Travel to the U.S. again. To be fair, it’s not just about the surveillance. It’s also a about the political dystopia that goes with it. But these two are connected.

I love you people and I love your country - you’re alright. But fuck the technofascist dystopia you’ve allowed yourselves to slide into, and fuck the criminal sacks of shit a lot of you have put back in power. I wish you all the best for removing them. Until then, I stay away and help you starve your regime and its corporate enablers of any Dollar I might otherwise have spent there.

Freedom of Speech. 🥲 Also socialize and make friends.

I love tech! But I hate techno-surveilance.

Great summary of my own stance.

What do you NOT do, that you would do without privacy violation?

Since the day I realized I could not trust (high) tech to respect my privacy, I decided to use tech as little as I can.

There is not much I can do to change tech beside using Free/Libre software that do respect my user rights, or to resist that dystopia our leaders seem so willing to make our reality (probably thinking they will able to escape it for themselves, their families, and their friends), but I still have the choice to not actively contribute to making it a reality by not using the very tools they’re using to eradicate our privacy.

• Moving back to analog, wherever I can. Things like pen and paper, print instead of digital, and so on. And also to physical media I could fully own, instead of streamed ones I don’t own.
• Moving back to low-tech wherever we could too. And yes that means not using a lot of things one may want to use. There is no smart gizmo at all in our home, none. And we try to keep tech at bay as much as possible everywhere. For example, we barely use our phones and store nothing personal on them.
• Also, rekindling in-person encounters/chats/etc. instead of doing those online.
• We also constantly try to improve our ‘de-reliance’ on high-tech. I mean, my voice recorder is now a 90s Sony thingy that works wonder, that do not spy on my personal memos, needs no Internet, no subs and comes AI free.

Small things like that. And there are a lot available.

Edit: typos/clarifications

Nothing. I do my best to keep my data private but I don’t let it deny me life experiences. If I did, that would be another form of power that our surveillance overlords would have over me. Fuck them.

I’ll probably get down voted into oblivion for saying that in this forum but this is where I’m at.

If you get Organic Maps you can use GPS navigation. It works entirely offline so you can turn your phones cellular off and just use GPS which is passive and doesn’t send out signals. Best practice would be Graphene OS as the base and not having google services installed at all too.

Lots of things.

I’d start a YouTube channel to document my travel life, but Google.

I’d use LinkedIn to expand my professional network, but Micro$lop.

I’d join communities related to my hobbies that mostly exist in FB groups or subreddits, but, yeah.

There are also things I still do, although differently. Like using Google Maps to view detailed information about places, like accessibility, restaurant reviews etc. But I only do it through a browser, and I use CoMaps for navigation. Or banking apps, due to convenience. Or the GoPro Quik app so I can remotely control my GoPro when I mount it on the outside of my car. Or music streaming services.

Surveillance sucks, but I try to find compromises that I can live with when needed. I can live with some inconvenience, but to a degree.

be on linkedin

For example. I wanted to volunteer on a trail maintaining crew. But they’re all TF over FB and Tiktok. They put everyone’s photos on there. Vids of ppl working. They coordinate on FB groups.

I used to do a lot of this, but that was long ago, before the Eternal September.

I take less road trips than I want. I hate having all my travel logged by ALPR. Even driving an old ass car without onboard GPS.

This gives me the impression that your security choices are somewhat capricious & vibes-based. You may want to consider a more analytical & methodical approach. Maybe take a page from cybersecurity.

i’d be able to speak candidly to my friends and family again, other than just in person without phones in the room

Mostly interacting with other people in-person. I left most corporate social media and lost access to Meta explicitly due to a conflict around my viewpoints on what constitutes hate speech against trans people (hint: saying it’s a sickness that needs curing and that justifies cure by torture, eg. conversion therapy, is hate speech). But I lost access to a really active Buy Nothing group in my neighborhood that’s on Facebook as well as several groups that only post their in-person events on Facebook. Really sucks that Meta locked us out not for violating a rule, and thus with no possible appeal, but assumedly because they were surveiling their platform and excluding people who argued against their stance. Or at least that’s the best guess that those who were blocked have for why.

Also, I have been losing a lot of home automation from Nest devices because Alphabet bought them and has decided to force allowing access to data for “AI” training and “law enforcement”/government surveillance. If I could keep the data local, I would still be able to use the devices with Home Assistant, but they only allow using their servers.