Umm, because my Hisense remote has the mic button and a little hole for the mic to collect sound. Which makes sense when a person wants to speak and be heard and have the mic a foot from their mouth vs 6 feet across the room. But I guess your TV is different and listens with infrared.

Snowden says he does the same thing.

Technically you can do the same for your TV since the mic is probably in the remote. But that’s not the TVs worst threat. The constant snapshots of your screen no matter what is displayed is the bigger deal. That is a software issue and not being disconnected without an entire custom firmware/OS approach.

Yes, but controls on local WiFi networks does nothing if they use a SIM to bypass it. So both are needed. And then that doesn’t take into account public networks, so controls are needed there. It’s a layered approach.

Right? Make a product that a majority of people could find useful and not have any backlash at all…but then again, they’ve never been a product company. They’ve always been a personal information broker.

And I’m not arguing not to.

But I tried to get everybody I know to contact me on signal or simplex. For a year. Only one person switched and they did so to signal. Because it was easier and more people were on it. I myself stopped using simplex because not enough people are using it that I know.

So where the rubber meets the road, if anybody wants to use signal I’m good with that because its good for 99% of all things.

If we (as privacy enthusiasts) want to promote the better apps, they need to be and appear less niche so they’re more acceptable.

I appreciate the comment on the matter. This is good information to know and consider.

People should know that Signal is encrypted and private, but won’t make you a ghost.

That being said, the majority of people are not interested in privacy so getting them to use Signal over WhatsApp or SMS is a 99% win.

This sounds really interesting. I’m looking forward to what this becomes.

And to top that off, those features have a terms contract you need to accept to use. Yet you don’t know what that entails until you spend a lot of money.

Both your point and this also needs to be denormalized. We should be able to have full visibility for purchase decisions and have no push back on returns if we don’t.

Which is why we need to de-normalize this thought process. People should always ask, why does my vacuum need to go online? Or at the very least, can I turn that “feature” off?

Most banking works fine. There was a time it had more problems but I don’t even need to use a secondary profile with Google Play Services running any longer.

NFC works, but that is app specific. So no, wallet won’t work because google wallet wants Google services to work. But in the EU some banks have their own contactless payments that work fine. In the US none do to my knowledge. For bus pass etc that would be down to your app and if they require google services or not. There’s always the option for secondary profiles.

To me, I was amazed at his many apps use google services for notifications. So many apps work, but don’t give me notifications unless I open the app… Which I’m okay with because 99% of them I would turn off anyways.

Correct. In the US there is no entity that is supporting it. Technically any of our banks could create an app that supports it, but they’re lazy and cheap.

Oh but the best part about Nest is that if you don’t upgrade it doesn’t go offline. It stays online sending data back to Google. So it’s not like they pulled the plug, they just pulled the plug on service because they wanted to and they’ll still sell your data for profit. Double whammy.

This is effectively a paywall. They want you to pay with your privacy. No thanks, I’m not buying.

My work around was keeping the phone number but not on my phone so I never lose it like that.

Specifically I ported it to Google voice where its just parked with no monthly cost (there was a 1 time port cost). I’m not logged in to voice ever so the anti-privacy of google doesn’t apply. Any text messages I receive get forwarded to a non google email (but thats few and far between).

I’m sure there are other similar options out there, but I did what I knew and its been fine.

I have a similar view as you where I don’t have the time to really learn the intricacies of ensuring it’s all set up properly and securely.

I’ve recently started self hosting more things and found tailscale as a very adequate solution for secure connections in a simple fashion.

The other thing is that if it doesn’t need outside access you don’t need to do it which is an extra security step you can take.

Right, but as an update I now have vaultwarden running myself. Still testing implementation but the technical part is done.

I’m aware of vaultwarden and am considering self hosting my password manager. I literally almost installed it this weekend.

I’m also aware of the shifts bitwarden has made to their open source roots that might change the future of the product. I do think they will focus on enterprise for profit and that leaves the consumer base in limbo, but I’m not necessarily convinced that will be “soon”. I still think today bitwarden is one of the best out of the box solutions.

But to your point, yes I think that path is the one most orgs take as they grow.

I vote for bitwarden. I’ve used it for years and think its one of the best password managers.

At my work we use roboform. Its functional and not a bad choice, but bitwarden is better IMO.

Oh its fantastic. How’s the money from the competition?

I probably agree with that, which is why it seems scammy. I’m not sure you can get a true understanding of what is being done or not done either on the effort or the results. I don’t know, maybe these companies have a way of reporting that, but I doubt it.

Anther issue I see is that this seems like a one and done process. Scrubbing your old data when you didn’t realize how much was being out out there and shared is a process, but eventually it ends. If you’re privacy minded enough to use them, then you aren’t continually putting your data out there, so there’s no need for an ongoing subscription.