There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.

Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!

Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.

Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!

And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.

Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.

the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough

I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.

  • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    1 year ago

    One of the main freatures is that there is a feature caled advanced privacy you can block all trackers

    It’s probably just a DNS filter. You can achieve the same thing on any Android phone using NextDNS (or any DNS resolver that blocks trackers) and the native Android DNS-over-TLS implementation, which is present on every Android ROM that’s based on Android 9 or higher. It takes 5 minutes to set up.

    Tunnel your IP Adress through Tor from the settings or from its Widget at a per App basis without root out

    You can do that with the free Orbot app released by the Tor Project.

    Its fork of Aurora store “app lounge” has privacy ratings for all the apps calculated using the permissions they require and trackers they have

    The information about Trackers and Permissions comes from Exodus Privacy and it’s included in the normal Aurora Store too

    it includes FOSS and pwa apps too

    This is actually a nice feature. Of course, you can get FOSS apps and PWAs on other ROMs as well, but it’s nice to have all the apps in one central place. Very useful, especially for new users.

    (also must admit I mostly just use fdroid)

    That’s what I do on GrapheneOS too

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸@sh.itjust.works
        01·
        1 year ago

        You understand, that you can locally filter DNS and then send these filtered requests to a remote nameserver, right? DNS filtering can absolutely happen locally. A great example for that is the /etc/hosts file on Unix/Unix-like operating systems (including Android, e.g. DivestOS locally filters network requests using a hosts file)