How do you block mobile ads?
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170 million users who are getting ads and giving personal information to Bytedance disagree.
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If you’re using Wi-Fi for your mobile device, you can configure that WiFi network to use a dns blocker like this one -
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Disagree with what? If you use TikTok, you are willingly giving up your privacy. This thread is about protecting your privacy.
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They agreed to give their personal information to someone either way, whether it’s Bytedance or a US-based company taking over. Hardly a move to protect their privacy since either company is likely to milk that data for profit and/or other purposes.
Can we not use these on Pixels? When I installed it, it says it requires a VPN and wants me to purchase one.
Post was deleted by the author.
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What sorts of app do you prevent access to the internet?
I use “noroot firewall” (completely free, based on iptables if memory serves) to fully block individual apps from internet access, but I recently found out that it was pulled from the Play Store, although there are other similar apps. It acts as an always-on VPN through which all connections go and I can select which apps (including system apps and components) can use mobile network, wifi, both, or neither.
Apps are bad! Why do you think everyone under the sun, from your local weather pervert to the traffic lady are urging that you get the “desperate_local_affiliate” app on your phone?
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Question for the hive-mind, since I couldn’t find an answer. Has anyone used Citi or CapOne Virtual Account Numbers with PayPal? IIRC the cards are supposed to be merchant-locked. All PP transactions appear as “PAYPAL *SELLERINFO” and I’d like to know whether the cards are locked to PayPal itself or to the actual seller. In other words, can I use a single virtual card to pay different retailers or even different ebay sellers, or would I need a separate virtual card for each PayPal merchant (or even each eBay seller if I pay with PP)?
I don’t think either Citi or CapOne virtual cards are locked to a single merchant. Citi’s is this way since they changed the implementation of their virtual cards some years ago (another change is that the limit that you specify now resets daily, not monthly as it used to). Don’t think CapOne’s was ever merchant locked.
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An FYI/PSA. This happened last week and has supposedly already been addressed, but just came across my radar.
There was a similar problem with Google Forms recently. I think we discussed it here. The email was sent by Google, so it passed SPF/DKIM.
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Does anyone out there value their privacy? And also what sites did we forget?
Search Engines:
Duck Duck Go Over 55 Billion anonymous searches - DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.
Lukol
Gibiru
Startpage - gives every page a privacy rating plus lets you search without trackers!
Secure Browsers:
Brave.com Brave stops online surveillance, loads content faster, and uses 35% less battery.
Tor Protect yourself against tracking, surveillance, and censorship.
Duck Duck Go Browser - For Windows, For iOS, For Mac.Social Media:
GETTR A brand new social media platform founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought and rejecting political censorship and “cancel culture.”
- Secure Email:
Proton Email - No personal information is required to create your secure email account. By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account. Your privacy comes first.
Videos:
Rumble - you’ll like Rumble! Check them out!!
Artificial Intelligence - AI
Free VPN:
I’ll add context to the list above, since I see no reason to trust the source.
I’ve heard of and used duckduckgo (uses bing) and startpage (uses bing and google), they do what they say and I’m not aware of any problems with them. Never heard of lukol or gibiru.
Parler, GAB, GETTR, and MeWe are all associated with right-wing / “conservative” owners and user base, so if you’re going there for the content, know it will be heavily skewed.
Never heard of reagan[.]com, seems like a small time operation (doesn’t even have an “about us” page) and there’s no way to figure out if their privacy claims hold up.
Not sure about the free VPN services, because not all VPNs are the same.
Everything else is good.
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Because they pay a ton in ads and for referrals, I suspect. But they might also be good. I’d start here for anyone looking.
Explain? Port forwarding is not needed for downloading torrents…
I’m paying $10/yr for Windscribe. Seems to be well reviewed on most sites, including PC Mag and TF. They recently won a criminal lawsuit in Greek court where their non-existing logs were subpoenaed. Since they don’t keep logs, they could fairly easily refuse to turn anything over. Link
Seems good enough for me at least for the cost.
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LoL. Learned something new today 
.
Looks like Citi is changing their system again, tomorrow(!!!). I have this hard-to-notice note in my Virtual Account Numbers dashboard: “We’re updating your Virtual Account Number experience. Starting August 24th, numbers created on or before August 23rd can no longer be used to make a purchase. Create new Virtual Account Numbers on or after August 24th to avoid any inconvenience.” I haven’t seen any other notice of this change. This is insane! I have several recurrent payments on these VANs, and would much appreciate a better and earlier notification. Also a better transition period from the old system to the new one. By the way, I couldn’t find any information about what’s changing, if anything, at all - no transition FAQ, nothing.
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I don’t think we’ve discussed this here, but Google has a tool that alerts you if it finds your personal information in its search results and allows you to remove it: https://myactivity.google.com/results-about-you. You can add names (including nicknames), addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. As much as I hate sharing my PII with Google, one of my accounts has my real info because I used it with payments and wallet. The tool works pretty well. Of course all it does is remove you from Google search results, not the source or any other search engines / crawlers / LLM bots, so it’ll only thwart the laziest of stalkers.
Bing allows you to remove pages with your PII, but it’s manual: Microsoft-Report a Concern
The ideal solution is to remove the information from the source (then either request or wait for the cached search engine results to be updated), but that can be difficult, especially for those who don’t live in a state that protects their residents’ privacy. For more internet coverage, might have to visit each “source” engine: List of search engines - Wikipedia
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