YouTube is Google. Asking how to use Google without losing your privacy is asking how to swim without getting wet.

Use PeerTube. You’re asking this question on Lemmy, so surely you’re comfortable with the whole Fediverse thing.

You don’t have a disability. Just saying.

Doing anything online that requires you to break strict anonymity… breaks your anonymity, hence your privacy. The two should be separate subject matters, but the corporate surveillance model ensures that if anything can be traced back to you, your privacy is as good as gone.

You say you do Facebook… There’s your answer.

Literalicy? Ain’t nobody got time for dat.

Funny, I wanna ping 8.8.8.8 every microsecond forever, and make as many machines as possible all around the world do the same…

I’m a bit confused by your question: it sounds like you want to advertise yourself and your work. Why don’t you let AI scrape your information? If I were you, I’d want a chatbot to spit out my details when someone asks it to name the name of someone who does what I do.

I’m violently anti-AI, but this is the one use case I would happily feed it information: to use it as an amplifier to spread public information I want to broadcast as far and as wide as possible.

This is not a gratuitous visit. The clown up north badly needs the clown with the bad haircut.

Yeah… Whoever agrees to meet with Kim Jong Un clearly is a despicable world leader.

I don’t know what it is with Mozilla, they’re both the only saving grace of the open-source browser world and the most stupid internet company at the same time. And they’ve been both for decades, with a budget that could have allowed them to be and to do so much more…

Privacy used to be priceless. It still is for my generation. I work my ass off to maintain my privacy, which is harder and harder in this increasingly dystopian world, and I lose out on more and more services and conveniences everybody else enjoys as a result. But privacy is non-negociable for many people my age.

For younger folks, sadly they were born in the dystopia - or an early version of it - and they never lost the privacy they never had. For a lot of younger folks, not enjoying true privacy is their normal. Many of them are waking up to the obscenety of what Big Data does to all of us, but of course it’s harder to wake up than to resist someone trying to put you to sleep.

And finally, the assault on privacy is so relentless and comes from actors with so much more clout and resources that many simply give up, because it’s just too much. I’m one of those who refuse to drive and take the bus because cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance. But most people are not willing to accept that level of loss of quality of life and it’s fully understandable.

Here’s my personal rule: any product / company heavy-handed enough to get past my strict ad filtering online, or advertises enough offline to get on my radar immediately goes into my never-buy list.

Example of that: NordVPN and Brilliant. They managed to bribe so many of the Youtubers I watch - who otherwise produce good, honest content - into shilling their shit that they will never get a dime from me. They might have if they hadn’t invaded so much of Youtube, but now they won’t.

I looked at it, but it’s not highway-capable. If it was a bit faster, I’d buy one.

I guess what I mean by side effect is the vehicle refusing to start to force you to “fix” it, or artificially reducing performances, or (lesser evil) leaving an error code and/or a light on on the dash all the time. If it loses GPS, OnStar or some other connected feature, well… that’s a small price to pay for privacy.

With no side effect?

That’s great advice! That sure puts the Chevy Bolt near the top of my list. Thanks!

Interesting. I didn’t know some cars had a separate module. I just did a quick search about this but I couldn’t find much. But it was only a quick search.

Thanks for the tip!

That’s a far better option for the environment. I can’t speak on the privacy aspect since who knows what your bus system does.

Yes that’s true, especially since half of our city’s fleet is now electric.

The bus is great and I usually like it, especially since I don’t like driving so much. But here’s the thing: I’m getting older, and it’s getting more and more tiring to change buses and wait outside in the dead of winter when it’s zero degrees out, and doing a 50-minute commute that only takes 20 minutes by car. I’m all for the environment, but my creaky gen-X frame is starting to complain about my lifestyle. I’m not lazy and I try my best, but I just don’t have the stamina anymore.

In the winter, I find myself using my old diesel more and more out of sheer tiredness, and I’d rather not: that thing is all shades of terrible environmentally in the cold and it’s not good for the engine anyway. And now with my employer essentially offering free electricity, it’s really tempting to buy an EV, at least for the winter months.

Yes that’s kind of my plan so far. I’m not concerned about performance or range, as long as it does 30 miles in our punishing northern winters, and I don’t mind using an adapter. What I’m concerned is buying a car with a battery packed that’s so spent it’ll be utterly dead in 2 or 3 years. I wouldn’t mind buying an older Leaf with a new or refurbished battery pack, even if it’s not particularly financially sound, but that’s not a thing here.

Your Ioniq 5 is connected. It doesn’t require an internet connection - what car really does - but it has one, like all the others.

My questions is: can you disable it - like, completely, for sure, not using a fake button in the menu?

In other news, CNN says the best news source is CNN.

You’re a rude patronizing prick, that’s for damn sure.