Bandcamp is interesting and I am considering it and cancel Spotify. How do you go about discovering music? I use Spotify for not only listening to my artists but for music discovery too.
DuckDuckGo does save users search history. It is stated in their privacy policy:
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
Startpage's privacy policy states they do not save search history:
"We don't record your search queries
When you search, your query is automatically stripped of unnecessary metadata including your IP address and other identifying information. We send the anonymized search query to Google and return the search results to you. We don’t log your searches.
To prevent abuse such as robotic high-volume querying, we anonymously determine the frequency of popular search keywords as a part of our anti-abuse measures, while protecting your privacy."
I would say this is true. But personally the late night hours is a time when the world seems to stop and I'm able to be in my own space. I don't use social media so I don't have to worry about notifications from those apps. But I also don't have to worry about calls or texts. I am able to relax and be at peace.
I agree. You're not wrong. Us niche groups care, see how the tech works or learn how it works, see what happens with our data and see the possible use cases with some of these systems. That's why I think the whole data collection and privacy war is already over. Until the common user gets affected personally they think data collection is good, have nothing to hide and like it's being used to catch criminals.
Facebook lost at being a social media platform long ago with serving ads and trying to be a social media platform and news media platform at the same time. It just does not work.
That seems to be the big issue with people trying to create a social platform. You can't have a social platform that also has ads and news going around like wildfire. Ads ruin the experience and make it feel less "social" and news well just look at Facebook and Twitter and what news sharing has done there.
People want to be able to chat and have a feed among their friends and family. Take out all the business, celebrity pages and all other pages. Just have a friends list, chat and a feed.
I look back on the AIM days and how simple it was. It was just a friends list, chats and chatrooms based on topics from what I can remember. There weren't any algorithms altering anything. There wasn't all this extra stuff like following or friending businesses, magazines/newspapers, celebrities or anything else.
I have no idea why a social platform today needs all this extra garbage like businesses, celebs etc that has nothing to do with being a social platform. I think at that point it just becomes a hub for information and not a place to socialize, chat and share among your friends and family.
Eric Schmidt also said in a interview back when Google was starting up that they wanted to get Google right up to the "creepy line" but not cross it. This interview was also put in a documentary called "The Creepy Line." I'll see if I can find the interview though and link it to this comment.
I remember that story about Zachary McCoy.
This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care.
Right now the average user does not care at all about security and privacy except the small niche groups of us on HN, Reddit and other tech/Geek forums. The regular average user will continue to still use Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple etc. As long as the average user keeps using their services and vote with their data and wallets I doubt much will change anytime soon.
Until we get some real data privacy laws and regulation we just have to matters into our own hands. I don't use Google search unless I need to, and always have my VPN on (Mullvad).
Edit: Then again, once we did get data privacy laws and regulation could we actually trust the companies and politicians and LE. Probably not. That's why I also feel the laws and regulation needed for tech is more of like a "The public thinks we did something" type of situation. There will still and always will be under the table deals.
If the regular user can realize eventually how they feed these companies with their data and what happens with their data it could also hinder or start to hinder data collection at the government level (NSA, GCHQ, Project Raven and so on).
I'm in the same boat. Though I actually do trust my VPN provider Mullvad. Highly talked about, based in Switzerland, and Mozilla also uses them for their VPN service.
Edit: Sorry. Not Switzerland. Sweden. For some reason thought Switzerland.
I agree. A journal is supposed to be "your place" usually that no one knows about. When you use apps and note apps to journal in your data is being sent somewhere and the sacredness "your place" idea is gone.