The why is browser fingerprinting. Which Google started using as of January to track everyone.

https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

So if you go to ANY page with Google trackers, even in private mode, Google knows.

For vanilla FF I use multi - account containers, uBlock, and privacy badger.

For other FF forks like Librewolf, I get more blocky, like JShelter, a random agent switcher, and if that breaks a site beyond use I try Chameleon and NoScirpt.

Holy shit. Yes, it does. Thanks! Hadn’t heard of it until today

Because it’s an option already. “Transliterate to Latin letters.”

Edit: I should add that you should look at how many keyboard layouts there are. It’s kind of silly that for me to use an OSM based map and go to any county east of Slovenia I need to both have the keyboard AND know the transliteration of the alphabet.

Have you seen the Armenian or Georgian alphabets? What makes the K sound?

Did you know every dialect of a Slavic language using Cyrillic has it’s own distinct keyboard varied by mostly the letter for the nya sound and J?

Greek?

All while transliteration works fine in Google.

Destination search in all the OSM based maps is a challenge. The Latin letter transliteration only applies to large features. So if I want to find an address in a country try that doesn’t use Latin script, I literally need a keyboard in that language or do a lot of cut and paste from Google Translate. My address never, ever works on OSM. Gets the wrong street, can’t even handle house/building numbers. Works fine on Google.

This 100%.

Wealthy people essentially pay staff to do make things happen for them, and those staff don’t sign up for IG or FB stressing abou making sure to use their ONE email like RichieRich1975@hotmail.com for everything.

PA staff are both IT staff and human password managers, creating and curating massive sets of logins that are functionally disposable. With enough clout and money, if you DO have a problem with a social media platform, or your phone number, a PA calls an Executive CSR and sorts out the problem.

So it’s that their “privacy” is masked by the haphazard way they interact with things that track them. For them, tracking them is security to ensure you know who they are so that have a frictionless experience. If they want a dummy account to creep on people or be a perv, they get that easily, too.

The problem with the money problem is the money part. As much as I actually do want to donate to ALL the open source platforms I use, I don’t have enough to do that equitably between platforms and even cover processing costs of the payment. 25 services split $100? Why bother?

A foundation with an endowment is actually the solution. The Open Source Foundation (or someone like them) needs to become a neutral arbiter and incubator.

But also - I would, and can, provide labor. I would love to give anything FOSS 20-30 hours a week of my time. But doing what? Should I get a part time job to support 25 FOSS services? Take Fivr gigs and donate it all? Or can I just directly hustle a part time work week somehow?

“Brad, I saw you cheating on Stacy at the club last night” [your pgp key here]

I do like this a lot.

Since you sort of need to be there with the hat, it makes me wonder of you might get more response and/or geographic spread if you has some sort of leave behind. A sticker, or a card that you can slot in places.

I do think that leaving it as the gpg key is better, not a QR code. It helps ID this for nerds like you and me. I would never scan a wild QR.

There’s 2 separate universes here.

Devs and tech companies care only for UX, convenience, and reduced friction to use any service. They would put their granny’s home address and SSN in the headers if it made a page load 10ms faster. Their incentives are all short-sighted to hit the next goal to outcompete other devs/companies and ship their end of history killer app that will solve all problems - and that will still get bloated and enshittified within 18 months.

Then there’s us, a subset of rational people educated about how much data gets transmitted, who are horrified by the general state of being online, and are hard to impress when it comes to more than just saying “privacy!” when promoting anything at all.

IMO, we have to DIY and cobble together so much of our own protection, we’re closer to artists that live a strange life that few people understand, seems weird from the outside, but we love for the peace of mind. Which is not enough to be any appreciable segment of the market to move the needle on any product worth real money.