Apple does extensive audit of mobile apps, including limitations of tracking. So the app cannot spy on something you are not letting it to know. But you are giving it a bunch of info voluntarily.

I’d say using that app on iOS is similar to making a food delivery order using a loyalty member ID. Basically, you are letting the company (McDonald’s) know who you are, what is your phone number, where do you live, and what do you like to eat. And if they wish to, they could use all that to purchase your profile from a data brocker. Or they can sell that info for a few cents to make up on that discount.

Jeez, what an impressive troll work in the comments

I’m afraid that if the sanctions will continue to be a go-to method of dealing with geopolitical rivals, we may end up with a few divergent forks. One for US and “the west” block, one for Chinese comrades with their junior Russian partners, and maybe one for Indian code gurus who don’t like both sides and have capable engineering resources themselves.

Not nationality but alleged involvement with sanctioned organizations. There are plenty of Russian names on maintainers list remaining.

I thought it’s more involved. Like the face ID tech used in phones

Yeah, I don’t think these cameras are used to ID people routinely. Government already has my photo - I have passport anyways. However, face scan is much more sophisticated and they cannot take it with overhead cameras

I draw a line between a photo and biometric face scan. I have a photo ID, so my government already has my picture, but face scan that is tied to my identity and allows for accurate identification is something new

No, I think that many people in my line were first timers, so they did both

Oh, sorry, I’ve assumed that you are in US since you posted an article about FTC.

I don’t know if there is a similar service in Europe. I think you could get a virtual card linked to a crypto wallet, but this obviously comes with downsides

There is Privacy.com that gives you virtual cards to use for purchases. Money go from your bank account to them. Destination is visible on payment description still, but it may fool bank’s algorithm. Or you can get paid plan from Privacy.com and mask destination completely.

I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.

While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.

Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Apple’s PR is better. With Microsoft all news titles were like “OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI”, and with Apple it’s more like “Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been”.

Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don’t even have yet.

Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it’s done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it’s closed source and is subject to change at any time.

Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple’s products whatever the company does.

Yay, I can get some targeted ads about data center hardware!

Mullvad has a feature to add random noise into traffic patterns, actually

This is a good point. Maybe setting up a VPN at home would the good option for when I’m on the go

Thanks for the suggestion, but anonymity is not my goal with VPN. I known about tor etc, and it is not working well for everyday web surfing

I have a small standalone speaker, not good for TV. I doesn’t want to link with my Google profile, so no voice control from Assistant. So the only way to use it is from their app, or maybe casting

Sonos speaker. I have Google Home speakers around the house and we use them to play music. Sonos almost never get used

Convenience stores that sell gas usually buy it from wherever cheaper. 7/11, Wawa, Quickcheck. Not sure if same applies to anywhere outside US, though.

Also local small brands may not sell top tier gas

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