Have you also tried using Signal instead of WhatsApp? Sorry, had to do it.

Celebrity/billionaire worship. Just no. It means their values are wildly erratic.

Originally I thought I could, but no. Because when I listen to the music, I’m giving that artist money, attention, and power.

That results in giving them a bigger platform to spew their bigoted opinions/actions is counterintuitive to my goals. I would rather not.

This would only be meaningful if it wasn’t collected in the first place.

I’ve bought every single generation of an Apple Watch, and I returned it every time.

I wanted to love it so much, but I couldn’t.

It’s just a glorified notification system.

Anytime I got a notification on it, or wanted to use it for something, it was faster and far more convenient to just pull out my phone and do whatever I needed to.

The only thing I found it good for was controlling music from a distance, but that’s not an important use case for me and definitely not worth the price tag, plus the recurring data plan. It’s a money and attention hog, just like any other smartphone.

What’s even scarier is that takeout is probably only the data they want you to see, or are legally obliged to share.

I would be willing to wager they have lots more on you that you’re not even aware of.

Google ~likes to exploit~ you too

Fuck Google. Ruining the internet for profit.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Wait, what? A shitty Google product? Plagued by ads and spyware? No way!

As others have pointed out here, use Aurora Store or F-Droid.

I think about this every day, but I keep coming back to this: they do care. It’s just that they don’t always know they care, or to what extent. The big problem is that there’s virtually no way to visualize the harm in using privacy-invading products and services. Everything that goes on in the background of our phones, we’d never tolerate in real life.

If you could visually see every time there’s a background process, an app activating the mic, the sensors, the location, accessing your messages, etc., we’d be in a better position.

There’s no way we’d tolerate the IRL equivalents of what goes on digitally—at the browser level, at the app level, perhaps even at the OS level.

It’s usually visual cues that set off change. Think about it this way: 9/11 killed ~3000 people and we got the USA PATRIOT Act virtually overnight. COVID-19 happened and killed ~1.1 million people in the US alone. But because COVID wasn’t as “visual” and as “graphic” as 9/11, there was less urgency to do something about it.

Burn it all down

Power Delete Suite still works AFAIK: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

In addition to uninstalling the client (RIF), you should poison your Reddit posts, and then delete your account.