Does anyone else feel as if it’s over when it comes to really owning your own things?
As of now:
- You don’t have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts
- You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer
- You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone
- You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device
- Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap
- Everything is going for a subscription model in general
And now Google is attempting to implement DRM on websites. If that goes through, Firefox is going to be relegated to privacy conscious websites (there aren’t many of those). At this point, why even bother? Why do I go to great lengths at protecting my privacy if it means that I can’t use most services I want?
It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy. Even more important is to actually PAY for services they like instead of relying on free stuff. I’m not optimistic not just because the non privacy conscious side is lazy, but because my side is greedy. I mean one of the most popular communities on lemmy is “piracy” which makes it all the more reasonable for companies not to listen to privacy conscious people.
I wouldn’t say that this is the endgame but in this trajectory, privacy is gone before 2030.
Depending on your situation, most of your issues can be avoided by not owning a smartphone. It’s extreme (by today’s standards, at least), but it does work. I ditched my smartphone back in 2017 for a cheap flip phone. I can find spare parts on eBay easily. My car is older, so there is no SaaS crap in it. If I need to keep in touch with someone, we can use SMS, call each other or meet in real life. I use a Linux laptop for banking/browsing the web and I keep a physical GPS in my car in case of emergency.
and I agree with you. Privacy is pretty much gone already.
Wouldn’t google’s DRM be considered a monopoly? Not in the US, but don’t they have laws and regulations against this type of stuff?
Even if it was, it likely wouldn’t be enforced, since it’s overseen by lawmakers and judges who have only the barest sense of what a webpage even is.
And are all on Google’s payroll.
Nah, because it will be considered a service that people choose to integrate with, and you won’t be required to use Google’s authentication service
Yes, also pretty sure Meta will roll their own offering too since the main appeal is for advertisers.
So my choice is gonna be between Google or Meta?
Real Sophie’s Choice there huh? 🫠
At that point, other than at work, I will stop using the internet.
You will if you want your website indexed by Google.
You don’t have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts
For now it is indeed an issue. It may get better as EU imposes easily replaceable batteries for instance.
You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer
Well yes, because technology is complicated by nature. BigTech inject billions in making stuff simple and UX pleasant precisely to attract layman customers. Privacy-focused tech companies have less money, put a lot of effort in privacy tech, and are less mature UX-wise than classic bigTech. Customers also want more privacy, but have a hard time paying for anything. At some point the customer has to come to terms with coherence. Vote with your wallet.
You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone
No you don’t necessarily. LineageOS works perfectly on my Oneplus 6T.
You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device
Yes you can. Magisk Root + Universal SafetyNet Fix v2.4.0-MOD_1.2 (by kdrag0n, modded by Displax) + editing the deny list properly.
Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap
Use public transport when possible. Rent cars when really not possible. Problem solved.
Everything is going for a subscription model in general
I understand it’s frustrating. At the same time we either expect a constant stream of updates, or everything-IT requires regular updating if only for security purposes. Companies have employees to pay. Do you work for free?
There’s a phone company out of Europe, Fairphone, that’s striving to fix these problems. I can’t really say if their specs are up to par or not (fwiw their newest phone can do 5G), but you can repair you phone with their Spare Parts offerings, like the selfie camera, earpiece, rear cameras, speaker, USB-C port, display, back cover, battery, etc.
Issue is that you can’t buy it in the US or elsewhere, but there are some tricks where you can get it into the US/CA by going with Clove or Reship.
Phone looks to work best on T-Mobile networks, so AT&T or Verizon users might see terrible performance.
So, not panacea, but a decent solution for those willing to go down that path.
help the fact that you only put a one in the first paragraph is bothering me
I’ve never heard of Clove or Reship before though, thanks!
I was just responding to the first point made by OP. Didn’t intend on commenting on the other stuff because either I agree or don’t know enough to contribute!
No worries, my problem was that markdown indents the first paragraph after a list item declaration like
1.. My recommendation which you can definitely ignore is just ditch the number
Fairphone is excellent for repairability and the general ethics their company have, but that comes at the cost of performance and software updates. They don’t come close to modern flagships and their Android versions are years behind. Making a good, private phone costs money, and few people care enough about their privacy to buy a Fairphone.
That said, phone hardware has become fast enough that even the slower SoCs will work just fine for most people and it’s not like Android has gained any important features in the last two or three major updates.
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No need to be down!
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Fairphone exists and has just expanded business into the USA
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Privacy is hard not because it’s difficult, but because we like free shit (free email addresses, free cloud storage, free apps, free news, free everything!). If you pay for your stuff, privacy becomes a lot easier!
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ROM quality depends on your make and model, and the volunteer work put into it. You can buy phones that fit your needs (i.e. /e/ or Pixels reported compatible with GrapheneOS) and you’ll have little to no compatibility issues.
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Magisk and that one magical fix module have prevented apps from breaking for me! If apps refuse to let you use them, you can always use different apps!
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I don’t like the SaaS bullshit in cars, but they give you a ton of hardware for free and all you need to do is read the manual and apply power to the right pins to get heated seats for free! With the right attitude, this crap is making your features cheaper!
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You rarely need to pay subscriptions for everything. Subscriptions are often cheaper and easier, but media is still available in physical form, software is usually sold (for more money) with permanent options, and car shit can be bought off beforehand.
The real problem is that people want privacy but they also like getting discounts or free stuff subsidised hy their data. Everyone wants YouTube, nobody wants ads, nobody wants to pay for YouTube premium. Everyone wants music, nobody wants to buy CDs, nobody wants to buy MP3s, and all that’s left is subscriptions.
There are things you can’t avoid (i.e. American ISPs selling your location history to bounty hunters and partnering up with advertisers) but there are LOADS of options out there that will serve you perfectly fine if you’re willing to pay the money companies would’ve earned off you by selling your data.
DRM in websites has already existed for years at this point, it’s why Netflix is allowed to give you HD video by the copyright holders. Google take on remote attestation sucks (but I think it beats the implementation Apple has built into current versions of Safari) but in the end it’ll be your own choices that determine if this becomes a problem or not. Don’t visit the websites that enforce this crap and, if enough people care, things will change for the better.
Let me just spare a few dollars for privacy after paying for rent & groceries in my third world country currency.
What’s the alternative? Lemmy is run by the community and pretty much a labour of love, but everything fro phones to search engines is made by companies, not charities.
You can rely on open source, volunteer products if you want affordable privacy. That’ll deprive you of luxuries and it’ll require you to put in more work yourself, but it’s not the end of the world.
The alternative is putting pressure on companies to not succumb to greed and to go as far as enacting regulation to protect consumer interests. Paying some other companies to mitigate the harms of these companies while pretending that it’s a sensible solution to everyone is not my idea of solving a problem. You’re just sequestering privacy behind a paywall and pretending it’s all fine. It’s not; it’s elitist and plays into the pay-for-privilege that toxic capitalism breeds. Because let’s keep in mind that privacy–unlike the continuous stream of manufactured goods–is a choice that only needs to be made once.
- I know about Fairphone but the specs are a bit limited IMO.
- I do have a Pixel with the stock (I know bad idea) ROM but I rooted it. I do have the kdrag0n Safetynet fix, but there is one app that somehow finds out about it. I guess one app out of however many I have is not too bad now that I think about it.
- I haven’t really looked too far into this, but I assume that they build some tamper detection in the seat warmers (unless they’re incompetent or lazy). But the good news is that the seat warming subscription is no longer there.
- For this one I was just looking for things to complain about. I have no subscriptions for media and just buy the physical stuff (or digital from Bandcamp).
I guess it’s not a guarantee that DRM would be that proliferated and I can avoid it. I was being way to pessimistic at the time.
Thanks for uplifting words mate!
Fairphone exists
As someone who has a Fairphone 3: they destroyed any trust I had in them the moment the FP4 came without headphone jack and with a different form factor. I thought that their idea would be that each module could be upgraded independently. That’s what would make their offering truly innovative and eco-friendly. By departing from that, they simply became a manufacturer of overpriced phones with slightly better ethics.
ROM quality depends on your make and model,
I am using /e/OS since when I got the FP (what, 3 years ago?) and to this day the applications that need GPS are completely unreliable. I gave up on using bikesharing systems here because their apps simply fail all the time to get my location.
but they give you a ton of hardware for free
It’s not free. There is no marginal cost in what they are doing. This is all a cash grab and an attempt to further segment the market.
Everyone wants music, nobody wants to buy CDs, nobody wants to buy MP3s, and all that’s left is subscriptions.
If the lion share of music revenue went to artists, you can bet that more people would pay for it. But we know for years that this is not the case. Same for movies.
I don’t know anything about Fair phone’s modules and uogradeability, all I know is that you can buy replacement parts which is better than most other brands.
I know /e/ is far from perfect (they’ve lagged behind for years) but I don’t believe that’s the OS FF themselves support either. I just know it comes closest in terms of integration compared to stock Android. How well it works differs strongly per device, some work perfectly out of the box while others have nonfunctional hardware.
The cost of most car features is either upfront anyway (software stuff) or very minor (seat warmers). Sure, they sell you seat warmers for a couple grand or a major monthly fee, but resistive heaters really don’t cost all that much. There’s maybe $50 of hardware in a car that they will charge you ten times as much for if you buy the feature. I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.
I don’t think most people care all that much about artists. Most people I know just go to Youtube or Spotify because it’s free and easy. However, if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.
I’m pretty sure they’re actually saving money by simplifying their supply lines and factory processes to just make a single type of chair.
My point is that if these types of features are so cheap to add, then why not just make it part of the standard package?If it costs $50 to make, add $100 to the price of the car and make a standard feature. This extreme segmentation just to squeeze more money is counterproductive.
if you think artists get little money for CDs, you’ll be shocked to see the streaming situation. Streaming pays out MUCH less compared to physical media. If you want to support artists, go to their concerts, that’s where they rack in their cash.
Yeah, I know. This is not a defense of streaming services.
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You will own nothing and you will be happy
It was outlawed out of concerns it would make us less productive
If it’s a physical object, how can you turn one into 1000? How can it be both the alignment of magnetic domains on a spinning disk, or an area containing more or less electrons than normal, or a sequence of letters printed on a page? It can even be stored in meat if you memorize a sequence, or separated in space and time then reunited
Data isn’t a physical object, it’s any pattern that can be decoded to result in the same useful sequence. It’s information.
At best, you can call it a property of a physical object
Agreed, I’m currently moving my digital life to free software to escape that bullshit.
While everything else seems to be caught up in enshittification, free software is constantly improving.
Yeah that’s true. I guess I forgot that there are some really cool stuff that are objrctively better than the google stuff like hosting your own NAS, backup, local high quality music from Bandcamp, etc. Not to mention that Lemmy is really growing on me now.
3. I’m guessing that Google apps would be problematic. Except those apps, I didn’t have any compatibility issues, on Custom ROMs. Especially GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, LineageOS, and /e/OS.
4. On a different user, I installed banking app that would usually prevent you from using it. No problems to use the app whatsoever.
If the companies and our government have their way, then yes, they will be able to monitor our every move and make sure we rent everything and own nothing.
This runs against the grain of the Constitution of the United States, but our Federalist Society SCOTUS jurists have been gutting the fourth and fifth amendments long before the Dobbs decision triggered a public hue and cry.
And it’s going to be up to us to regard censorship as damage and route around it. Essentially, there are repair shops that can fix your iPhone for you even if they’re not authorized and will even replace proprietary bolts with standard ones. Eventually right-to-repair will be established by courts if not legislators, state-by-state if not federally.
There are too many complexities in the system to lock us down permanently into their walled gardens, but they will try until we respond with [redacted] until ashes cloud the skys.
God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.
God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.
That’s delusional. As soon as more and more parts of software are run remotely on proprietary hard- & software there will be nothing to hack or crack. Sure, someone could reverse engineer it, but there aren’t enough hobbyists in the world to rewrite all this software.
We see this more and more in gaming… it used to be the case that they just gave you the software to run your own game in multiplayer setups, nowadays, if they shut off the servers, the game is dead (unless, someone releases a very wonky, extremely buggy, barely usable, reverse engineered server with 10% of the features some time down the line)
It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy.
They don’t. People don’t care, don’t understand, and don’t care that they don’t understand. The average person is oblivious of the way the world around them works, and they’re okay with that. Ignorance is bliss, after all.
The truth makes for tough reading. Now for the good news: imagine all the free software you use every day, and all the people who built it with passion and countless hours of hard work, and - not least! - how much more powerful that software is than it was even a decade ago.
It seems that the ignorant masses are not entirely in the driving seat, right?
Ignorance goes both sides though, free and open source has dark aspects to it. The assumed security has no one to hold to account, and for profit companies has real leverage over projects and can hurt the ecosystem if given a chance. Add to that how lax the wider community attitude is to breaking licences and you have a ecosystem that can fail if all you do is assume good faith.
Remember to keep an open mind to everything and not just the things in life you have a particular issue with. Everyone is ignorant to something.
Remember to keep an open mind to everything and not just the things in life you have a particular issue with.
FYI this presumptuous and gratuitously patronizing remark undermines the rest of your comment.
They consider revenue streams more important than one-off payment.
So everything becomes service and we are left in this non-ownership economy where we own nothing.
Why would they sell you something for $50 one time, when they can charge you $9.99 / month forever?
Seriously watch this video posted here: https://lemmy.world/post/2126185
If Yann is correct about how AI will work in the VERY near future, google is already dead. It has no future Personal offline open source assistant AI is near at hand. This will kill the entire digital ecosystem as it stands now. If you understand this, contextually, all the BS right now is from desperate venture capitalists trying to get as much return on investment as possible.
Get a machine with at least 16GB of VRAM on a GPU and start leaning to mess with FOSS AI. This is the next digital age.
Privacy is something we control. You don’t actually NEED the conveniences. You vote with your wallet. As far as devices, I love Graphene, but I also live without anything that only comes from the proprietary google framework like the Play store. I only use open source Android apps. The Play store is not Android, it is proprietary google garbage.
