It is never a requirement to perform 100% of all “Privacy best practices” 24 hours a day and 7 days a week with perfect execution. Simply put, nobody has that level of threat on average unless they are someone like Snowden, a Journalist covering a story, or are working as an intelligence agent.

It is best to assess your threat level and choose Privacy preserving techniques and tools according to what best suits your life and situation first. Don’t overdo it, don’t try to achieve perfect privacy, don’t try to keep up with the metaphorical Joneses. There will always be new threats to your privacy to assess; and you shouldn’t be ignorant of them; but you also should not ever let that growing list of threats overwhelm you.

If you need to take time to stop reading privacy news…do so. Just like regular world and national news; it can put you in a state of constant panic. Manage your mental health and state first before you ever allow yourself to address your privacy issues at hand.

Once your mental state is clear and your focus is sharp; focus specifically on little things you can easily do to protect your privacy. Maybe make sure you have a VPN set up or ensure you go over critical privacy settings on your devices to ensure none have changed or shifted since you last visited them. Then consider other small things you can do; if you can say, for example, choose a new email provider, then do so. If not, pick a new thing to address and move on. Do not make managing your privacy a chore if you can possibly help it. Take improving it one step at a time, take breaks for your sanity and make sure you don’t overdo it all at once.

I don’t think any alternatives exist that are easily viable.

Most require you to buy specific phones and flash the OS or buy them from a specific supplier who pre-images them.

Carrier compatibility is also a major issue if you’re in any country with a cellular network requiring that you use VoLTE services in general…these third party OSes can’t always get at the vendor binary blobs or simply won’t include them because legal and privacy preserving reasons.

You may have some luck with GrapheneOS or maybe LineageOS but those are the only mainstream “alternates” to Android that exist; which actually have a decent chance of working well and can usually be installed to a fair number of different devices; as long as you can unlock their bootloaders and root them day one.

No.

It sold out on it’s privacy promise years ago. Brave Browser CANNOT be trusted if you are someone who must ensure Privacy Preserving featurs must remain on at all times.

I recommend the Tor Browser. DO NOT USE THE TOR BROWSING CAPABILITIES OF BRAVE! YOU WILL BE DEANONYMIZED! Likely anything you’d be using Tor for, you don’t want your browser slipping up and leaking anything.

Personally I use a blend of hand-hardened Firefox (Via plugins), Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium (for very rare cases where the site is actually trusted and requires Chrome to function predictably)

As Dick Vayes would say; that criminal is probably the Bonehead of the Day.

Ironically this does not prevent technologies like Monero from becoming the next big platform; nor will it really prevent people from evacuating their coins to a more private and self-custodial wallet.

In general it really only puts a few more onerous steps into the equation where there will be fences and people who are expected to digitally mule bitcoin around.

In the same manner that organized criminals work around modern financial regulations aimed at capturing them; they can also work around regulations surrounding Bitcoin itself; and once the Bitcoin itself is fenced off into a Monero or other privacy preserving coin; it will remain there ‘burned’ or get ‘laundered’ by a group of gang members a few hundred times to re-mint coins clean enough to be re-deposited and re-used in the same manner.

It won’t matter in the long run that they are tracking the provenance of every satoshi. Especially not if it’s far too common that anyone making a suspicious move turns out to be a privacy conscious, law-abiding, yet innocent citizen.

It’s probably time to leave reddit; even if you do manage to get your accounts back.

As a former mod of /r/Genderqueer I can say they’ve been terminally enshittifying for a while now; and have gone full AI rampage to eliminate human mods because they get accused of bias constantly. It doesn’t help that some mods are legitimately bad too; some of the stories I could tell you from when I was in private mod-only meta-reddit communities would curl your toes. Even I wasn’t without my biases; but I had the interest of my community at heart…which, as you know, nonbinary and genderqueer people are very vulnerable to abuse and harrassment.

It’s time to step off the reddit mothership, and don’t bother looking back unless you must. Tools like redlib can at least help you view reddit posts still, anonymously even if you can’t comment.

I’ve been running my own personal Redlib instance locally using WSL2, Docker and Podman. It’s been invaluable in ensuring I can still read things I need to read.

Agreed with the dislike of Brave; but my reasons of not using it are because the person(s) running that project have proven that they do not have user privacy as a priority over their own ability to stay profitable enough to operate. This lack of principal I feel makes Brave privacy hostile at random times when their company runs low on money and is vulnerable to making deals with the devils they’re trying to keep at bay. Usually these deals are horrific blows to user privacy, or introduce unwanted and unneeded bloat to the software.

I’ve seen this when bopping around in the F-Droid catalogue. Never took it seriously because it didn’t seem to communicate well what it was doing.

In general; I usually dislike using Chrome anyways…so much so that I hard disable Chrome on my device, oftentimes via ADB, and download a wide range of alternatives; Kiwi (Plugin enabled), Hermit ([Closed source] Forced Isolation of all domains/sites along a side of ad-blocking and web-app caching baked into the app wrapping it’s renderer; which is, of course System Webview. Unfortunately this one is not open source, so I do not often recommend it here and while I trust it; your decisions may be different.) and Firefox (Plugins installed, seems to be replacing Kiwi because it’s likely a dead/gone/depreciated/archived project.) I even use URLCheck from F-Droid itself as my “Default Browser” so that I have the power to review each URL and open it in a browser I feel is most appropriate to the context of my browsing and choose the browser I feel can best protect my privacy for a given site. One-off visits often go to Hermit; which promptly isolates away and forgets I ever visited the site while blocking ads with a lighter touch than most plugins I’ve seen that exist. If a site often breaks in Hermit; usually due to ad-blocking hostile scripts; I kick it over to Firefox where I have extensive plug-in tooling to defang the beast…including tools like JShelter, Canvas Blocker, LocalCDN, Chameleon, Decentraleyes and uBlock Origin.

What I do know is that Android System Webview is far more configurable than you might realize; and that it is absolutely possible to build a browser on top of it. Most importantly; Android System Webview IS NOT Chrome! Yes, it is extremely similar and it behaves mostly the same; but it is based on the Chromium project; which is basically what Chrome is before Google applies all of its own Branding, Customization, Policies and Application touches on it. Does Chromium project mirror what Chrome needs? Absolutely yes, but it does not follow Chrome exactly. In general; Android System Webview is a Web rendering component that other applications can call on and wrap their own code around. This means you are basically free to implement whatever other features you want around the webview; including adding plugins and other things like ad-blocking. My favorite closed-source lite-app browser Hermit does this; and I’m not seeing any significant privacy concerns with that one.

I see your concern; but I can’t imagine there’s anything to do about it other than to contact the Holy See directly and ask to speak to the Pope directly. (Seriously, good luck is wished at that endeavor for whomever feels they can achieve this.)

We can’t stop him from commenting. But we can specifically prepare for it.

If you main frustration is Youtube; I recommend trying Invidious or Piped, as these frontends for Youtube do not have such aggressive scripts; and can be hosted locally on your machine.

Hint: I strongly recommend self-hosting Invidious on your PC using Docker and Podman for ease of use and administration. You can also self-host other privacy oriented front-ends for other sites as well, such as redlib for reddit and any others you can imagine.

Seriously; don’t bother with the public instances. They don’t work well. Self-host the software on your local PC and use Tailscale if you need to help other devices access your self-hosted instance.

Similarly FreeTube would work as well and pairs nicely if you self-host Invidious locally.

No. You should not turn this feature off; no matter how infuriating you find it to be. You will eventually find it useful. It was put there for a reason; and your usage of the addon to find tab sounds is not a common thing people do. Additionally if your plugin begins to fail or is suddenly no longer maintained; you will have a UI element to immediately fall back on using to help you manage tab sounds.

As the Messages RCS implementation is supposedly E2EE from device to device; No. It is not possible that a log of your messages’ contents are being kept.

Can it stop them from storing your encrypted messages to decrypt later if law enforcement should be able to confiscate your phone and extract the encryption key? Also No. It is not possible for E2EE to prevent “Store ciphertext and decrypt later” attacks.

It also cannot prevent companies from logging who you are conducting an encrypted conversation with; even if the contents cannot be seen and this information cannot be used to infer anything about the contents. It cannot stop companies from making inferences about your messaging activity due to timing of messages sent or who they are sent to.

If these kinds of attacks are on your threat model; you need to ensure you are not sending messages or information via electronic means via your phone to begin with, wherever possible.

It is absurd to assume that they have backdoored the RCS protocol without proof or evidence. This isn’t saying it’s a verifiably secure or private protocol; but I think you could trust an E2EE RCS message for long enough to help you get someone else onboarded on to Signal or another more properly encrypted messenger without needing to worry about being put on a watch list. I would trust it with my grocery list or trivial communications with family; even if I wouldn’t trust it with my truly personal or private conversations.

Furthermore the article clearly states:

Testing on frozen shrimp from the distributor, Indonesia’s BMS Foods, also tested positive, the FDA said.

The shrimp was in fact contaminated. But as a precaution; with anything Radioactive, it is always presumed that anything that is in contact with a contaminated object, is also in and of itself inherently contaminated.

I recommend you watch some Kyle Hill on Youtube;¹ he explains clearly how these things work. Radioactive contamination is no joke. It is handled with this level of caution for a reason. It kills people quickly if left unaddressed.

¹ - I wish I could explain which “Half-Life Histories” episodes are most relevant; but I cannot. They all are; they all describe nuclear disasters and they all contain good explanations about what happened and how they’re contaminating things and such. It is much to watch, but very informative.

I do not expect the news or the government to tell the truth about the findings in general.

Nuclear stuff is still, to this date in the USA, treated as “Sensitive Information” which may be “Classified” under a number of laws which require gagging/nondisclosure/censorship under the guise of “protecting our National Security.”

My partner is a former employee in that sector. The amount of information that could be ordered to be protected in this way is likely more than you’d expect.

To be honest; I would imagine that the Cs-137 is a product of illegal fishing. Fishermen are told not to fish in contaminated areas; but may do so anyways out of desperation for a catch they can sell.

I remember nuclear disasters near SE Asia and Japan over the last decade. It is also true that Shrimp are also, not so unimportantly, Bottom-Feeders. As Bottom of the Ocean feeders. They literally hoover up the soil at the bottom of the ocean and eat the microbiological life living there. With recent nuclear disasters; I think it’s possible some orphan Cesium got down there.

Naturally this is just my theory; based on my limited college educated knowledge of biology and the food web.

I second tailscale. But this requires you to be using it at home as well.

I don’t like it. It screams “FINGERPRINT ME!”

A symbol for privacy should imply privacy. Not show things that which should be protected. (like your handprints or fingerprints)

Time to get some dumb Democrats voted out of office!~

No. Not without paying a hefty license upgrade fee (Retail copy) or doing something incredibly shady. (Piracy tools which I won’t specifically name but I’m sure you can find and likely know the dangers of obtaining for some users.)

Unfortunately no. Home edition will actively ignore Group Policies and Registry keys relating to privacy.

You would be better off using a 10 Pro license or pirating 10 Pro and keeping it from phoning home.