I just avoid most of that shit. This may be a hot take, it may be impractical to people who are younger than me, or live different lives, have different needs, but for me, I just avoid it. I think it’s a generational thing. Generation X, we were fine with forums, and AOL/AIM, and ICQ, and all that good stuff, but when these sites started asking for our real names, I think a lot of us just said no. Some of us stayed on with Twitter for a while, some of us went to Reddit until that went tits up (I mean it’s still there but it sucks now), and I’m sure some of us did cave and start using the real-name services, maybe to reconnect with old flames or whatever. But for me, and others like me, we just said no.
I don’t use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter. I had a MySpace for a while, but ditched it. So I’m not completely pure. I also used Windows through the first couple (major) versions of Windows 11 before switching to Macintosh (well, Mac — the full name hasn’t been formally used in a long time). So Apple does have some of the same bullshit as Windows, you need an account, there’s an App Store (similar to the Windows Store, and just as useless), and there’s technically AI, if Siri counts (we — Mac users, I mean, basically never use it, it’s always been useless), but if you just wanna say “fuck the system” while still using something with commercial support, Mac’s a solid choice. (Of course, Linux is better, especially if you already have a Windows computer and you’re looking to break away, but also, a majority of Linux users consider Windows their safety net, or backup plan. Having actual Macs means no, I don’t have a backup plan, I can’t just fall back to Windows, unless Windows for ARM becomes viable and supports Macs. I’m all in getting TF away from Windows and Copilot.
Of course, I do a lot of the things the image suggests. I invert my birthday. MM-DD to DD-MM and, for the year, ABCD to ABDC. For a while, this didn’t work to make me appear to be over 18, so I’d just add or remove 5 or something like that, but now, my “ABDC” year is over 21, so it’s fine. It’s also easy to remember, if I need to recall my “birthdate,” I do the math in my head and there it is. It’s not random and it doesn’t look random.
I’m younger than you but was essentially raised by your peers online. We were all warned about how foolish it is to self doxx and I saw real lives ruined via doxxing on forums. To then watch as everyone around me rush to share their personal information on a publicly accessible database in the form of Facebook was my first lesson in how stupid most people really are.
Apple sucks balls. The way they intentionally make their products incompatible with non-Apple products so you have to buy through them, or get a “dongle”. Dongles suck balls.
you hit the nail on the head. and Remember when we used stuff like IRC, ICQ, AOLIM, forums, etc it was CONSTANTLY drilled into our heads to NEVER share our real names, hell even posting an actual photo of yourself was seen as extremely risky. It wasn’t until Myspace that I felt comfortable doing so. The only social media I use now is piefed. that’s it. I don’t even use Mastodon much anymore. it’s easy for me to just ditch that stuff on whim. I ditched facebook easily a good 10 years ago, I just don’t think about it.
I was born in 83 so not quite gen x but I think people my age have a similar mindset. we’re just kind on the cusp of it all. I think unlike Gen X who just said “nah i’m good” many millennials rather were like “meh, ok, ill give it a shot for a bit” before saying no.
I’m not that much older than you. Funny how the generation lines are drawn. And we’re both over 40, so it doesn’t matter anyway. Once you’re over the hill, it’s a moot point which decade you were born in… for a while.
I have a Piefed, I thought it would be so much different from Lemmy, but it’s just an older (looking/feeling) interface to the same communities. But I’m on RetroFed which tries to focus on retro computing/gaming. I rarely use it because it’s not that different an experience and I generally don’t like being two people on the same network/federation, it just feels disingenuous. If they don’t delete it for inactivity, I can use it if anything happens to this account.
The people who were in college circa 2004 were the first to rush into giving all of their personal data to large corporations online. They told Facebook their real name via their official school email address, school, location, interests, their romantic attachments and a map of their entire peer group for nothing.
Linux user chiming in as we do: Windows isn’t my back up plan, I’m forced to use it sparingly at work, and rarely vendor lock in forces me to borrow a friend’s pc to update my garmin maps (for example), but it’s not my “plan” and I’m pissed about it. My plan is that vendors develop at least passable linux options for updating shit like that other than “fuck you, use windows loser.”
Plus, the linux transition process is a lot easier these days. Most the open source programs have a windows version for you to learn on. There’s the linux for windows subsystem to learn the terminal basics. Linux Mint broadly mimics Windows’ interface. Installing linux isn’t the massive challenge to set up that it was ten years ago. I don’t even have windows partition these days.
Honestly, if someone is a Windows user it’s probably easier to slowly transition each of your programs to the open source versions then make the leap to linux than it is to learn Mac’s set up.
Shit even years ago that “open source” part was true. I switched to all open source programs (when possible) even though I was still on windows the second I found out how much better VLC is than everything. That was like '07 lmao. And it indeed was a big reason I stopped being scared of switching to linux, someone told me “dude almost everything you use already runs on linux, you won’t even need to find alts.”
That’s a good point about WSL though too because afaik that wasn’t around when I switched and I was indeed still scared of the CLI (until I switched and watched a few “linux CLI basics” and “bash basics” youtube videos.) I’ll have to remember to recommend that for those in my old shoes, thanks!
I think there‘s a bunch of different groups. There‘s Gen X that got taught not to share their personal info, the current generation is growing up being taught this as well, a lot of all gens gave sites everything because clueless or indifferent, and then the groups that deliberately shared info trying for internet fame.
There‘s plenty of Gen X that are clueless about privacy and computers.
Knowledge about avoiding tracking, obfuscating your identity, blocking ads, etc. requires constant effort ad knowledge. We‘re on lemmy, and that‘s a bit of an echo chamber because people here as a whole tend to be more knowledgeable about computers, and people here seem to forget that like 90% of the population are clueless about them.
I just avoid most of that shit. This may be a hot take, it may be impractical to people who are younger than me, or live different lives, have different needs, but for me, I just avoid it. I think it’s a generational thing. Generation X, we were fine with forums, and AOL/AIM, and ICQ, and all that good stuff, but when these sites started asking for our real names, I think a lot of us just said no. Some of us stayed on with Twitter for a while, some of us went to Reddit until that went tits up (I mean it’s still there but it sucks now), and I’m sure some of us did cave and start using the real-name services, maybe to reconnect with old flames or whatever. But for me, and others like me, we just said no.
I don’t use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter. I had a MySpace for a while, but ditched it. So I’m not completely pure. I also used Windows through the first couple (major) versions of Windows 11 before switching to Macintosh (well, Mac — the full name hasn’t been formally used in a long time). So Apple does have some of the same bullshit as Windows, you need an account, there’s an App Store (similar to the Windows Store, and just as useless), and there’s technically AI, if Siri counts (we — Mac users, I mean, basically never use it, it’s always been useless), but if you just wanna say “fuck the system” while still using something with commercial support, Mac’s a solid choice. (Of course, Linux is better, especially if you already have a Windows computer and you’re looking to break away, but also, a majority of Linux users consider Windows their safety net, or backup plan. Having actual Macs means no, I don’t have a backup plan, I can’t just fall back to Windows, unless Windows for ARM becomes viable and supports Macs. I’m all in getting TF away from Windows and Copilot.
Of course, I do a lot of the things the image suggests. I invert my birthday. MM-DD to DD-MM and, for the year, ABCD to ABDC. For a while, this didn’t work to make me appear to be over 18, so I’d just add or remove 5 or something like that, but now, my “ABDC” year is over 21, so it’s fine. It’s also easy to remember, if I need to recall my “birthdate,” I do the math in my head and there it is. It’s not random and it doesn’t look random.
I’m younger than you but was essentially raised by your peers online. We were all warned about how foolish it is to self doxx and I saw real lives ruined via doxxing on forums. To then watch as everyone around me rush to share their personal information on a publicly accessible database in the form of Facebook was my first lesson in how stupid most people really are.
I was with you until that. Apple is no different and in many ways worse than Microsoft.
You need support? Run Ubuntu.
Apple sucks balls. The way they intentionally make their products incompatible with non-Apple products so you have to buy through them, or get a “dongle”. Dongles suck balls.
you hit the nail on the head. and Remember when we used stuff like IRC, ICQ, AOLIM, forums, etc it was CONSTANTLY drilled into our heads to NEVER share our real names, hell even posting an actual photo of yourself was seen as extremely risky. It wasn’t until Myspace that I felt comfortable doing so. The only social media I use now is piefed. that’s it. I don’t even use Mastodon much anymore. it’s easy for me to just ditch that stuff on whim. I ditched facebook easily a good 10 years ago, I just don’t think about it.
I was born in 83 so not quite gen x but I think people my age have a similar mindset. we’re just kind on the cusp of it all. I think unlike Gen X who just said “nah i’m good” many millennials rather were like “meh, ok, ill give it a shot for a bit” before saying no.
I’m not that much older than you. Funny how the generation lines are drawn. And we’re both over 40, so it doesn’t matter anyway. Once you’re over the hill, it’s a moot point which decade you were born in… for a while.
I have a Piefed, I thought it would be so much different from Lemmy, but it’s just an older (looking/feeling) interface to the same communities. But I’m on RetroFed which tries to focus on retro computing/gaming. I rarely use it because it’s not that different an experience and I generally don’t like being two people on the same network/federation, it just feels disingenuous. If they don’t delete it for inactivity, I can use it if anything happens to this account.
The people who were in college circa 2004 were the first to rush into giving all of their personal data to large corporations online. They told Facebook their real name via their official school email address, school, location, interests, their romantic attachments and a map of their entire peer group for nothing.
Linux user chiming in as we do: Windows isn’t my back up plan, I’m forced to use it sparingly at work, and rarely vendor lock in forces me to borrow a friend’s pc to update my garmin maps (for example), but it’s not my “plan” and I’m pissed about it. My plan is that vendors develop at least passable linux options for updating shit like that other than “fuck you, use windows loser.”
Plus, the linux transition process is a lot easier these days. Most the open source programs have a windows version for you to learn on. There’s the linux for windows subsystem to learn the terminal basics. Linux Mint broadly mimics Windows’ interface. Installing linux isn’t the massive challenge to set up that it was ten years ago. I don’t even have windows partition these days.
Honestly, if someone is a Windows user it’s probably easier to slowly transition each of your programs to the open source versions then make the leap to linux than it is to learn Mac’s set up.
Shit even years ago that “open source” part was true. I switched to all open source programs (when possible) even though I was still on windows the second I found out how much better VLC is than everything. That was like '07 lmao. And it indeed was a big reason I stopped being scared of switching to linux, someone told me “dude almost everything you use already runs on linux, you won’t even need to find alts.”
That’s a good point about WSL though too because afaik that wasn’t around when I switched and I was indeed still scared of the CLI (until I switched and watched a few “linux CLI basics” and “bash basics” youtube videos.) I’ll have to remember to recommend that for those in my old shoes, thanks!
I think there‘s a bunch of different groups. There‘s Gen X that got taught not to share their personal info, the current generation is growing up being taught this as well, a lot of all gens gave sites everything because clueless or indifferent, and then the groups that deliberately shared info trying for internet fame.
There‘s plenty of Gen X that are clueless about privacy and computers.
Knowledge about avoiding tracking, obfuscating your identity, blocking ads, etc. requires constant effort ad knowledge. We‘re on lemmy, and that‘s a bit of an echo chamber because people here as a whole tend to be more knowledgeable about computers, and people here seem to forget that like 90% of the population are clueless about them.