Right now, there’s drama because WhatsApp is changing its terms of service and wants to share even more data with Facebook (at least from users outside the EU).
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Chris Wiegman shared a status update about his journey to replace big tech with small tech.
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Today I finally deleted my Instagram account, or rather initiated a deletion for 30 days. Yesterday evening I started a data export, today I was able to download a ZIP file with all my data from Instagram, including all photos, likes, comments and stuff like that. So if I think of something important, I can still pull the data from the archive.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good arguments against selling your privacy, a so called “data dividend” or “pay-for-privacy”.
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Cloudflare currently celebrate their 10th birthday and launch a new product or feature everyday for a week. Today they launched Cloudflare Web Analytics. Until now you had to proxy your site through Cloudflare to use their analytics, because they collected those stats – “at the edge” – on their servers. But now they are adding an JavaScript-based option, similar to Google Analytics and all the new privacy-focused analytics services like GoatCounter and Plausible. But like GoatCounter and Plausible and unlike Google, they promise privacy, because they don’t make their money tracking users, but selling products (that aren’t users) – at least that’s what they say in the announcement post on their blog:
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Tonight I spoke with my girlfriend on the phone and we talked for two hours about all kinds of topics. One topic was that I don’t think corona tracking apps, where the data is stored centrally, are a good idea because of privacy and stuff. My girlfriend, on the other hand, said why is privacy important at all? The argument that nobody needs to know what I do with whom, when, where and for how long was not convincing to her. She said that I track my runs via GPS anyway. And she asked who would be interested in your data if you are not famous or something?
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Mattias Geniar found a way to not have to display a cookie warning on his website and it’s surprisingly simple:
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I just added a page that lists all the photos from this blog. It’s my alternative to using Instagram. Everyone can view my photos without the need to create an account, seeing advertisements and getting tracked. It was also a little challenge getting Hugo to filter and list all posts.
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I’m now trying to get used to the browser extension uMatrix. It’s a bit more advanced than uBlock Origin by the same developer and it let’s me select on which domains to allow or block cookies, css, scripts etc. I enabled the setting to block JavaScript by default, because I noticed that especially news sites sometimes load much faster (or at all) with JavaScript disabled and of course this reduces the amount of tracking a lot. Do you have experience with uMatrix and any tips on how to make the most use out of it?
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Stories like this are a great reminder to not install any “freeware malware protection” software and unknowingly opt-in to data collection. If possible switch to Linux, or if you want to stay on Windows, use the integrated Windows Defender.
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