I am not a big fan of social media, which I have successfully resisted (unless Usenet counts as social media, that is). I am wondering about a limited foray into Instagram to be able to send periodic messages to (younger) relatives. I do *not* want Instagram reading my contacts, monitoring my shopping or tracking my movements. Can all of this be suppressed? Would I be better to use the app on my phone or the website on my PC for this purpose?
Tell everyone to get onto Mastodon as its not allied to a data harvesting company. The way a lot of things are kept free to the end user is by selling your soul to others. Its a trade off of course, and we have been doing it for years on the web through cookies and click through links. The problem of course is that if there is enough annon data about it gradually gets more likely that you are known. Usenet can be scanned of course, but to me it seems like few big companies bother, its mainly scammers. However take facebook, for example. They actually encourage closed groups, but the people who run it, Meta can then profile people by their interests and where they go, target adds to them and even let nhs and other entities know info. Google metrics are used to spot early signs of an outbreak of flu or some other disease, which is probably a good thing in isolation. Brian
Avoid all phone apps, use the web site in a separate browser or an 'incognito' tab in your current browser. Once you have finished close the tab.
Theo
Thanks. Would a VPN help? Is specifically blocking any access to Outlook an option?
Not much, unless you want to pretend to come from another country.
I don't think their browser tab would have any access to Outlook anyway?
Running a good adblocker like Ublock Origin (the Origin bit is important) will skip a lot of their tracking and also block most of their ads - recommended for any website.
Theo
or run a sandbox if you have windows 10 or 11.... (its a lite version of a virtual machine.
Useful if you want to check out possibly dodgy sites too
Whatsapp seems to suggest end to end encryption, at least until the UK Government law comes in. Brian
No. Usenet is Anti-Social Media.
I prefer it that way :-)
LOL!
I'm always intrigued by requests for me to accept cookies when I want to read something (possibly a news report). Reject all is my favoured response but do some people actually blithely accept all?
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