One of the main reasons I moved to GrapheneOS was to avoid the impending push for Gemini to be everywhere and I don’t trust Google not to use some subset of my data by not making a setting for it and not making it clear that it’s being used. They started doing that in way too many places the last several years.
There are many places that have those rules as I mentioned. For private property, it’s not uncommon, but mostly only in secure locations that you buy tickets or otherwise pay or that have other restrictions to enter. Especially artistic venues where artists don’t want their works recorded. This is mostly for protecting financial interests over privacy, though. It’s not common for stores, gyms, and other locations that are open to the public, even if on private property, where taking photos isn’t a financial concern of the location. That’s pretty rare because it was too difficult to convince people to leave behind their phones or trust a worker to keep track of who’s phone is whose, so it kept people from coming to those places. Instead people often voluntarily keep their phones secure in lockers or keep them in their pockets or otherwise don’t take them out in plain view due to social pressure for privacy, especially in public showers, bathrooms, and changing rooms which were the places some politicians insisted it would end up being a major issue without laws.
That’s cool. I wish there were alternatives in the US. The banking apps seem to have all removed their tap to pay features even. I don’t want something like Curve that sells your purchase history in exchange for a few features. I just don’t want to carry a wallet just for credit cards anymore.
Yeah there’s a lot that apps are doing to uniquely identify you. Not just the apps themselves, but the advertising systems and unfortunately, the telemetry systems which were originally meant only for tracking errors and how apps are used so they could be improved. And often you can’t block those systems without blocking the app from working, usually by design, but sometimes more because developers don’t understand how their customers’ data is at risk by using those systems. Often because their told it’s not used that way, but actually is, just in a convoluted way so it’s technically true. It’s quite confusing as someone who used to develop apps myself.
I don’t think it’s a big deal most of the time if in public. And private places are always allowed to ban cameras. If you ban smart glasses because of the camera, then you have to ban phones and that was tried and failed in most places. And banning cameras in public or requiring a license to carry one would be a huge hit to freedom overall. All of those things were already tried when portable cameras and then cell phones with cameras were new if you want to research why.
The idea is to allow social pressures to deal with these things. And most of the imagined problems never actually pop up. Like there wasn’t much of a significant increase in illicit photography in changing rooms when cell phones were allowed. The only difference here is that the smart glasses may end up being difficult to differentiate from ordinary glasses eventually. But companies like putting their brands on things, so that may not end up being an issue.
And there have been illicit versions of these things for ages and that isn’t going to go away just because it’s illegal to wear it. It’s already illegal to do a lot of the things people are using them for that you’re likely worried about. Having an additional law for possession is not going to change that very much and definitely won’t balance out the harm caused by disallowing all cameras in public.
Only because you are the product with the others, pr your information anyway. Without selling that info, they need to do a lot to make up the lost profit. Assuming this is real and not just a sting op or something.
I’d guess they would give the data to government agencies as it comes in through backdoors that most communication companies have these days. Likely they just don’t store the data for future requests and don’t have your data stored to sell. That’s about the only way I could see it working without them getting shut down.
But that’s assuming they’re being truthful at all. Only way to be confident would be if someone can trace the money used to make the company to see what their possible business plans are and wait and see. Based on the current government, I’d be more likely yo assume they’re actually just a government agency doing a sting operation for which they aren’t legally required to tell any truth at all, but time will tell.
Well, they have to be accused of something to be detained. Immigration violations of some types don’t get a court hearing to be “convicted” of those violations by a judge by default.
What kind of device are you using? There was recently there was a leak that Meta is using technology to have web browsers talk to the Facebook and Instagram apps on your phone without your permission and link your identity to every website you visit that has any Meta plugins. I’m sure other companies are doing the same or similar like Amazon and Google. I’ve been using GrapheneOS on my Android Pixel phone which isolates apps. There are other ways to do this as well if your phone is unlockable. And I use IronFox web browser wherever possible to reduce the capabilities of the browser to do things without my knowledge. And use ReThink and a pihole to reduce the cross site communication where possible. I also left all Meta platforms, but still am migrating away from Google, Amazon, and some other platforms. And make sure your advertising ID is disabled at the OS level.
Those are where I’ve found most of the targeted ads were coming from. Not from the IP address alone.
Strongly recommend reviewing the compatibility of apps you can’t live without, especially finance ones. And you won’t be able to use Google Wallet with tap to pay. Those are often not happy about you having any amount of security or privacy in the name of security, but really usually because they’re too lazy, or want to violate your privacy themselves.
I never really used it so it was fine with me. And the few apps I had to dump I mostly found open source alternatives for other than finance ones which I just use the websites instead now.
This is the real issue. It’s not so much the intentional sale of your info for profit, or, for the majority of people, the threat of surveillance states finding out you’re one of their enemies of the month. Most people are hit by criminals using the info to target them. For example, if they know your adult child’s information and have samples of their voice data from social media, they can make an AI bot to impersonate them and ask for money. Or, if robbers happen to be targeting a neighborhood, they can use your location information to determine when you aren’t home. These are much more complex than most of these scams, though. Most are much simpler, but using some combination of info from social media, security breach data, location data, etc. All of that data is being bought and sold now. Mostly by “legitimate” companies. Things like that are the major consequences for the majority of people.
As others mentioned Esc during boot. You can also configure this in your grub config so you don’t have to hit escape, assuming your distro uses grub. Other boot config options will exist in other systems.
For grub it also depends on the distro as to where it is, but look for /etc/default/grub edit that and on the lone that has GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT remove the quiet and splash options. So if it looks like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash”
change it to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“”
Then run “sudo update-grub2” to make it effective.
Icons for pictures, detail view for everything else. Easier to sort in the detail view.
That was a lot of really good info. I’ve been having to deal with some more complex systemd configurations at work which has gotten me interested in the subject. This was a really good intro and will help a lot in my own self-hosted activities as well as work.
Yeah that can make a difference in some cases. Are they media files? Android tends to do more scanning of those as each is created. You can also set a .nomedia file in the directory that you’re unzipping to on order to reduce sone of that, though not sure if the new AI stuff obeys those like Android itself does.
Pixel 9a has some issues with performance, currently. They used older storage tech for the 9 and 9a than other devices and not enough memory for all the “AI” features that are tracking everything you do to make things more convenient. There are a few articles out there related to some ways to improve performance a bit by disabling some background apps that you may not be using. It’s also possible future updates from google may fix some of whatever is causing the issues for many users.
But it’s not an endemic Android issue, at least not modern versions in my experience. I use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7 Pro currently and just grabbed a couple of 10+ GB zip files I had on an old dropbox account and unzipped them with the fossify file manager. It was basically instant. Took longer to download them than unzip.
As I mentioned, your best bet is to use ADB or similar and monitor what applications are eating up resources and try to free some up. Especially any apps thrashing the storage or filling memory. That’s assuming you have already uninstalled any bloatware and rebooted recently to make sure no bad apps are stuck.
TL;DR: You should have both due to the explicit breaking of the robots.txt contract by AI companies.
AI generally doesn’t obey robots.txt. That file is just notifying scrapers what they shouldn’t scrape, but relies on good faith of the scrapers. Many AI companies have explicitly chosen not no to comply with robots.txt, thus breaking the contract, so this is a system that causes those scrapers that are not willing to comply to get stuck in a black hole of junk and waste their time. This is a countermeasure, but not a solution. It’s just way less complex than other options that just block these connections, but then make you get pounded with retries. This way the scraper bot gets stuck for a while and doesn’t waste as many of your resources blocking them over and over again.
Bottleneck is usually storage speed rather than processing power. If you have a device that can use external sd cards and your device supports high-speed cards, that might help, though if the controller for sd cards is slow, that might just end up a worse bottleneck. But that’s just a guess and it definitely could be that your memory is not sufficient or background apps are eating up processing, such as crypto-mining malware just as an example. You can check resources over adb while unzipping or try some benchmarks to determine your issue.
Anecdotally, I have no issues on my Pixel 7 Pro and never had issues on past Pixel or Nexus phones I’ve owned (generally higher end models with plenty of memory and storage space). Pixel devices don’t include sd card slots so this is all on internal storage in those cases.
Sure anything is likely to take longer on a phone than on a laptop or desktop, but shouldnt be that significant of a difference unless there’s a hardware bottleneck or other apps are using all the resources.
I use Fedora with KDE and never have issues. Though I no longer have NVIDIA cards in any of my computers. The drivers suck on Linux in general and were the cause of many of my previous issues with Linux overall.
…worse for users. Better for them…in the shirt term. That’s the real issue. Short term Profit overrules everything in modern corporations.