Another main reason why I took off my hat back then was because I was a broke college kid with garbage internet speed and my only computer was a laptop. Torrenting shows sometimes means I need to have my laptop on for days. Now I have an entire homelab setup with a dedicated VM on one of my servers for torrenting and I can afford fast internet. I was pleasantly surprised how efficiently I can torrent when I got back sailing recently.

If you're not using the wifi functionality perhaps putting the device in a Faraday cage would prevent anyone from accessing it.

The closest country with the friendliest law of what I'm currently trying to do

My mom is tech illiterate and I buy all her devices for her. If I gave her a Mac she'll just use it without knowing what OS it is.

That's only true if the engineers following the order clearly know what they're doing is wrong, which is often not the case. Most software engineers are as ignorant about privacy as their customers. They do not give a damn about FOSS nor privacy and are often users of these products themselves.

"Coercion involves compelling a party to act in an involuntary manner by the use of threats, including threats to use force against that party."

Perhaps you should kindly explain why you think threats are involved in this case?

I thought this was true a couple months ago. Until last month I all of a sudden found out fb messenger no longer allows you to sign out from the app. I'm not sure when the change happened but this pissed me off.

I then started DM folks one by one that I normally talk to to convince them to switch and kept bothering them until they caved in. Then I rebuilt the same groups on Signal. Now most of the folks I converse with on a regular basis all uses Signal group chats.

fedora 38

Well I don't use TikTok and couldn't care less if they get banned. If you actually read the bills that's getting passed like the RESTRICT act in the US you'd realize it's not about banning TikTok and it has numerous vague and concerning clauses that infringes on your privacy. My opinion is always have better privacy laws and enforce it equally on all companies. When my government blatantly tries to steal more of my data and pretend they're actually doing me a favor I'd rather the foreign adversary have it for free.

Well, in real life I probably do appear to be an autistic security nut to some. I don't blame people from thinking this way because I came from that place too. You just don't realize how important infosec is until you do.

I did actually manage to quit FB the website for the past two years and it was largely inconsequential, but if I quit Messenger right now I'd probably loose a good chunk of my contacts. I'm not ready to take that step yet.

I made the first step a couple years ago which was quitting FB the website, but I still have one foot in the swamp that is messenger. I'm still working on getting my parents onto signal, so far haven't succeeded yet. Some people can quit cold turkey like what you did, but others like me take time.

+1 for graphene

I love it when it still allows me to use some google apps (e.g. Gboard) but I can completely neuter its tracking capabilities by removing network permission