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This Week in Privacy #5 (blog.privacyguides.org)
submitted 10 months ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
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submitted 10 months ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
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submitted 10 months ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one

Sharing this because it's one of the most promising Android projects we recommend on Privacy Guides, and it would be a huge detriment to the Android/Privacy community at large if this developer is no longer able to continue this work :(

Happy New Year!

DivestOS and the Divested projects as they currently stand are ultimately unsustainable.

My goal for 2023 was to acquire a grant to continue my work, I was unsuccessful.

Today I am announcing a fundraiser of raising $12,000 USD by end of February.

It may be a stretch to ask, but I hope you all have found sufficient value in my work to keep these projects going.

If it is unsuccessful I will switch to a full-time job and the Divested projects will take a backseat.

To those who have donated, I truly appreciate your support.

Thank you - Tavi/Tad.

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This Week in Privacy (#2) (blog.privacyguides.org)
submitted 11 months ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
148
This Week in Privacy (#1) (blog.privacyguides.org)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
[-] jonah@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Can you self-host, or are you looking for another online service? Facebook Groups is basically a forum when it comes down to it, and any forum software can do what you're asking. I really like Discourse. You can self-host it for free (well, whatever your server costs), they'll host it for free if you're an open-source project, or if you're a legal non-profit you can get 50% off their hosting for $25-50/month.

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

When doing an outdoor activity, I would allow my precise location on a run.

It is well-known now that anonymizing location data still does not preserve privacy: https://iapp.org/news/a/getting-lost-in-the-crowd-the-limits-of-privacy-in-location-data-2/

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Comments are pushed out by the community's server, they're not pulled in by yours. So if you're missing comments from communities hosted on lemmy.ml for example, it may be that lemmy.ml is overloaded and not sending out comments to the fediverse properly.

The other common issue with missing comments and posts is misconfigured language settings in your profile. You need to make sure at least Undefined and English are both selected, lots of people only have English selected which will make a lot of posts hidden.

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submitted 1 year ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

I prefer the browser to apps personally, this is actually one of the main reasons I like Lemmy over Reddit and it's unusable mobile view. You'll find plenty of mobile app users here too and it sounds like it works fine, I'll just caution that some (all?) of them sound like they're feature-incomplete, so if you ever think something is missing from Lemmy, double-check on the website first, because it might just not be added to the app yet.

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

The biggest problem to me is what I just saw you post in another reply, that these models built upon our knowledge exist almost solely within proprietary ecosystems.

and maybe even our Mastodon or Lemmy posts!

The Washington Post published a great piece which allows you to search which websites were included in the "C4" dataset published in 2019. I searched for my personal blog jonaharagon.com and sure enough it was included, and the C4 dataset is practically minuscule compared to what is being compiled for larger models like ChatGPT. If my tiny website was included, Mastodon and Lemmy posts (which are actually very visible and SEO optimized tbh) are 100% being scraped as well, there's no maybe about it.

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submitted 1 year ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one

TL;DR: Reddit is making their tracker-filled mobile app the only way to access Reddit on mobile devices, they are falsely accusing third-party developers of blackmail, and they are on a path to severely lower the quality of content posted on Reddit and increase the amount of spam you see. To stand against these changes, alongside numerous large subreddits, Privacy Guides is not currently available on Reddit. Join us on Lemmy at [!privacyguides@lemmy.one](/c/privacyguides@lemmy.one) :)


As we discussed and announced a week ago on Reddit, the Privacy Guides subreddit is being made private from June 12 to June 14th to call attention to Reddit's most recent anti-consumer behavior.

What is Reddit doing?

A few weeks ago, Reddit unveiled plans to change the pricing for their API from $0 to $12,000 for 50 million requests. For third-party clients like Apollo on iOS or Sync on Android, this suddenly put the cost to create such an app in the realm of $20,000,000 per year, a figure clearly unsustainable for third-party Reddit client developers. For comparison, Imgur—a website with a similar userbase and size to Reddit—charges developers approximately $166 for every 50 million requests. This change in Reddit's pricing to far beyond any reasonable market value was driven solely to eliminate third-party clients from the market, in order to force Reddit users to use the official app instead, a plan which was successful given that most major third-party Reddit clients have now announced they are shutting down by the end of this month.

Reddit's API changes also affect a number of bots which are critical for moderation. Reddit cutting off access to clients and bots which moderators require to effectively care for their communities will only result in Reddit being overtaken by spam and low-quality content.

Why does Privacy Guides care?

The internet is supposed to be an open standard, and information on the internet cannot be funneled solely through proprietary first-party clients. The difficulty I had in merely archiving the r/PrivacyGuides announcement post on the New Reddit design (note everything missing here on internet archive) clearly demonstrates the danger of locking information into closed ecosystems like Reddit, where merely accessing this information is subject to their whims.

Open APIs and third-party clients are paramount to enabling privacy-friendly access to otherwise proprietary silos on the web. Through the use of those APIs and clients, it was possible to interact with Reddit in an entirely user-controlled, privacy-friendly way. Reddit's restrictions take that choice away, making their official app virtually the only portal to the information on their platform available to mobile users.

While Reddit is certainly within their rights to make these changes, Reddit users are certainly within their rights to reject these changes and choose an alternative.

We—obviously—think that the r/PrivacyGuides community is hugely beneficial to the internet at large, and a lot of great discussions take place informing people about privacy and protecting their data online. All of this taking place on Reddit was a necessary price to pay in order to reach a ton of new people and get them interested in private, open-source technologies, but if Reddit is going to abuse that power and try to control those people into using privacy-invasive clients, the cost of that might outweigh any benefit to us remaining on the platform.

Reddit's Current Response (Unmitigated Disaster)

In the past week, Reddit has largely made two real announcements about this change:

Firstly, they announced that they would keep the API free to certain clients which provide accessibility features. It should go without saying that this is just another way of Reddit saying: Because we are unwilling to make our website and apps accessibility-friendly ourselves, we will very generously let third-party developers do it for us for free.

Their second response has been to falsely accuse a prominent developer of blackmail, and then double down on their false accusations when confronted with irrefutable proof of their behavior. Threatening and accusing people in private messages, and then acting like the victim when those people publish those messages to refute your claims is incredibly toxic and inappropriate behavior from anybody working on any project, much less the CEO of Reddit.com.

In my view, this childish behavior from Reddit moves this situation far past the typical money-grabbing moves you should expect from Big Tech corporations and into legitimate concerns about integrity and stability at Reddit. If their leadership is going to devolve into Twitter-esque, dictatorship-fueled decision making, the entire platform can no longer be trusted as a source of knowledge at all.

What happens on June 15th?

I don't know what Reddit's response to this widespread protest will be. In any event, the Subreddit will re-open, but if Reddit's response is to do nothing, then r/PrivacyGuides will re-open in restricted, mod-only posting mode. Then we will have a community discussion about our next steps.

Reddit choosing to do nothing is—in my opinion—an untenable solution. While we will re-open r/PrivacyGuides in order to allow people to access the vast community knowledge that is already there (while you still can), it is entirely possible that the subreddit will remain restricted indefinitely. It is hard to imagine a reason why we should encourage our incredibly helpful and generous community to continue to provide valuable content to Reddit for free, only for Reddit to go down this privacy-invasive, ad-first path.

What's Next?

In any case, I would strongly encourage you to stop using Reddit going forward. The fiascos at Twitter and now Reddit clearly demonstrate that centralized big tech companies can no longer be trusted with being the gatekeepers to user-generated information (as if they ever could, hah!).

I think that smaller, federated communities like Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon are the future of knowledge-sharing on the internet, and the new Privacy Guides community on the fediverse can be joined from any ActivityPub enabled instance, such as:

All of these are links to the same community, just pick whichever site you already have an account on.

Privacy Guides additionally hosts a Discourse forum at discuss.privacyguides.net where we have discussions about and analyze various privacy tools.

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

I would describe Apollo as an accessibility app in the sense that the regular Reddit app is unusable.

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submitted 1 year ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one

You want Chrome 114.0.5735.106 or later on Mac and Linux, and 114.0.5735.110 or later on Windows.

(Also relevant to Chromium browsers, e.g. Brave, which you can check at brave://settings/help)

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submitted 1 year ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one

Since we launched our first paid plans in 2015, our Premium price has never changed. Now the time has come to update our plans. While prices for existing subscribers will not change, we have an awesome one-time offer if you decide to switch to the new plans right now: Get the new plans at half price and benefit from more email addresses, lots of storage, and more features!

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

Click the copy icon to the right of the community name on the search tool, then go to https://lemmy.one/search and paste in the URL it copied, and the community should show up. If it doesn't immediately show up: wait 30 seconds, refresh the search page, and try again, and then it will work.

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

"The content" on all Lemmy instances is the same. There is no account migration, but you can just sign up on lemmy.ml. If you already had an account there and you want it back... I don't know if it's possible for an admin there to restore it, you might have to get in touch with them.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jonah@lemmy.one to c/chat@lemmy.one

Some people have been asking which communities they should join first, so I posted some remote communities you can subscribe to on the sidebar on the homepage :)

Tech → !technology@beehaw.org
News → !news@beehaw.org
Gaming → !gaming@beehaw.org
Memes → !memes@sopuli.xyz
Privacy → !privacy@lemmy.ca
FOSS → !foss@beehaw.org
Monero → !monero@monero.town
Music → !music@beehaw.org
Books → !literature@beehaw.org
LGBT → !lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org
Nature → !greenspace@beehaw.org
Sports → !sports@beehaw.org
Programming → !programming@beehaw.org

Find another cool community? Leave a comment :)

There's also this universal community search tool you can try using. If you find a community, just copy its URL and paste it in /search to subscribe to it here. This just goes to show that while there might not be many local communities here on lemmy.one yet, the beauty of the fediverse means that doesn't matter!

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago

Just my password manager and uBlock Origin :)

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the "main" instances. I don't know exactly what concerned people, but I definitely think that more bigger, possibly saner instances like beehaw.org and—hopefully—now lemmy.one can make a better first impression on users.

Also, federation with non-Lemmy platforms seems to be much better than it was last time I looked at this place 6-12 months or so ago.

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submitted 1 year ago by jonah@lemmy.one to c/privacyguides@lemmy.one
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jonah@lemmy.one to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

I think there's a bug somewhere :)

[-] jonah@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You might want to check out !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml for asking questions, and !lemmy@lemmy.ml for reporting bugs and requesting features :)

Mods available to be added?

Not sure what you're asking here? About creating communities (subreddit equivalent) and adding mods for them, see my comment here: https://lemmy.one/comment/536

You can collapse comments, it's just not really intuitive, click this button:

No downvoting on lemmy.one:

Downvotes are disabled on this instance, because it is a very small community. If you see something against the rules, report it. If you see something you don’t like, go find something you do like and upvote that instead :)

I may consider changing this in the future.

If you have more questions about this instance, lemmy.one, generally, you can also ask at !meta.

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jonah

joined 1 year ago
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