Ayup that has been the holy grail of big tech.

They are most of the way there today. Make Identity Resolution inescapable. Bing bang boom.

It is more than just phones and lappys too. It’s everything. That smart TV. That fitness watch. That automobile. That streaming music service. The ebook reader you got as a birthday gift.

Your behavior across every single device is data gold. This is today’s reality.

That’s why you have to use the special google app that will protect you from all these dangers*

*and also collect all your data, sell it to advertisers and forward it to US surveillance agencies (for your own protection of course).

My current GraphineOS phone will probably be my last smartphone. I’ll be moving to a dumb phone and a data hotspot connected to some type of cyberdeck. Will have that thing locked down, blocking known abusive companies like Google. Honestly could care less about using any service that touches them.

It’s not 2007. Devices are everywhere now, smartphones, TV’s etc. The social dimension (social pressure) and implications are very different now. Their power increases, amount of people caught in the loop is immense now. 2007 was all still fun and games.

The ongoing battle against online privacy is a symptom of capitalism, the EU is a capitalist state. The only thing the EU would ever do against US-based capitalism is to gobble up those capital gains for themselves. It doesn’t matter if it happes or not, the privacy-issues for end-users would never be alleviated by the EU.

I see you have no clue. You will learn, eventually.

You’re right, you’re not going to achieve complete anonymity if you’re interacting with Google services in any way, but you can reduce the amount of information that they receive.

Sandboxed Google Play Services doesn’t have privileged access to location information, so it can’t pull your GPS location or Wifi Positioning information. It would only see a blank profile and doing this would allow for your primary profile to continue to not run Play Services.

Any malicious code which could be injected into the process would find itself in a sandbox, on a blank profile and isolated from the rest of the system.

Google would only see that you are authenticating from a profile without anything installed, from an unknown location and coming from whatever VPN endpoint that you’d like. They could possibly infer that the blank profile and your ‘real’ profile are different via browser fingerprinting. You can randomize a lot of fingerprinting datapoints with browser extensions, but avoiding browser fingerprinting is a whole other topic.

The ‘real’ privacy solution is to avoid anything that uses this version of recaptcha. However, if you have to use these services then you can still reduce the amount of information leaked via Play Services by using a blank profile to scan the QR codes.

That’s assuming they know I have another account

Ayup absolutely. Those co’s have such weight. They can drive this into essential services. Banks. Gov services. All online stores. Heck even sites that don’t need logins.

It’s short sighted to say “I’ll just use other sites then”. The end of that road is, we get excluded from modern life.

You’re so right, it’s dystopian.

My solution is take a screenshot and then open the file in a separate QR reader app that can open files.

I think apps can have screenshot permission, so just by using that feature

Everything is possible. Some things just highly unlikely in the current political climate. I think the mamdani method of doing a shitload of door to door campaigning has been really successful in other parts of the world as well.

It can give a huge boost to leftist parties which then will be able to affect positive change but also change the political landscape. Overton window and all that.

What I’m saying is get the fuck out with your local leftist party/candidate or whatever if you can.

It’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil

Thank you for getting this quote right. Often, it’s shortened to “money is the root of all evil”, which hits different, and removes the element of personal responsibility. The “love of money” bit is important.

There’s no small scale capitalism as the Capital needs to expand more and more. Political Economy 101.

Ah yes, the mythical small business capitalism we all hear about. I will agree it sounds good on paper and also seems to distribute money in a somewhat efficient manner.

Unfortunately there has never been a government able to regulate and keep capitalism this way. Other people have said it is simply not possible due to the nature of capitalism.

I think there is a worthwhile debate here around systems and culture. Perhaps capitalism could work if people were not inherently so greedy. I tend to believe that culture is the deciding factor which is a little disheartening honestly.

Capitalism does not work because companies will always seek to grow more and more and more. It’s the core of capitalism. You need anti-capitalist policies to keep companies small.

Man, I want a phone with physical kill switches for things like Wifi, GPS, Bluetooth, because a lot of things seem to detect when these things are turned ‘off’ by software. Wonder how they’d react if in software, GPS is enabled, but the actual hardware is not powered at all

Oh yeah that’s something I’ve been meaning to look into!

The main ones for me are the RBC app, Skip the Dishes and Communauto. But I think those might all be Canadian?

If you turn it off, you’ll have to do the captchas manually.

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I know in what way it’s open source. I just don’t understand what person this idiot thinks they’re mocking when they wrote that. It’s as if they think there are really people out there claiming that android/Google respects privacy (lol) and that it’s proven by part of the OS being open source. People make up fake scenarios to get mad about and they’re often rather ridiculous.