Anecdotally whenever I encounter someone from Denmark, they are always downplaying their home country and saying how great they think the USA is; I think they have a cultural propensity to try and keep Denmark a secret from outsiders.

Hey johnson & johnson, we’ve got a bundle of email addresses and phone numbers for another 200,000 people who mentioned to their friends and family that they’ve been sick in the last 48 hours to sell you.

Good question, and I just want to add my input as a framework for how to think about this:

Airplane mode is a software feature built into phones, and the idea of restricting it from connecting to the internet would work for what you want it to do; HOWEVER that requires you to TRUST the people who make the software, and I think nothing good could come from that. Smart devices have cameras, microphones, GPS technology built in; all of the tools necessary for something to spy on you exist in those devices, it is just safer to not have them at all unless you are an advanced user who can take appropriate measures.

I’m not an advanced user, so I leave my devices at home when I want to minimize my risks. Paranoid? Sure, but it’s not a constant anxiety inducing fear of being tracked, I see it more as a basic safety measure like wearing sunscreen or carrying an umbrella.

I’m not an advanced phone user, the deactivating of apps confuses me… I think I have also seen things get stealth reactivated on updates (my samsung). Hard to trust if this helps anything…

My relatives think their amazon echoes are not spying on them because they opted out of being spied on as a tangential example

In real life people think it is weird that I don’t use apps; even if this is obvious to us, we are also a bunch of anarchists on a defederated internet forum. Explanations and examples like this will help us protect the normal people who don’t think like us (yet).

I worked as a student loan debt collector over covid, all the old school collectors there would wax nostalgic for the times they could call peoples family members and shake people down; the CFPB was single handedly keeping debt collectors defanged and declawed.

I’ve always been too self conscious to dance, and had never thought of this before, Nice article, thank you for sharing.