Q&A highlight
Posted16 days ago
Key Takeaways
Amazon works fine.
I suspect they work along the rather practical lines of: if we can snag your data we will but if you want to block our efforts at predation but want to spend out, we are fine with that too.
Amazon absolutely will not refuse your money and they are jolly good at extracting it.
It really is not about attestation etc, I'm afraid. Its all about maximising profitability.
If you use a walled garden friendly device then you will be frisked inappropriately at every opportunity.
All other websites are just websites.
Also, I have trouble believing that the App Store and public SDKs went from "not on the roadmap" to "released" in one year. I know it's the popular narrative, but I feel like there must be more to the story. It's plausible that they were being worked on but a final management decision hadn't been made to launch them?
Technical protections on your phone aren’t going to stop anything if you’re using apps that sell your data from their servers out the back door.
That dns proxy looks intriguing but looks like quite a bit different from the simplicity of pi hole.
Or did you still want to be able to view tiktok?
Sorry. Can't help you there. Or can I? https://www.torproject.org/download/ or https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/proton-vpn-fast-sec...
They probably have the most sophisticated fingerprinting ever created.
But you can take first steps by using a simple dns proxy to make things more difficult.
The thing I'm curious about is whether the GDPR / DSB complaints are likely to have any result. Is that likely to just result in some cost of business fines and TikTok goes on with life? Or could those complaints bring about substantial repercussions?
If you look at these systems that same way some people look at casinos - places specifically designed to take your money - you realize there isn't a way to change them nor improve your overall experience with them. You just don't go inside. I'm kinda hoping that it becomes the trend in the next few decades to completely abandon these algorithm-driven data-hoarding attention-stealing apps. I've been calling it "digital hygiene", personally.
Instagram: I have a 15 minute daily timer, because I sometimes post, and I sometimes receive DMs.
Reddit: Fully blocked, I think I ublocked everything.
Tiktok: I won't even download it ever again. It has an algorithm like no other for sucking me in. Dangerously addictive.
Facebook? Deleted it completely around 2013, so no idea what's going on there.
If you steadfastly refuse to have one, it seems like it'd be the same as trying with job seeking without a LinkedIn. Making things harder for yourself. Which, to each their own; is their perogative.
Instagram is a tool for women to manage their fan club of orbiters and get validation from them on demand (which is what makes so addictive for women). It might look like "hey there's all these hot women here if i hang out here i will get dates with them" but that's the mirage.
So an idea I've been thinking about lately, is that evolution didn't produce humans that were wired to date forever. These app publishers undoubtedly would prefer that you keep using their apps until you die, so they're happy to see you also keep dating until you die. But that shouldn't really be how things go and it's not how most of us are wired. Most humans throughout history went through a brief courtship period and then they settled down with someone, even if that person wasn't perfect.
The app has utility in that courtship period, but the activity itself is meant to be temporary, possibly even brief, and ultimately give way to something else. The app publisher has an incentive to make you forget that.
Note about Onyx, they're kind of violating GPL by refusing to publish source code. Also, their Android devices are a bit special and you have to jump through a couple of small hoops at set up to be able to use Google Play (nothing special or complicated).
The e ink screen I use the most is a boox 10.3 tablet. It does have internet and can run android apps. So I can read rss feeds, hacker news, manga, ect. I don't do any "serious" work on it and don't sign in with my main google/apple accounts. The build quality for the price is superb, and its the first eink device I've had that feels premium like an ipad. Its also super thin and the battery lasts me ~2 months on a charge.
As far as fun text based websites, you're already on the best one :) But I also have a million RSS feeds that I read to get the news.
I'm also a recovering social media addict, it was a slow and painstaking transition but the benefits in terms of attention, concentration and attitude have been profound. The main metric for me was going from almost 5 hours a day of phone time 2-3 years ago, to about 1 hour today. Of course the socials still snuck in on other devices but that was the main thing which killed the poison at its root and then eventually all the offshoots withered.
The apps condition you to come back through a feedback loop. Once I broke the feedback loop enough times the whole idea of going into one of these apps or sites and watching my life disappear into it started to feel revolting, like I just knew it was going to make my day worse not better, then the hold was gone.
The next battle I see on my horizon is that I sometimes watch 20-30 minutes of YouTube subscriptions in the morning with my coffee. There's some good content, but sooner or later Google's going to try and kill my ad blocker and probably look for new ways to creep that time up into hours instead of minutes. I know it's coming and I'm ready to die on this hill rather than lose my morning. I will do absolutely anything to continue blocking ads, up to and including saying goodbye to YouTube, to Google, to a web browser, putting only TUI interfaces on my TV, anything.
My favorite small act of defiance this year was purchasing a $120 deluxe hardcover edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy - that's a great work I enjoy enough that I'm happy to read it many times over the course of my life, it improves my attention span instead of worsening it, and it won't show me a single ad ever. So I figured in terms of recreation, it's one of the best investments I could make. Perhaps several of such omnibuses on a shelf next to a comfortable armchair is the best defense against Big Tech.
I do scroll on Instagram, but it was mainly to share some reels with my girlfriend, no other purpose. It was not addiction. I tend to forget to check hers (which she does not like so I try not to), and when I check hers, I look at some reels to send back, then I close the app.
I did scroll on Facebook when I started using it recently, and it might be leaning towards the addiction side, but I stopped myself from doing it because it is a waste of time and I realized everyone is arguing there, and their arguments are horrendous. I feel like were I to read it all day it would dumb me down.
But yeah, I think the best move is to not play at all. Use Facebook only when you absolutely must. Same with anything else. If you have Discord, you may use it for discussions, whether technical or not, but it can be just as addictive as the other website.
Given that these companies tend to converge on addiction as their business model, I think there's a lot of overlap.
It just means keeping track of the difference between empty dopamine, which rewards behaviors that don't benefit you, from dopamine which is working in its normal evolutionary context--to encourage behaviors that do, and being intentional about how often you engage in the former.
"Digital hygiene" sounds like the start of a mental framework with good intentions, and which might help somebody with their World of Warcraft problem. But that problem isn't really unique to digital things, they're just a commonly found example of it. If you have a habit of seeking out empty/fast dopamine loops, where the rewards come frequently and are otherwise useless except as a reason to continue the useless behavior, then you're likely to come off your World of Warcraft addiction and immediately find a (potentially non-digital) addiction to put in its place.
My point is that yes we need a new kind of hygiene to deal with modern kinds of manipulation, but no we shouldn't restrict its scope to computers. I don't see how that counts as "manipulative disinformation," or is in contradiction with established science about the function of dopamine.
Don't forget mental hygiene. Letting these apps have access to your brain causes legitimate brain damage.
Moxie tried that with GoogleSharing system back in the day.
Not really sure what the biggest downsides were, but it was discontinued.
Block, ignore, disengage and scorn any software or service that behaves this way.
Make fun of your friends when they use these apps and use peer pressure to dissuade them from using them. These services need to be uncool.
Be the change you want to see. Research alternatives. Provide alternatives. Make alternatives easier, better, and cooler.
Choose principles over convenience and encourage your peers to do the same.
these things are why frequent comments on HN that go “this company is not using our data for training, it is in ToS etc…” makes me literally LOL.
Young people complain about being worse off than their parents. Sure, the income gap has exploded, and there are many factors that are making things worse, but what exacerbates this is our complacency.
First, people are just more miserable in general because everyone on social media seems to be living the "Miata life", to quote "Worcaholics".
Do you see any starter homes being built? I don't. All I see is starter mansions. Everyone thinks they are entitled to one at 26, while THEIR parents lived in a starter home until they could afford something bigger, at 45.
Secondly, and it's more to the point - spending money has never been easier. Want. Click. Get. Within hours. All this tech revenue is coming from somewhere.
What was the last time you audited your subscriptions? How much do you spend per year? If you watch two shows and a couple of movies on a streaming service, is it really worth the $240 per year? Do you listen to 12 books per year to justify the $180 Audible subscription just to break with the a la carte price? And so on. This stuff adds up. But, sure, it's CONVENIENT. These companies are counting on your laziness.
Become a responsible consumer, refuse to participate in being a product. Yes, I know, it takes effort and focus, but it's not like we do no have the power to walk away.
However that's not what happened, because my "following list" is restricted to be viewable by "only me", even though my account was public. "public" just means that you can view my videos without me accepting a follower request. And I don't have any videos.
Facebook/Meta has a proven track record of fetching all data from your phone, even when abusing security vulnerabilities to do so. And the clowns at Apple can't even fix RCEs in their network-exposed applications, I'm not convinced the separation between apps is flawless.
Retargeting has been a thing for like 15 plus years now. Visit website for knives, ad network tracking cookie notes that down, same ad network later serves you ads. Or some convuluted data sharing network that has the same outcome these days.
I don't disagree with your point that demographics can be very good and sometimes uncanny, that aspect I agree with. It is just the timing that leads me to believe it is retargetting.
In this case it's not Tiktok and Instagram that are sharing data with each other, but the product website that is choosing to share data with both of them.
The gist of it is that the platforms carefully curate what data they provide to their customers. They don't want to give anything low level away, both for compliance reasons and because it would undermine their own business. Facebook makes money by charging for access to their users, not by giving away enough information about them for one of their customers to become a competitor.
Almost all of the data the platforms provide is 'How well is your marketing campaign doing and among whom' - on a high level. There are issues with poor designs leaking information when the campaign only hit 20 people, but as a general rule of thumb, but that's an exception, not the rule.
It's just done through middlemen.
Almost everyone in ecom is running every ad network integration they can, no matter the source of traffic.
So if you click a Facebook ad, load a website, enter your information/checkout ALL of your information goes to every other network they integrate with.
You might never use TikTok, you might have every Facebook domain blacklisted, but when you clicked on a Google search "result" (ad) and checked out everything about your order was sent to meta/tiktok/applovin/400 other "networks" via S2S APIs.
Until this is made illegal, the incentive structure will ALWAYS push marketing departments to do this.
So basically, the TikTok app is not spying on your dating apps - your dating apps are willingly selling your information to them, through intermediaries.
This means uninstalling tiktok won’t help. And worse, many other companies are getting your dating info too.
[1] https://thehill.com/business/4614940-grindr-sold-hiv-status-...
[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/major-data-broker-leak-might-have...
The right to lie to apps should be part of the new tech Magna Carta
And tracking bluetooth emissions shouldn't matter as they are randomised while not in an active connection.
Did he do any research on you beforehand?
Did you and him both search the same guitar model, in the same days, while in the same area?
TikTok has a legitimate activity of personalizing the feed of users to make it as relevant as possible.
But... has been around and allowed for years.
What's the latest anyway on the US steal of the app? (pardon me... I meant the forced sale due to 'national security reasons')
It's sad that the gdpr is now being watered down, especially the protection of these specially protected data points.
Not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator. We simply enrich the public API with analytics.