They don’t need the data perpetually to train their AI. Just dump it once into the black box and be done with it - no need to save it for even a second. Of course, if they want to train and re-train, and perhaps build ad profiles, that’s a different matter.

I don’t know where they got their quote from, since, historically, democracy has almost always died in broad fucking daylight.

Dark mode can be recreated using extensions, although the colors most likely won’t be as legible as “native support”.

I don’t see why a similar extrnsion couldn’t change the timezones of clocks.

Additionally, I don’t see why the server should bother with either (pragmatically) - Dark mode is just a CSS switch and timezones could be flagged to be “localized” by the browser. No need for extra bandwidth or computing power on the server end, and the overhead would be very low (a few more lines of CSS sent).

Of course, I know why they bother - Ad networks do a lot more than “just” show ads, and most websites also like to gobble any data they can.

Checked the site quickly and didn’t find the information, but judging by the top-level comment, they don’t charge you if you want to use their cloud service, but if you want to “unlock” the ability to use someone else’s.

When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?

Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.

“If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?

Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.

Ah, the third option.

Is that Motorola’s EULA or buying throug a carrier?

Cloased source does for privacy and security what sweeping problems under the rug does: it mitigates them, a bit, but then when they inevitably do hit, they hit hard.

About that. I heard somewhere wordpress.com and wordpress.org are seperste entities, one for-profit and the other not, but Wikipedia doesn’t mention why they share the same name.

About the Ribbon: Apparently M$ has a patent (or multiple ones on) it, so they ultimately have the last say on what is and isn’t allowed. They did make a licence availiable royalty-free, but I assume that that licence didn’t cover enough of what LibreOffice needed, so they probably struck a deal with M$ about having the option, just not as the default.

I haven’t researched this all that much, so mostly speculation. Although the M$ having a patent part of someting so true. And that patent (apparently) explicitly states that use in directly competing software with M$'s is forbidden, at least for-profit.

Idk, maybe it’s a case of patent restrictions, or LibreOffice being LibreOffice.

Honestly, a really interesting rabbit-hole.

Thank you for the correction!

The english word “free” actually carries two meanings: “free as in free food” (gratis) and “free as in free speech” (libre).

Ollama is both gratis and libre.

And about the money stuff: Ollama used to be Facebook’s proprietary model, an answer to ChatGPT and Bing Chat/Copilot. Facebook lagged behind the other players and they just said “fuck it, we’re going open-source”. That’s how and why it’s free.

Due to it being open-source, even though models are by design binary blobs, the code that interacts with them and runs them is open-source. If they were connecting to the Internet and phoning home to Facebook, chances are this would’ve been found out by the community due to the open nature of the project.

Even if it weren’t open-source, since it runs locally you could at least block (or view) Internet access.

Basically, even though this is from Facebook, one of the big bads of privacy on the Internet, it’s all good in the end.

You forgot a million switches for each “partner”. More like prostitution.

Tenacity is a telemetry-free fork of Audacity for a start

Reminds me of Tom Scott’s Emojli

Civil disobedience is a good thing and it should have no “consequences” to think about. At least in a democratic society, which Academia isn’t on multiple levels.

Additionally, a well-meaning and functioning state would make those making these threats think about consequences of punishing free speech exercised in a civil manner.

Well, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They are a large player, so they are under a bunch of scrutiny.

But at the end of the day, WhatsApp clearly states it takes all this information. They only claim to keep your messages end-to-end encrypted.

I wonder if this applies to text messages only, or to things like voice memos, images/videos, gifs, etc. as well.

WhatsApp doesn’t let you send documents if you don’t give it full access to your files. Sure, maybe they pinky-promise don’t do anything but this is Facebook we’re talking about.

The same caveat goes for photos and videos - you can’t even send a photo if you don’t give it the camera permission and gallery access, something it clearly doesn’t need just to send a single picture.

Additionally, WhatsApp loads previews of websites. Sure, on the privacy violations list that’s pretty low-priority but I’d still like to not have a link contacted before I can take my 3 seconds to look at it and decide wether it’s worth clicking. Especially since a lot of my contacts send obvious scams (“send this message to 10 contacts for a chance to win a free iPhone” type bullshit mostly).

Revoking WhatsApp’s contacts permission will not show peoples’ nicknames - it will only ahow numbers. Yet you have to give yourself a nickname on WhatsApp, so they clearly have some interest in your contacts. Otherwise they wouldn’t block it outright when it’s an already implemented feature to show nicknames for numbers not in the contact list.

All quite suspicious if you ask me. Although I don’t work in cyber security so it’s clearly just incoherent rambing from me.

AFIAK privacy laws are still the same as before we left the EU

I can confirm

Depends. According to the GDPR for any processing of PII you need consent from the data subject or a reasonable basis why you have to act upon the data (your servers communicating with an IP adress is neccesary for your service to function). Saving the adress isn’t, so you need consent or other legislation under which you’re required to store it that trumps the GDPR. That’s the so-called “overriding legitimate interest”. It doesn’t mean “interest = money”, “data = money” therefore “data retention = overruling legitimate interest”.

Keeping leaked data or scraping it from public sources is still problematic since you do nees consent.

If you’re approached as a 3rd party by someone with data who sells them to you you are obliged to make sure the data you’re given has been aquired with consent. Often times checks aren’t in place, and ultimately, if you’re given “bad data” by the intermediary you cab always claim they kenw they should’ve notified you but didn’t.

If you’re scraping leaks, well, there’s no one between you and the data subject who can take the fall. You’ve knowingly collected “bad data” unilaterally.

Yup, it affects all chromium browsers AFAIK