That’s always the cycle when it comes to giving up data for ‘perks’. First there’ll be benefits for complying, then those will go away, then it’ll turn into penalties for people who don’t comply. With the rise in technology in cars we’re already seeing some insurance companies offer lower rates for people in exchange for sharing their location/driving info. I think eventually it’ll shift to the point where ‘default’ insurance is made so expensive you’ll have no choice but to share everything you do with your insurance company

Cash makes you more aware of what you’re spending, is good for budgeting, and better for privacy. I’ll never stop using it

Your point on housing and government is a pure cop out. Plenty of people would be happy smaller basic houses if they could just afford them. But they’ve all been either knocked down, renovated to inflate the value, or still exist but are no longer affordable. And labor are, at best, complicit in many of the problems people have. They used a vaguely defined ‘skills shortage’ to justify one of the biggest migration rates into the country in its history while barely lifting a finger to increase housing supply. Yes, the libs would’ve been 10x worse, but that isn’t an excuse to just disregard criticism of Labor

I stand corrected, but do you need a Google account at any point for activation etc.? I’ve had increasing difficulty creating a Google account at all without a phone number

Apple devices aren’t the best but theyre definitely not the worst. If the leaked Cellebrite documentation is to be believed then the newest devices running the latest iOS builds are well protected against hacking tools, second only to GrapheneOS. The iOS permissions system is relatively robust, lockdown mode is a good bit of extra protection too. And iirc full-disk encryption is enabled by default on iOS these days. Advanced Data Protection lets you E2E encrypt (most) cloud storage too. These are all good things

For the most part, you can set up an Apple Account without using genuine information (though the age verification thing might change this, but Google is implementing that too). For both iOS and GrapheneOS you need to either trust Apple or Google with your phone number to set up an account.

I’d be interested to hear people’s criticisms so long as they’re not just random claims with no elaboration or evidence

TikTok was a data harvesting surveillance tool from day one. It didn’t need to be ‘got’

Their Online Safety Act is stupid ever since it was enforced last year as that has done nothing except for making people bypass it entirely

It’s had worse outcomes than that. People who do decide to follow the law are having their IDs stolen and leaked and the UK gov (and others worldwide) don’t care. They designed and forced on us a law a ‘Safety’ Act that does nothing but actively compromise people’s safety. I realise I’m preaching to the crowd here but if this shit doesn’t destroy what’s left of people’s faith in government then I don’t know what will

It comes from many sources. Governments want age-verification for surveillance, advertisers want it to target people and ensure those people are real, social media companies want it for similar reasons, hackers want it so they have more IDs to steal, and (some) voters want it because they’re idiots

CCTV is the problem. Mass surveillance has to be stopped at the source. Just like the only way to guarantee a company won’t leak your ID or other personal info is to not let them have it in the first place, the only way to ensure a recording of you isn’t used for tracking or other malicious purposes is to not be recorded to begin with

How to actually do this I have no idea. But even if a company or government is legally bound to not use CCTV footage for nefarious purposes, there’s little actually stopping them