Use the user profiles feature of grapheneos to make a “social” profile and only use that to access Instagram / facebook.

Meta sells your convo data on WhatsApp for ads, if you use it you will get targeted ads regardless.

Other options are signal (Molly on fdroid), simplex, etc.

And if you need port forwarding use airvpn. Proton seems more and more sketch every day

Google updated something that broke most third party clients this past week… newpipe had the fix within an evening and the rest followed shortly after.

I had multiple updates over a few days on smarttube beta so the devs must have been working overtime to get it fixed and its working great again now.

Reminder to consider donating to the project if you get use out of it.

Airvpn is what I landed on for port forwarding

There’s nothing stopping creators from doing sponsored videos and/or sharing their liberapay/opencollective/patreon on peertube, they even provide a dedicated place for it.

Most of the youtubers I follow claim YouTube’s direct compensation makes up very little of their overall income, especially since YouTube keeps lowering the compensation/demonetizing everything. Most of their income comes from sponsored videos, patreons, and merch sales. Maybe it depends on the youtuber but it seems consistent with those I follow.

Satisified customer here. Bought 2x lifetime plans for myself and my partner

Hmm you’re thinking Open Office which was the predecessor of libreoffice.

OnlyOffice is a different product

Holy fuck I hate HOA’s/condo boards

Could dual boot your laptop or run windows in a VM as someone suggested. Onlyoffice was what finally solved the office compatibility problem for me during school. O365 is online anyways and works on Linux…

Replaced gboard with a FOSS keyboard without internet access on your phone? I use and like AnySoftKeyboard.

Are you on stock android or a privacy friendly ROM? That’d be #1 on my list. I use grapheneos on a pixel 8 and would recommend. Whether you have google apps on your phone or not they have access to everything you do on stock android 🤷‍♂️

Either way I think its important to recognize how much you’ve already done, and not stress about what you can’t change yet. You’re already more private than 99% of the general population and you aren’t in school forever. I was in the same boat with a windows partition on my laptop for a couple windows only programs for school (online test invigilation can be a bitch for compatibility, windows in a VM generally doesn’t work I found), but school ends and that partition is gone now.

TL;DR You’re doing good, don’t stress if you have to keep some stuff around for school, give onlyoffice a shot, look into privacy friendly ROMs for your phone.

You can also download ready-made decks for different categories in many languages. Useful for expanding your vocabulary I find.

+1 for simplelogin.

Cancelled proton unlimited since the majority of their platform is lacking features on Linux and switched to just a simplelogin subscription to pocket the savings.

KOHO has a single virtual card that can be reset… but it would reset everything being billed to that card ofc so not quite 1-1 with privacy.com’s per-service virtual cards.

That being said, my koho card was also compromised and their chat wouldn’t let me dispute the transaction or talk to a human for another 3 days after the fact so I just closed it down.

Ya same here with librewolf, ublock origin, and a VPN. Decent number of sites block and want me to turn off ad block and/or VPN.

I have a simple policy now: they stay on.

I’ll just go somewhere else that doesn’t want to track people that badly

Seems like an honest recommendation to me. You fit the apple use case pretty well, so if it works for you, great. I’d argue a stock pixel using stock android would be comparable in terms of not needing to mess with stuff since its a very curated experience, since google then controls the hardware and software, like apple.

The trade off is you’re giving google (or apple) 100% access and control to everything you do on your phone.

With a fairphone or any other android with (e, grapheneOS, calyxOS, lineage, etc) you WILL need to change some settings, maybe play around with it a bit to get it working how you want, but you are the one in control. Its really not that difficult to develop the small amount of technological knowledge needed given the amount of help available online and I’d say its a necessary life skill these days just like learning to use a computer became a necessary life skill.

This is built-in to firefox rightclick menu when copying the URL, no extension needed. Less extensions means less fingerprint

Another good piece by the EFF. Its an important message to write about to your gov’t representatives if it resonates with what you feel is the way forward with regards to the misguided “internet safety” laws so many countries are trying to pass right now

When I still had Netflix I was only able to get 720p streams on lineageOS because of netflix’s DRM checks (same with on a web browser)… does your method allow 1080p or even 4k streams or is it still the same deal?

I mean, not a great source… That’s just a link to a forum post and the only thing they reference for it “not being secure” was a github PR from 2021… Not saying its great they had teething issues, but that’s literally a year within starting up and they fixed all those issues right away, and had an independent audit done. So I kinda feel like using it to say they’re not secure now isn’t very useful. But if you have something showing their current deployment is insecure please share.

They did a complete infrastructure overhaul at the start of 2023 too moving to their own hardware and such so I imagine more might have changed since 2021 than just those issues.

This is literally client-side encryption using fully open source programs… If you “do not trust it to be e2e”, verify the code yourself. Doing your own encryption on top would be redundant.

Lifetime is implied to be the lifetime of the company as is the case with LITERALLY EVERYTHING.

From an economic view: In this case as soon as you hit 13 months without filen going bankrupt you are literally free compared to the 200GB plan with Google Drive which you would still be stuck paying $4 CAD/month for 200GB long after the lifetime plan has paid for itself (assuming they don’t increase monthly rates as time goes on, which they always do).

Go ahead and pay monthly if you want but you’ll be in exactly the same position if a company goes under, except you would have paid a hell of a lot more than 35 Euro by that point.