sure the sensor data would be sent to the tower either. It would just be a general area.

A Linux phone could theoretically use other networks. You could pipe traffic through I2P or bounce it around multiple network types with reticulum. It’s actually theoretically possible to make a community mesh that doesn’t need cellular at all. I don’t NEED to carry the entire internet with me everywhere. I can carry a device with a cache of stuff I need but for everything else I can just connect to some sort of network to fetch it when I actually need it on demand.

A Linux phone would let you do that. You can explore that possibility. Android and IPhone will never allow that because latency is shot on the alternative networks and they aren’t expensive enough to make a profit off of.

What carrier do you use with a pinephone?

And in case it wasn't already clear enough how absurd this all is, the creeps at Palantir are now actually so brazen as to officially call one of their mass surveillance systems "Project Gotham"...brave new world.

Because they will never quit. Ever. We need to get lucky and stop them every time (and I feel powerless beyond signing some petition online and maybe making a donation), but they need to get lucky once.

And I cannot recall a single time that such laws were ever repealed. The patriot act has had some questionable efficacy and now ICE and the Trump administration want so many more additions that there is just no going back.

Even in Canada, which never had an issue with terrorism, has passed many laws heavily infringing on people's freedoms and are trying to pass the biggest one yet with Bill C-2, even though it actually weakens border protections and gives American companies far, far more ability to surveil Canadians than ever before. This is when violence and terror threats have been greatly diminishing for years (and not because of some BS laws).

And useful idiots like /u/alaknar.

And pay a 4th party to go around removing you from data broker lists, is the expectation