Initially Bitwarden was one of the most impressive FOSS password managers, but their increasing willingness to trade user privacy for services and promotion by our favorite surveillance capitalist’s is the real issue imho. Believing Privacy and Security are inextricably linked, I cannot recommend, nor use them at this time.
A quick scan on Blacklight (TheMarkup’s Privacy Tool) is an eye opener.
Fairphone 4 with eOS, escaping Google and Apple’s duopoly is quite liberating and not as hard as I thought it would be. Yeah, eOS is technically Android, but deGoogled.
I tried to find the video on PeerTube, from the end users perspective I think we should encourage others to choose community over corporate and use platforms like PeerTube to post these videos instead of YouTube (Alphabet).
I didn’t know it was a Cloudflare site, but I was happy to see it’s not running Google’s hardware fingerprinting Ajax scripts that I dislike more than Cloudflare services.
Unless we want Google to complete the “Death Star” and totally control the Internet, I think using services based on their products still perpetuates Alphabet dominance of the web. I use Firefox based browsers and search engines like DDG and Brave that don’t depend on Google’s code base to exist.
I don’t blindly stand behind any of these companies, but I believe DuckDuckGo is privately held, so it doesn’t have shareholders clamoring for the greediest and most deceptive business practices like Alphabet and Microsoft. I know Brave is controversial, but lately their search engine has been working well as backup for DDG, so I can avoid Google all together.
Wow, I didn’t think of that. Thank you!
Companies don’t desire to be treated as people under the law, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that interpreted the 14th Amendment as corporate personhood was the most racist decision we still live with today. The amendment was written to grant freed slaves citizenship, but the same greedy capitalists that benefited from slavery used it to begin the neofeudaism that still enriches the few while causing suffering for the masses today and it’s only getting worse. Don’t “love” any corporation, they’re literally born out of the greatest evil in US history.
I think the automotive analogy is relevant, some think using technology means they understand it. I’m a pretty good driver, but it would be unwise to ask me to repair your car’s transmission. My grandmother spends more time on her computer glued to Facebook than I spend using my computer on a given day, but I’m not asking her to build my next gaming rig.
It’s easier to build a PC in 2023 than it was in 1993. Modern motherboard’s typically don’t require separate cards for sound, network and video (unless you’re gaming). It’s mostly integrated now and you don’t need hours manually manipulating jumpers and trying to affix terribly designed IDE cables now replaced with SATA. I’d much rather work on repairing my modern PC vs trying to troubleshoot a Compaq 486 20+ years ago.
I highly recommend Howard Zinn’s book “A People’s History of the United States” to gain a better understanding of how and why such deplorable things took place in the US.
In the 1990s if you wanted to play a PC game you had install it manually with a CD, typically configure ini files in a text editor and fix irq requests for your peripherals just to play. In the contemporary world a zoomer only needs to tap the install icon on the screen, Gen Z may have more experience usually technology than any previous generation, but the days of asking grandma to fix your computer seem a certainty on the horizon.
You make an excellent point and it’s easy as a PC gamer like myself to forget, that Apple actually sells a lot more games than Value.
A dispassionate authority is more effective at protecting local communities from predators, but at what price? Unfortunately that dispassionate authority also has little compassion for the poor and marginalized people it rules and even less accountability to them. I’m also more afraid of the Orwellian police state being proliferated by the marriage of federal law enforcement and multinational corporations than criminals in my neighborhood. Those people breaking the law in my neighborhood probably need better access to mental healthcare instead of long sentences in federal prisons handed down by said dispassionate authority.
Purism’s corporate charter recognizes them as a social purpose corporation, it sounds very good in theory, but I think it’s been a struggle for them to pull off. Under this charter they’re supposed to value creating products and services that benefit society more than simply making profits. Unfortunately, I think being so idealistic has caused them to over promise and under deliver, as was the case with the Librem 5 phone imo.
Another Linux tablet is definitely good news. I like Purism’s stated values and their laptops are very solid, the Librem phone was a disappointment for me personally though.
Same playbook used throughout history, we need to make you safer by taking away your right to privacy and access to communities you identify with. Without the LGBTQ+ community center in my hometown I doubt I would have survived young adulthood. That was a physical space funded by a non-profit, now that so much of our access to community is online the authoritarians from both parties in the US can just remove communities they don’t like assisted by legislation like this.
Are you implying that Google’s primary business model is something other than the collection and sale of people’s personal data? Google services are discounted or “free” because they monetize user data through tools like their reCAPTCHA hardware fingerprinting technology deployed on System 76’s website. My point is that System 76 claim’s to be “extremely concerned with user privacy”, but chooses a payment processor dependent on the Internet’s least privacy preserving corporation and that is a contradiction of your “proclaimed” values.
Btw, I recently learned that Purism also deploys Google scripts with their payment processor and I wasted my money on a Librem 5 a year ago. It has the worst touchscreen and battery life of any device I own, so let me assure you I’m no shill for that company. I honestly buy my hardware from System 76 every chance I get, so when I feel they’re being disingenuous about their values (privacy), I take it personal, since I’m typing this on a Galago Pro.
I’ll probably relent and order the Lemur over the phone as Stetson suggested. I’m critical of System 76 because I want them to succeed and I think they should follow other companies (Valve, Discord, etc…) abandoning Google as their ship sinks because of shareholder greed.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/steam-ditches-google-analytics-over-customer-privacy-concerns
I’m sure a lot of people at System 76, like myself started using Google in the 90s and had an invitation only Gmail account, becoming enchanted with the company 20 years ago. Unfortunately, after their 2004 IPO, the shareholder’s have clamored for the increasingly relentless collection and sale of user data to advertisers and even government tax and intelligence agencies to the point that Alphabet has lost much of it’s goodwill in the tech community and many are now suspicious of Google like myself.
I made my post not to bash System 76, but to point out what I believe is a strategic error continuing to have Google as a business partner when payment processor’s like Stripe will allow hCaptcha’s (privacy preserving service) instead.
I appreciate your response Michael, but I don’t think it’s a misconception that Google monetizes user data and any service they provide is a means to that end. If the payment provider System 76 uses promotes a non-privacy preserving service, then why choose that payment provider?
Blacklight is basically a front-end for DuckDuckGo’s open source tracker radar tool. https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-radar
In a world increasing dominated by surveillance capitalists and dystopian tech, conscientious consumerism is one of the most effective tools we still have to effect change. Google chooses to sell tech to a Far-Right government’s engaged in ethnic cleansing, Bitwarden chooses Google as a business partner for analytics, marketing, cloud services, etc… I choose to not use Bitwarden.
Another resource to assist in choosing which services to use is the open project PrivacySpy. Bitwarden doesn’t score very well by their metrics either.
https://privacyspy.org/product/bitwarden/