Yeah i agree with you there. You can get away with using the same username for some stuff if it’s related, like i read a lot online so have accounts on some websites like that and they’re the same username (these sites aren’t quite forums though so it’s just for reading, publishing your writing and reviewing other works). But for the most part it’s best to go for different stuff each time where you can. The only other place I’ve used the username on here was for a gaming platform nearly a decade ago
I saw that! An insurance scam i think!
I try not to G**gle anything much these days. DuckDuckGo offer pretty decent search, free to the user, but without the surveillance capitalist model of massive data acquisition & ‘mining’. It makes me feel alot more secure.
Yup. Me too. Wouldn’t touch G**gle with a shitty stick these days. DuckDuckGo works just as well and they keep NOTHING.
This might explain it:
Surveillance capitalism is, in my opinion, a bit like a smoke and mirrors trick.
Your data is held by, for example a search provider or social media platform and not shared. This dataset is free for use by the company to create a profile of you to predict your desires, which the company can trade. In this process they serve up their users predicted
behaviour as a product to advertisers, political campaigns, or whoever pays for this service.
The user‘s dataset is not shared or sold directly, as this is illegal in most countries, however, the service (behavioural prediction) provided is not. Which is where this type of company trades.
DuckDuckGo offers a very very limited form of this model. They only trade screen space to advertisers based on purchases by users making similar searches, I believe (not 100% on this). They discard all private information, unlike other private browsers that only delete this information from your device or computer. They keep the data, while you do not.
The surveillance capitalist giants of Silicon Valley, by contrast, acquire way, way more data, and can sometimes use it to create creepily accurate models. Which is why they are valued in the hundreds of billions.
I should add;
I’m not anti-capitalism. I don’t have a big problem with people making money in general. The term ‘surveillance capitalism’ is from Shoshana Zuboff‘s Book describing this relatively young industry.
It’s the surveillance bit that I find interesting to consider when we’re talking about anonymity and privacy issues.
Basically, I feel safe on this site, but especially so when I‘m not telling my search provider who, and even where I am at all times.
Don’t know about anyone else with the name but i definitely am
I’ll have to look at trying that 1, i don’t use Google very much anymore anyway, i usually use my universities search feature to find papers and don’t really need to find much else
I use a password Authenticator app now, especially for my email address accounts, when you log in the app will ask you to approve the log in first, works if that email address is linked to a Skype or Discord account.
Lovehoney’s Sexual Happiness Podcast had a great episode last year on sexting. The tip on using Signal was golden.
Signal do not have a key to your encrypted data, they do not collect metadata either. It’s free to use because its development is paid for by government grants and donations, so they’re not trading anything. Unlike certain other messaging apps, you are not the product!