Tonight I spoke with my girlfriend on the phone and we talked for two hours about all kinds of topics. One topic was that I don’t think corona tracking apps, where the data is stored centrally, are a good idea because of privacy and stuff. My girlfriend, on the other hand, said why is privacy important at all? The argument that nobody needs to know what I do with whom, when, where and for how long was not convincing to her. She said that I track my runs via GPS anyway. And she asked who would be interested in your data if you are not famous or something?
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Mattias Geniar found a way to not have to display a cookie warning on his website and it’s surprisingly simple:
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I just added a page that lists all the photos from this blog. It’s my alternative to using Instagram. Everyone can view my photos without the need to create an account, seeing advertisements and getting tracked. It was also a little challenge getting Hugo to filter and list all posts.
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I’m now trying to get used to the browser extension uMatrix. It’s a bit more advanced than uBlock Origin by the same developer and it let’s me select on which domains to allow or block cookies, css, scripts etc. I enabled the setting to block JavaScript by default, because I noticed that especially news sites sometimes load much faster (or at all) with JavaScript disabled and of course this reduces the amount of tracking a lot. Do you have experience with uMatrix and any tips on how to make the most use out of it?
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Stories like this are a great reminder to not install any “freeware malware protection” software and unknowingly opt-in to data collection. If possible switch to Linux, or if you want to stay on Windows, use the integrated Windows Defender.
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Although it’s great to self-host your web fonts instead of using a service like Google Fonts (that may decrease the privacy of your site’s visitors, because Google can log IP addresses and other stuff), it’s probably not necessary to use web fonts at all. Every PC or tablet or phone has a lot of fonts already pre-installed, which are more than perfect for displaying your website (unless you take a lot of care about corporate design or your personal brand and require a specific font).
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Kyle Piira explains, why he stopped using Google. He used Google products for nearly everything: Emails, calendars, contacts, entertainment, news, web browser, online storage, domains, analytics, ads, … But one day he got an email that changed everything:
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Matt Baer, the creator of the writing platform write.as, writes about Apple’s privacy focused marketing and how that doesn’t matter when your iPhone is full of apps like Facebook, Instagram or Google.
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I hope I don’t have to explain why Google is bad, but just to give a few reasons to switch to alternatives: You’ll probably get better privacy because those alternatives collect less data about you, your data won’t get sold to advertisers or government organizations that easily and you help to prevent a monopoly. Sometimes alternatives are also just better than the Google product and don’t lock you in so much.
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There is some discussion recently about another evil move by Google. Google plans to deprecate (and remove) an API in it’s webbrowser Chrome, that is used by many ad-blocking addons. Of course they are ignoring voices from the community! Only enterprise customers will be able to use this API for custom development.
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