I’ve got to make a decision and want to take a room temperature check on what sacrifices people find acceptable for their own comfort. Use any services you know you shouldn’t? Any tools that you’re just waiting for a chance to replace but can’t yet?
Probably my reliance on Google Maps.
OSMand is what got me off Maps. It’s one of the few apps I pay monthly to support. It does a ton of stuff Maps cannot and never will do, like local trip recording, customizable everything and displaying OBDII data.
Nice try, NSA
Having a phone is a pretty big one.
This is my biggest compromise. The fucker listens to everything I say and do and reports it to thousands of different companies. I wish there was a good privacy focused phone that you could sandbox apps in.
Google maps for navigation in unfamiliar places.
i really want to switch to OSM apps (and I have comaps) but (1) it’s not nearly as good at understanding addresses (e.g. “123 first avenue” when it has my gps coords instead of “cityname, First avenue 123 zipcode”) and (2) doesn’t have nearly as many businesses mapped (e.g. i want to type in “Joe’s Restaurant” instead of the address bc i haven’t memorized it)
I occasionally need to use Google Maps but I’ve helped map my area on OSM which improved my experience. Most businesses in my town are now mapped.
I’m a data engineer so I love being able to download data to be able to play with. My biggest one is leaving location tracking on on Google Maps so I can download it and create heatmaps
Well as you didn’t specify which kind of privacy then… well if I’m in a high up hotel room with a balcony I like to run out onto it naked and then have a wiggle and quickly run back inside. I call it ‘willying the world’
I accept your terms. This will be taken into account as well
A car built after 2010 so it’s full of cameras and lte connections and gps etc so car companies and the advertisers they sell data to and the governments they backdoor always know what trips I make, how far, how long I stay, etc.
Dang, I got a 2015 car kitted out (tint, roof racks, sub, rims, a million speakers, leather everything, glass roof with limo lighting under retractable electronic cover) that I found for a steal accidentally at like 50k miles and it has ONE camera—backup camera! (Dashcam too, but no WiFi or Bluetooth and i installed that myself) Of course, she’s got a GPS and all that; if I had the knowhow, I’d disconnect it.
I hope I keep her forever. I love her.
ooh, yeah that’s one people overlook a lot.
I upload to YouTube. I know it gives up a lot of my privacy and I’m sure it’s being fed Into AI… ugh. 😩
I also upload the same videos to other video sites even if they don’t get many views.
Using Bitwarden’s cloud service. I don’t trust myself enough to maintain and secure a self-hosted online password vault. Also like others said, google maps. The sheer volume of crowsourced data they have is very useful for real-time navigation especially if you live in a city with heavy traffic.
Grocery store rewards programs. I know they are designed to link purchases to me, but the financial savings is worth the loss of privacy for me.
I just make up phone numbers.
8675309 in your local area code almost always works.
To be honest, I got banned off Reddit a few weeks ago and was surprised when I signed up here that i’d have to give my email. I thought from what i’d read on Reddit that Lemmy was decentralised?? Hate giving up any of my personal information for these online forums. I came here to try it after also trying Mirage and their sign up process required no personal information input which was good but I thought f*ck it i’ll give it a look on here as well. Is there any way around it? Has anyone else tried Mirage?
Décentralisation is just how it’s structured, it has nothing to do with privacy. Email itself is decentralised.
I would recommend using a service like duckduckgo which lets you generate @duck.com email addresses for anonymous signups
I still use YouTube due to not figuring out how to export my playlists in a way where I can just have a plaintext list of all the videos I want to keep track of. I’m planning on coming up with some kind of Python script to take what I get from their “takeout” method and from there, just find a programmatic way to get what I want. So basically, I allow Google to keep cookies on my system but I use a different Google account on my phone to avoid having them track me on different devices.
You can probably yt-dlp the playlist.
Yes you can. If I understand it correctly it’s about keeping it updated automatically, i.e. as soon as a new video appears, it should yt-dlp itself. I’m actually looking for something similar. But I have been downloading whole channels by using yt-dlp on playlists.
Tubearchivist maybe? I haven’t used it so I don’t know if it’s automated like that.
Personally I just have yt-dlp in a script run periodically by cron.
Microsoft SwiftKey on my phone. I’ve been using it since before it was acquired by Microsoft. It is an incredible keyboard and after using it for years, I am very fast on it. I ditched it for about 6 months last year for the FOSS alternative HeliBoard, but it negatively impacted my typing speed so much that I recently gave up and reverted to SwiftKey.
Google Maps also on my phone, because it works really well compared to the alternatives I’ve tried. I’ve used (and contributed to) OSM, but it’s just not a drop-in replacement for Google Maps yet.
I “verified my identity” on LinkedIn a while back because I’m job hunting.
Is LinkedIn even useful to you? Every time I’ve gone job searching, I’ve found a bunch on indeed and barely anything on LinkedIn.
