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I've been using DuckDuckGo for several years. Most of the time it has been good enough. However, the past few years I have been able to tell that the search results are not natural, and censored in similar ways to Google. Searching for news or politics is the biggest most obvious example, but now even searching for some technology things is clearly manipulated, especially when you're searching for solutions to problems that the tech companies think are "features". Any kind of joke that is not politically correct is almost unfindable, and finding memes that I know already exist are also randomly way more difficult than they should be. Search is moving away from giving you what you are searching for, to giving you a combination of what "they" want to sell you, make you think, or simply give you the opposite of what you are looking for (this one is particularly strange). "They" being not the mysterious they, but people who manipulate search results, SEO, make laws that govern search, write the code behind the results, etc.. Amazon's search is a good example of pushing product, not results, and eBay also recently switched to a similar algorithm. Newegg search is somewhere in between. So, I'm looking to see what other options are out there. I've heard of Ecosia, Yandex, QWant and SearX. I use Ecosia at work because DDG is blocked (they won't tell me why), and it's about the same as DDG. I haven't given Yandex a solid test, for no particular reason. I still haven't wrapped my head around SearX yet, nor determined which independent search server is going to be better or worse than another. QWant is A French government search engine, and I'd rather stay away from anything government controlled, but they made the thing to disconnect from Silicon Valley. Obviously, Google and Bing are right out. Except I do sometimes search for some images on Google when I get frustrated with DDG.

Shouldn't it matter if the OS collect datas on you if it can't actually send the data to Microsoft?

A GitHub user not working on Audacity suggested via a pull request thar adding "basic telemetry" for user experience improvement should be added. There is no article and this is a developing story still. As of today the feedback on the pull request page from users and developers is overwhelmingly negative. And one of the standout replies: My thoughts: The addition of telemetry, even with an opt-out, to audacity goes against the idea of free software. People are panic-forking the project already, and for good reason. What makes this suspicious is that a user is creating a pull request suggesting telemetry be sent to a Yandex or Google services endpoint. This user has no prior involvement in Audacity, and unclear interests and motives in regards to the Audacity project. https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

So a friend of mine is selling his phone and he wants to permanently delete the phone data so it can't be restored. He did format it but a factory reset will not solve it so what the best technic to delete the data permanently His phone is oppo a1 k

Summary iOS/iPadOS 14.5 has just been released this Monday with its biggest feature called "App Tracking Transparency" which will allow users to block apps from tracking them across other apps and websites which will seriously affect the ability for ad companies like Facebook and Google to serve personalized ads to users. Users will be prompted whether or not they want to allow a specific app to track them when it attempts to do so. In this same prompt developers are given a paragraph to explain why users should allow themselves to be tracked. Additional settings to block app tracking are also available within the settings app. Apple has reportedly held back this update in order to allow developers to prepare for it and because of the backlash they faced from several companies, most notably Facebook. Last year Facebook took out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming that this feature would hurt small businesses more than anybody else. Apple replied to this ad with this statement: Other companies have publicly reacted to this feature (just not as loud as Facebook did) with Unity and Snapchat warning their respective investors that they will be impacted. Finally, Apple has stated that they will punish developers who track users without permission. My thoughts It'll be interesting to see how Facebook and Google will react to these changes in the long run as this will impact core parts of their advertising business. While iPhone users don't have a market share as big as Android users, they are more likely on average to spend more than their counterparts. There will be a dent to both of these companies and they know it. What's most surprising to me is how little Google has been fighting this. My guess is that they won't be as affected by this as Facebook is since plenty of iPhone users use their services and apps (Google is the default search engine for Apple devices) and Apple can't block Google from tracking them there. In any case once I finish posting this I'll be updating my iPad to it. I will be interested in seeing how the user experience is like for blocking app tracking. Oh they also added the ability to unlock a Face ID equipped phone with a mask on if you have an Apple Watch, support for Apple's new Airtags, updated the podcasts app (I hate Spotify's podcast UI with a burning passion so yay), support for Xbox Series and PS5 controllers, and the ability to set Spotify as the default music player when using Siri. Sources https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/facebook-took-out-a-full-page-ad-slamming-apples-move-to-protect-user-privacy-it-didnt-go-well.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/26/apple-ios-14point5-iphone-update-is-out-now-heres-whats-new.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/04/snap-unity-warn-of-impact-from-apple-ios-14-idfa-privacy-changes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/15/apples-seismic-change-to-the-mobile-ad-industry-draws-near.html

Summary The government report seems to indicate that China may have used non-consumer Huawei hardware throughout Canada in cyberattacks as retaliation for Meng Wanzhou's arrest. Quotes My thoughts This report although not entirely damning or conclusive on it's on, does add to the ongoing ban the US has on using Huawei hardware for 5G telecommunication due to their "close ties" to the chinese government. It also leads to the puzzling question of why Canadian government HASN'T ruled out Huawei for critical infrastructure contracts. Sources https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/06/24/Cyber-Attacks-Involving-Huawei-Devices-Spiked-After-Meng-Wanzhou/

Summary The Tech Giant Google has isolated the compute core which does data processing like speech recognition. Also The Tech giant has decided to add a feature that allows you to decide what a app can track. My thoughts I doubt that Google did this out of their own kindness, rather I reckon that they did this to rival Apple as privacy is becoming a must have features for customers. Sources https://www.cnet.com/features/googles-android-12-maps-and-privacy-features-aim-to-build-trust-after-a-rocky-year/

Summary Because the majority of the Apple supply chain originates from China, Apple has given into increasingly larger demands to the Chinese gov't. They include holding all the data in China, building a system to skirt American laws for data, building a datacentre in China that is managed by a third party, giving up control of the Chinese data to said third party, allowing Chinese gov't access to the data, removing the Made by Apple in California branding on the back of its phones, setting up a system to block specific apps based on Chinese gov't requests (in the 10 thousands), which includes any apps that are critical of the Communist gov't in China, and building a separate bureaucracy to monitor apps inside of Apple which in the past has fired employees when the Chinese gov't complains, weakening security keys for data storage, and handing over the encryption keys to Chinese data to Chinese authorities. This is in stark contrast to the behavior of Apple in the rest of the world. China accounts for 1/5th of all sales in Apple. Quotes My thoughts While it is not much of a surprise that this is happening, this hasn't been as well documented specifically for Apple in any other story. Without getting into political topics the amount of customization that is going on here is staggering. Given the volume of interference in other countries political and electoral affairs and state sponsored hacking that China does ongoing (like other big powers) it is a little surprising that Apple has given in the way that it has and shows how dependent on China Apple and other tech players have become. This is a little reminiscent of the whole Coca-cola / fanta thing that occurred during the second world war because of the bad optics of doing business in Germany during that time. Sources https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

Summary USPS (United States Postal Service) reportedly using ClearView AI en mass as part of their Internet Covert Operations Program, tracks people all over, including through social media, and shares it with DHS and NSA. Quotes My thoughts Well, this isn't good. The pretext of the USPS is that this is for protection of their workers, to identify protestors/agitators showing up in an area to then avoid. That's great, but even if we took that as true and the only motive, this leaves a huge privacy issue...even before the network of information sharing they're part of. When combined with the mail scanning and recording that already goes on under the pretext of consumer convenience (being able to see pictures of your packages and each envelope going to your mailbox, along with where they are), this really starts to give the USPS way too large of a treasure trove of data for another government org to reference...and makes it that much easier for government to start acting more like China and target particular people and groups. There are of course big 1st and 4th Constitutional Amendment issues with this as well. ClearView has been a hot topic in the past...and sadly it probably will continue to be, until somebody else does it better or cheaper. The technological genie is out of the bottle, so to speak. Sources https://news.yahoo.com/facial-recognition-fake-identities-and-digital-surveillance-tools-inside-the-post-offices-covert-internet-operations-program-214234762.html https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/usps-reportedly-uses-clearview-ai/ IMPORTANT NOTE: This is not a political post, despite many of the concerns being political due to the USPS being a government entity. Please be respectful of the mods and the LTT forum rules when discussing.

Summary In a offical bulletin resolution, the argentinan goverment has solicited Facebok inc to stop the aplication of new terms of service in the argentinian territorie, for possible breach of the "Defence of competition" (free market) law. The resolution also takes into acount the different rulings and resolutions of other entities such as the Brazilian goverment, Germany, the EU, India, Turkey and the FTC. The argentinian defence of the competition comision, will take on an investigation to rule if the new ToS are braking any laws in the country, Quotes My thoughts I think that this is a great move foward for privacy and to stop the andvances faceboook has made in terms of privacy "violations" or personal data mining, im happy that the goverment here has step up and is investigating this issue, whats app is the main messging app in Argentina so this has big implications for the future. Sources https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/244442/20210517

This is from a few weeks ago, but I didn't find anything with the search function so here it goes: Summary Apple and Cloudfare are proposing a new DNS standard: Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) to anonymize user's data from ISPs Quotes My thoughts This is another step Apple is taking on privacy, now targeting ISPs. This combined with the recent feud against Facebook with the AppStore new guidelines on privacy, I'll say Apple is going very strong on privacy. Sources https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/8/22163871/cloudflare-apple-dns-protocol-online-privacy

Hope he will make video about this product . I am just curious to know what kind of quality compartment used inside this product ? And is that hardware really e secure ? Link for reference- https://puri.sm/products/

Is there any browser that is truly secure and private? Would love to hear your views

I've met a few people trough out my life that say they "don't care about internet privacy at all" and all I can think about is why would you not care?

Hi everybody! I am trying to figure out if Bitdefender's Web Protection/Filtering service logs all the websites you visit? And if so, do they encrypt it and for how long they keep that data? And finally, what is the alternative if you want to be on the safe side while having people on your network that click on any link they see? From Bitdefenders website/blog: "Bitdefender’s web protection technology makes sure you don’t land on a malicious website and risk having your personal and banking data stolen. When the Web Protection feature is active on your iPhone or iPad, Bitdefender checks every website you or the installed apps access for threats, blocking all known infected links and protecting you from cyber thieves." "Bitdefender”s web-filtering technology makes sure you don”t land on a malicious website and risk that infects your devices with malware. Web attack prevention checks every website you access for threats, blocking all known infected links and protecting your personal information from cyber thieves"

Summary I've encountered a strange issue on my work laptop and home desktop. When loading any website a <style type="text/css"> gets added. This css is loaded with trackers, and advertisements to sketchy websites. It's been a long time since I've done webdev, but it looks like it attempts to hijack existing ad spots on websites and serve their own ads. I've confirmed this happens in Chrome and Opera. This does not happen in Edge. The most concerning thing to me is that this is happening on my work laptop, which my company monitors. Some of these URLs are for things that would certainly get me fired. I have never looked at anything like this on that computer, nor have I plugged in a USB, so I'm not sure how it got on my laptop. Steps taken to produce issue 1. Load a webpage in Opera or Chrome. I use this URL because it's easy to find the fake stylesheet (https://phet-dev.colorado.edu/html/build-an-atom/0.0.0-3/simple-text-only-test-page.html) 2. Right click, inspect element 3. Look for a <style type="text/css"> , this is generally under <head> 4. Expand and note that it's full of trackers and advertisements I've attached the results that I see as a .HTML file of the website, in this case the fake stylesheet is showing on line 12. Steps taken to resolve issue I've cleared my cache, cookies, all browsing data, rebooted, ran CCleaner, and MalwareBytes. The issue persists. I did test another laptop on my home network and I didn't find any signs of this, so that rules out router issues. I'm sure this is just some kind of tracker that is incredibly suborn. If you have any ideas on how to remove it please let me know. Thanks, Denholm Simple Text Only Test Page.html

Summary Morgan Stanley, one of the biggest investment banks in the world, has been fined $35 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to delete customer data from old computers they were selling as part of an upgrade. Fifteen million customers were affected, going back to 2015. Not only did they hire a moving company with no tech knowledge to decommission the computers and servers, they didn't supervise them at all. They also found that branch offices were using machines that could have encrypted customer data, but they hadn't turned on that feature. Quotes My thoughts Getting fined $2.33 per customer should teach this multibillion dollar business its lesson, right? Right? Maybe they should invest in IT. Sources https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-168

Telegram's founder and CEO Pavel Durov said on his channel that in order to keep up with request for more features and to keep the platform ad-free. I think this is a nice option if you are a kind of person who sends files larger than 2GB and faster download/upload speeds and get new features first. No word on the pricing just yet but I doubt that it'll be that expensive. I'm sure that there are people in the comments below ranting about another subscription but it should be kept in mind that all the current features will still be available and that they're not putting ads on channels. It's not like they're forcing you to pay up. Maintenance of servers and bandwidth are not cheap as Luke Lafreniere of Floatplane once said in a tweet. Personally I wouldn't pay for it but I'm sure that there are a handful who can benefit with larger attachment sizes and faster upload/download speeds. Here's another unpopular opinion of mine about subscriptions, YouTube should actually block access to the site if an ad-blocker is detected unless they pay for YT Premium. Many people will whine and rant about it but remember than Alphabet, Inc. is a for profit institution, not charity. Sources Pavel Durov's Telegram channel

Would anyone happen to know whether the products affected by the Eufy privacy issue extends to Anker-branded products like their webcams? My Google-fu is weak and all I can find is mention of Eufy's devices but no explicit confirmation if it also affects things like Anker's named line of products. I had set up a few family and friends with Anker's PowerConf C300 webcam in the past year and it is going to be a PITA to have to replace them all. I suppose I should replace them regardless even if there hasn't been an explicit confirmation that it extends to Anker-branded stuff, but it'd be nice to know so I can figure out how urgent I should be getting on this matter.

Summary Apple just released a newsroom article to announce three new security features meant to protect user privacy in the cloud. Apple announced: Quotes iMessage Contact Key Verification: Security Keys: Advanced Data Protection for iCloud: My thoughts I have always believed that Apple is a leader in consumer data protections. With these new features, even more people will be able to feel safe with their data on Apples Servers. I encourage everyone to opt-in to these features, especially encrypting your photos and backups. I hope Apple continues to push forward with consumer data protection enchantments to further distinguish itself from the "You are the product" buisness models of companies like Google and Microsoft. To further demonstrate how serious this is, the FBI is worried that Apple is implementing these features. The FBI provided multiple statements on the subject: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/08/fbi-privacy-groups-icloud-encryption/ Sources https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/apple-advances-user-security-with-powerful-new-data-protections/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/08/fbi-privacy-groups-icloud-encryption/

Today I opend the Eufy Security app and found that they now clearly state which options have you data stored in the cloud! To my knowledge their marketing hasn't changed and this is still necessary. However, this is a good and transparent step in the right direction! I am sorry that it is in Dutch there was no way for me to change the app over to english. The options are in the screenshot are: "most efficient" where you only get a text notification. "full effect" first get a text notification and if available a second notification with a thumbnail. "with thumbnail" get a notification with text and thumbnail. With the last two options there is a small note: "This mode will temporarily save previews and previews in the cloud to improve the experience for event notifications" I am happy to see that some changes are being made. While they haven't fully admitted their flaws publicly it seems that behind the scenes thing are changing for the better.

Yesterday I sent an email to Eufy support expressing how unhappy I was with this privacy issue. I think the response is mid and the security team should be a third party. The response is an obvious copy and paste PR template: Link to the sites post: https://community.security.eufy.com/t/eufy-security-statement-to-our-community/3541186

I have a **Ticwatch 3 Pro Ultra**, and even though the hardware is nice, the software is rather mediocre and has received 0 updates since 5th of October 2021. The same goes for OS updates, including security fixes etc even though Mobvoi promised the update since the watches release since it's launch. That being said, today I was checking some of my google accounts settings, when i stumbled upon a warning from google on the **security checkup page**, that warned me about Mobvoi Fit app and the data it is using. > ## Remove risky access to your data > This app or service has extensive access to your personal information and its developer's information hasn't been verified by Google. You should remove its access unless you're sure you trust it. Even though the issue is clearly that they have not been verified by Google (which is suspicious on it's own), do you think that Mobvoi could indeed be a company that missuses it's user data?

I just received a delivery of the Soundcore VR p10 after watching Riley's unboxing video. Upon installing the app, I saw that it requires a constant access "to find, connect to, and determine the relative position of nearby devices" This makes sense for the ability to switch between dongle(s) and other BTDs. However, I wondered if it the app also sends this data to Anker servers. That would NOT be reasonable for the local functionality. If it does/did then it is theoretically possible for it to use that collected data to built up associations between it's users through overlapping matching devices and their proximity. Privacy Policy verbiage makes it sound plausible, but even if it is not, its not as if that would stop them. It's noteworthy that the app was updated on 24NOV, which was shortly after the Eufy story broke out. The description of the update is: - Bug fixes and user experience optimization. I wonder if the previous version can be acquired from somewhere and tested for what it does. Any thoughts on any of this?

Since every week we see more bad things from big brands, may it be anti-repair things, privacy violation, replace components during production, etc. Why not make a website/database where people can list all the bad things a brand has done? (with a good source, ofc). Good things would also be listed. For me, when shopping things that are all basically the same, the brand becomes an important factor: "Do they actually care about customers?" "Are they using slave labour?" "Has a sister company done something bad?". A ranking/list would help a lot to choose. I don't know if I can get my idea through. It can be just a list, a wikipedia-like website or a website that looks like a shopping platform but when you filter by "Vacuum Cleaners", only the brands with their profile show up.