They are looking to buy new, and need Android Auto and CarPlay
I was active on an automotive forum around the time when that sort of thing started to be seen as a "need" by car salesmen and some of their more enthusiastic customers. The big new thing was "infotainment" and it seemed like the whole industry was insisting we'd all soon see how essential this stuff was. I was disdainful of the idea then, and have only become more so. Cars should have an AM/FM radio receiver, and aside from lights and a horn that's all they need for communications.
That's not the answer you're looking for, but it seems reasonably on-topic here. If you must get a new car, the easiest route to having it not spy on you as much as it can all the time is to make sure it doesn't have a SIM card (or remove the one it does have) and never connect your phone to it in any way except perhaps via a 3.5mm audio jack.
You don’t have to share your number to get spam messages - I get weekly spam texts for “Susan” (not my name), which I never interact with but have been coming from random numbers for years.
Once your # is on a list, whether you put it there or not, it never leaves.
I’m the only one who has ever had this phone no., but if I were to swap now, 99% chance I’d get a reused number, which would probably come already loaded on a million different spam lists. There’s no winning.
They don’t care if you don’t answer. It costs them $0 to text you.
My profession makes me a target for a wide variety of advertising and my phone number is required by law to be listed publicly.
I already don’t. Mostly because Google Messages filters them in a way that I never even see them unless I’m actively looking. It was only when I got an iPhone that I realized exactly how horrific it is.
Cell phone tracking is common place. If you carry one, you’re being tracked, profiled and having your data correlated with others. The question is whether you support living in a surveillance society. If you do, grab a cell phone and be happy. If not, get rid of it and use alternative communication methods. It’s a simple choice. In my experience, most people choose convenience over privacy.
I have a wallet that’s supposedly shielded and it turned out to be useless. Then I got a jammer card as a marketing gimmick. It doesn’t just shield, it creates interferences. The stronger the EM field the better, to some degree. It actually works flawlessly. At least with my smartphone I can’t read any NFC chip near that card.
The Snapchat has a word-filter suggestion makes most sense. But then again Cloudflare is very popular on the Internet as the cheap and well-known MITM anti-DDOS tool.
I haven’t read much about i2p, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the government has their paws in there too.
You will have to trust something if you want to communicate, there’s also GNUnet, ZeroNet, DeltaChat, and probably a lot more.
CNN might be the only site I’ve seen that actually checks if you have made a cookie choice then. The whole cookie acceptance thing is dumb, but they are following the law.
Thankfully there is a plan that EU will make changes fo current policy so those popups might go away.
Since SMS is already sent in the clear, I actually use Google Messages. For those who also have it, it upgrades the SMS to RCS with end-to-end encryption. Sure, it’s nowhere near as good as Signal (which OP says these people won’t use), but it’s better than plain-text SMS.
privacy
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.