Self hosting is best if you have the knowhow, inclination and time to maintain it, but there are alias services that will encrypt any mail they forward using a key you provided so this would eliminate the ability of your chosen non-self-hosted email provider/server to easily read your received mail limiting their ability to profile or target to any metadata and header info that is passed along unencrypted.

Of course, then you are placing trust in the alias service’s privacy and logging policies. But some are open source and you could host an alias forwarding service yourself if you wished as well.

eatthecake, they clearly need you on the marketing team, stat.

Opt out where you can and let the evil empire crumble under the weight of its own mistakes. Cornered beasts will lash out hard, so don’t go for the killing blow, just let the empire die somewhere in the woods frok its self inflicted wounds and then peace-loving people can step into the void and build a better world.

In the meantime, do what you can to love those around you who you care for, promote liberty, support the innocents working for better change through peace, privacy, rights, speech, technology and so forth.

I believe that Odysee and LBRY (the blockchain-based back end technology Odysee sprung from and draws on) are separate companies with different people running them.

You don’t have to touch crypto or use any crypto features to use Odysee, so I’d still suggest it as a platform in the toolbelt in addition to a lot of the other great recommendations you’ve already gotten here in other replies.

VeraCrypt and 7zip are both good recommendations. I’ve read up on cryptomator, but haven’t used it yet, so it’s good to read an endorsement of it from someone who does for cloud storage.

Edit: you could also encrypt it with a local pgp key if you already use that encryption method with a pgp program or provider

These are probably less ideal for the tech illiterate, but they are available for iOS and haven’t been mentioned yet:

Session

Element / Matrix (edit to note someone else did already mention element above in the thread)

A lot of services actively disable VoIP numbers from being used for registration or submission.

Yep. I’ve tried using dummy numbers in the past for things where no phone contact is required for contact and it frequently triggers fraud prevention even if not rendered useless by sms verification before submission.

I’d personally prefer they didn’t implement any KYC-style identity verification at all in the first place, but it’s not my service or project and I’m not a paying customer, so my preference is largely irrelevant to them. But that said, I didn’t intend the comment to be damning, or even a particularly harsh criticism, just thought it wad an odd choice.

If what you are saying is accurate, and there aren’t better options, I at least understand that choice a bit more. If they feel they need an identity provider for whatever reason, they should obviously choose the one they feel best fits that need. And as others have noted, different servers and instances can be spun up or utilized. Users can choose to utlize whichever fits their needs best, or none if none of them fit.

Your other point is well taken though that it may be a gap in the marketplace. Sounds to me like a need waiting to be filled. I recall reading about some decentralized blockchain solutions for this sometime back, but do not recall the specifics. I haven’t followed along because it didn’t seem relevant to my personal or business needs at the time.

If anyone else knows of alternative options that may be better or more privacy friendly, I’d certainly be interested to hear about them. And would chip in funding for any good FOSS projects that might seek to solve this problem.

I agree with you and it’s an important distinction. But for me it’s also about the ethos of the developers or company. Promoting free and open source tools is great, but requiring the opposite as a prerequisite to use the largest publicly facing implementation of that is a very odd decision.

Absolutely rubbish company that has nearly cornered the market on venues artists and events and made the entire process of engaging with live entertainment worse and worse as time goes on.

The awful practices of Ticketmaster/Livenation are many, including many things others have already listed as well as an increasing phase-out out of cash and other anonymous payment methods throughout the entire process, including at the actual participating venues themselves.

Haha, love the image. I think everyone feels that way the first time they learn it.

End to end encrypt emails whenever you can too. Now, getting those you communicate with to implement and utilize pgp? That’s a whole other battle.

Smart. Everyone reading this thread who cares about privacy and separation of work and personal life should follow your lead.

Unfortunately, words on paper frequently fail to prevent organizations, public of private, from doing things they are technically not allowed to do. See the security state apparatus of any of the nations around the world including the 5, 9 and 14 eyes, or any number of tech companies that claim and market privacy respective policies only for people to uncover later that what they pitch publicly diverges in spirit from what they do or what is in the actual terms of service.

Hopefully if people find their employer going outside the bounds of the contract they can catch it, catalog it and hold them to account. Accountability can often be tricky and costly though.

This, but it won’t matter if you delete history. They know anyway if the want, and can enable logging it if they choose.

Same can be said for any browser, any app, any connection while on the employers network IF they wished to monitor it. Even if you were able to delete all local browsing history and used private browsing, your employer would still be able to know every site you visit if they wished.

If you’ve authenticated with your credentials on the device, IT is able to see IPs visited and DNS queries and has access to all sorts of network tools to track, shape and otherwise manage your activity.

It’s best to assume that nothing you do on your employers network, even when logging into their corporate VPN from a personal device, is private.

I’m always shocked by privacy conscious people who do not have complete segregation of work and personal equipment and devices.

Could it be designed so users generate and share the vast majority of the content? I’m envisioning something that is mostly self-sustaining once coded if it were simplistic enough so that continued development or features were largely unnecessary short of ocassional bug fixes and maintaining hosting.

It wouldn’t need much moderation as the scope of the service would be sufficiently narrow. Could it then be written to limit what type of content was even permitted to be submitted in the first place and where content filters catch anything off-topic?

Just spitballing ideas. Anyway, if you ever found time and had interest, I’d be happy to toss some funds at it in an effort to help cover any development, hosting or maintenance costs.

Some do, some don’t in my experience. They will still build a profile on whoever uses the card though. Then they just need to tie that to a real identity later. Are you paying with a card with your name on it? Whether they would invest any time putting the profile together this way or not is another matter. But they could.

It’s like the data anonymization claims from big tech. Many claim the data they collect is all anonymized, but lots of researchers and studies have shown how easy it is to deanonymize the data and build strong profiles on individual users from anonymized data.

This isn’t a bad idea, but the original poster’s setup is much better for privacy. It would be similar to a VPN with shared IPs, so would obfuscate the individual users by lumping in the shopping habits with tons of other users making any profile built on that cards use unable to be tied to a specific person.

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, even if you were to get a generic loyalty card with no info tied to it, or fake credentials, it will still be attributed to a single person/household where they build a solid marketing profile and may tie it to credit card or other revealing financial or tracking information that is unique to that user.

Yep, I agree. And even if you were to get a generic loyalty card with no info tied to it, or fake credentials as someone else in the thread suggested, it would still be attributed to a single person/household where they build a solid marketing profile and may tie it to credit card or other financial or tracking information.