Nix is awesome for experienced Linux users, AND that want to constantly play with their config file. If you do things and install things at the user level (which way too many do) then you’ve removed the benefit. That said, do it right, and recovering, moving, or duplicating your system could possibly be any faster/smoother.
Not saying it’s hard to learn, but if you’re not used to the CLI and editing config files, I’d start with it in a VM. If you decide you like it after you’ve totally set it up there, then the magic of Nix comes when you install it for real and just redeploy an exact clone thanks to the config file.
I do the same, obviously all bullshit info, email forwarders for the acct, VPN, and it’s cookies containerized so it can’t go snooping, and make sure your browser isn’t successfully being fingerprinted or it’s all pointless.
I have a VPN router, and will either use Mullvad browser with no other tabs open (and obviously all cookies freshly cleared etc) or maybe a vanilla FF on a VM. With all my details being nonsense, a unique relayed email, and the browser essentially completely resetting after every use, I doubt they can find out much useful about me
This is why it’s good to be middle-aged. If anyone I know was described as my ‘friend in _____ school’ without naming them, I’d just assume it was someone I don’t remember anyway.
What kind of phone do you have? Do you use social media? Do you use the same email address everywhere? They don’t know anything you didn’t willingly give out. It’s not a random website, it’s a website that bought you via your browsing practices.
This is most likely something that someone else gave out, not OP. Some old school “friend” signed up for some app and shared their phone contacts, app proceeds to spam those contacts hoping for more sign-ups.
The ol’ True Caller scam! Don’t forget all the people that add email addys to the phones contact list…and then give every app that asks for permissions full roam.
But I’m “paranoid” because 90% of people only get my VoIP number and non important email.
One an occupation or two when I know somebody really sucks I’ll give them a forwarder LOL.
The fight for privacy is not new, and it predates the internet by far.
The problem is that, in the past, the state was on your side in the fight for privacy. Today, it sides with Big Tech and whoever offers it the most data to conduct its own privacy violations, or pays our elected officials the most.
It’s a bit overwhelming when giant, unchecked and unaccountable monopolies and your own country, both with almost infinite resources and legal ways to do whatever they want with impunity, gang up on you at the same time.
Sounds like a really spammy and annoying way to promote an app. I assume someone else who has your phone number signed up on their app and gave access to all their contacts. Then the app sends out spam texts to get you to sign up.
Depending on where you are located, you might be able to report it. Otherwise just drop them a bad review, or name and shame them here
The thing is there should be a big fucking warning screen when apps ask for contact permissions saying ‘You are sharing OVERLY sensitive and potentially DANGEROUS data’ and then have the screen wait until 15 sec before they can press OK
But they are reserved for when i am using an adblocker
If you have a normal social life it’s honestly expected that a couple of people will leak your phone number (and contact name). Nothing you can really do about it. Happened to me many times.
Leaking it because someone they know personally asks? Sure. But the software side via social networks and other apps can absolutely be nailed down a lot more than it is.
That’s just a fundamental problem with security. You can vault up your home but give your idiot brother in law a key and find the back door wide open, him drunk on the kitchen floor.
Prompts don’t work and aren’t really the right way to go because they are annoying and pretty cryptic as apps often assign a myriad of features to a single permission. Everyone’s just going to hit OK.
It’s a difficult issue to solve because there are so many edge cases. And fundamentally you can’t really control what others do with your number.
Honestly. I wish we started talking about doing away with phone numbers altogether. I feel tech is there. And it’s honestly such a massive fingerprint. I’ve had mine for 20 years ffs.
Yeah. There’s literally nothing you can put on a prompt that will truly work. It’s still a good idea to prompt cause it will reduce how many people approve the prompt, but there is a significant number of people who don’t read prompts at all and just insta-confirm.
At best, I think you could design it so there’s no way for an app to request certain permissions themselves. They’d have to be opted in from the system settings and apps could only tell you how to do it. But that’s a usability nightmare that is quite frustrating for legitimate usages. There’s already some super sensitive permissions that do this. I think the ability to install apps, ability to display over other apps, and password managers for android.
Android apps can declare which urls they accept as deep links. Once that is registered with the system (ie after install) then links of that type can be opened by the app. It doesn’t have to match the package name.
I feel like so many shit designs are just an extrapolation on what Dropbox did 6 years ago. Weirdly wide or narrow fonts, weirdly contrasting colors, etc
They might not know know, but there sure can be a lot of meta data one can use to determine that a person goes to school, where it might be, and what school it most likely is.
Or someone else straight up posted the information publicly. That’s always a possibility you have to consider.
Either way, isolating certain websites and services from each other and/or the rest is certainly a good practice to limit what they can gather about you. If you don’t do that already, that is.
regardless of what measures you set up, they’ll still be able to collect a bunch of data based on what pages you visit their service, which posts do you spend more time looking at and which you scroll past, and so on.
I figure that if I can keep it pretty isolated, they’ll only get “scrolls marketplace in SE uk” out of it - I’m never going to look at the feed or have “friends”.
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