DominusOfMegadeus

Taken by themselves, yes you are correct. Less targeted is a positive. I would rather just not have the ads, which is where I am at now. So I don’t understand why I would give that up, which is what the OP’s strategy would seem to require.

I agree, which is why this approach to me seems ultimately counterproductive on an individual level.

I’m not seeing the relevance of your comment

I’m not, but OP would if they started opening up their IP and fingerprints to anyone who wants them, in order to inundate those parties with garbage data. Admittedly, I might be missing some clever part of their plan.

but how tf did we get here

With capitalistic gusto! 🤮

It’s an interesting concept, but I’m not sure the payoff justifies the effort.

Even with AI-generated noise, you’re still being tracked through logins, device fingerprints, and other signals. And in the process, you would probably end up degrading your own experience; getting irrelevant ads, broken recommendations, or tripping security systems.

There’s also the environmental cost to consider. If enough people ran decoy traffic 24/7, the energy use could become significant. All for a strategy that platforms would likely adapt to pretty quickly.

I get the appeal, but I wonder if the practical downsides outweigh the potential privacy gains.

How many schools are allowed per person?

Correct, that’s all it is. But if a live person is asking me for an email, and I don’t want to break out my phone to generate something complicated and hard for them to understand, this works great. (They have enough trouble understanding “duck.com,” even though after the first few instances of utter confusion, I now say, “@duck.com, like the bird, quack, quack.” And they still get extremely confused.

You have to use the Proton Mail Bridge

DuckDuckGo will give you free forwarding with a duck.com address. It also strips all trackers. I love it.

I use it on Thunderbird. I just couldn’t grow to like thunderbird.

Well. I’m with you, but it’s tricky. I actually still have something to lose. Unlike many of my fellow countrypersons. And the things I have to lose are still currently allowing me to fund my apocalypse farm.

Like, U.S. attack plans? American people here: we would like to not go to war. Thanks.

✌️

And now they apparently treat their own develops like shit. At least, according to an article I just read. There’s a lot to get angry about with them, for sure. It was NOT like this back in 2007.

I am actually very confident that Apple is selling what is almost certainly an enormous amount of my PHI to minimal buyers, if any. That’s not where they make their money, and they have no interest in it, and one of their main selling points is that they don’t do it.

Now, over the years, Apple has enshittified to an increasingly maddening degree, however—having worked at the Apple Store for five years some time ago—I can say that I think at the core of the company, it’s just not quite as evil in these terms as, say, Meta and Google. I think it’s a pretty informed, educated opinion to have. I know that many people disagree, especially in this community. And that’s fair.

I would actually be all about setting up my own ecosystem for smart home and sync and media library with Linux if it weren’t so frigging much work and so difficult that, honestly, it would take me forever and I probably would not achieve success. So, as objectively bad as the Apple ecosystem has become, it is sadly the best alternative out there, in my humble opinion.

iOS. Commence the hate bombs.

I have already done as you ask!

This isn’t already illegal?!?!?!? To the Dark Web, my friends! Opioids for all! Quickly, before the bill is passed!!

People never want to be convinced of anything that says they should do something differently than how they currently do it. Best you can do is lead by example. Talk about benefits of your way of doing things if they ask, or if it is very relevant to the conversation. Otherwise, don’t broach those topics. To take it a step further, if people start complaining to you about problems, before you offer solutions, ask them if they are just venting, or if they are looking for advice or suggestions. Now that you have your instructions on how to change what you are doing, please follow them to the letter, without deviation ;P