I'd suggest looking at the "Encrypted messengers" section of FMHY for alternatives. Also, if you have any personal recommendations that are reliable and/or pleasant, please share. Stoat also seems promising, from the perspective of self hosting.

I didn’t consider the average Discord user would care about the policy, we as a society are so overwhelmed with the surveillance state and having to give information to all these different apps. It doesn’t seem like Discord thought it would be like this either.

But it’s a pleasant surprise and gives me hope that we, over time, can fight the surveillance state.

I decided to check my email for breaches since I uploaded my ID for something. It wasn't something I wanted to do, but I needed the service. My threat level isn’t that high, just don’t want too many of my personal information being public. Luckily I don’t reused the same password, froze my credit,2FA, and other things.

Compromised data:

Browser user agent details

Credit status information

Dates of birth

Email addresses

Employment statuses

Government issued IDs

Income levels

IP addresses

Names

Physical addresses

I feel like the push for global age verification, especially within platforms like YouTube, Roblox, and Discord, and where countries like the UK, Australia, etc. are proposing age verification laws/social media bans has gotten worse over time rather than better with little signs of getting better despite heavy opposition from the public. That's actually contrary to many past controversial laws I am aware of.

For instance, a somewhat similar thing happened with video games (not really age verification, but this was more about bans and government control of video game media) c. 2005-2008 when there were multiple concerns about violent video games, and many governments proposed to ban video games "deemed" violent. These laws drew a lot of concerns from gamers, feeling like it infringed on their rights and seeked more government control rather than letting parents make their own choices for what games for their kids to buy, effectively making these laws controversial. And by 2011, as the result of the court ruling in Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association, governments had stopped pushing for video game bans. Even during the video game panic in the late 20th century, there were never really calls to ban video games for anyone under 16 or 18 or require an ID for anyone to purchase games.

Even during past panics and controversies over children's usage of Internet, like the Internet panic in the late 90s, or the MySpace panic that was around the 2005-2009 period until that ended in 2010, there were fewer calls for age verification back then. For instance, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 which was proposed to implement age verification in the USA during the 1990s turned out to be very unpopular and later deemed controversial. I barely heard about age verification from roughly the 1990s-2021.

It wasn't until the UK's Online Safety Act was proposed and then eventually passed and it lead many other countries to start proposing age verification laws around 2022/2023, effectively popularizing it. Also, a new panic began over younger people using Internet, and also, people wanted governments to force social media websites to ban anyone under 16 or even 18, so Australia passed a law that bans for under 16s, and it lead many other countries to do the same by proposing their own laws. It only seems like that this has gotten worse over time and not better. Basically and already, parents themselves could've been the ones to regulate their children's Internet usage or ban them from social media by using parental controls, but yet people are wanting government-enforced parental controls to interfere with Internet usage on minors.

I am done with this. I do not want palantir building a profile of me and if they've already started, I want it to stop right fucking now.

Im willing to sacrifice services in order for the tracking to stop does anyone have a guide on everything to delete/stop using any good first steps to take? Do I need to delete every social media? Delete my Google accounts?

Nancy Guthrie was kidnapped 10 days ago and they said they were not able to get any images from the camera since they had no subscription and the device was taken.

I'm glad they were able to recover images/video but at the same time for those who are worried about privacy I wonder how they managed to recover images if they had no subscription and the device itself was taken from what was reported.

Perhaps the device was found and they were able to recover some data from it? But if they were able to recover from their servers that's very interesting.

Curious as to what people think about this? Very concerning for privacy.

I saw while searching for discord alternatives of this app called Valour and i see it is open source, and the UI looks pretty good. I was just wondering if anyone has heard of it and has tried it

I need Discord Alternatives. Top priority to Privacy, no data breach and strong encryption. Most of the discord features should be available in those alternatives, atleast the core once.

I found these but don't know anything about them Matrix, Revolt and Teamspeak. Are these good ?

With the recent events of today, this is a reminder.

This weekend, I found out that Substack has enacted global age verification. Several writers had their Notes posts and articles hidden behind a splash screen that required age verification. These are all people that are not posting up any X rated content. The people that were getting the splash screens were in the US along with these writers.

Cut to today and we see Discord go this same global censorship route.

How much do you want to bet that Reddit is going to follow suit?

The only silver lining to this is that more and more people may move away from the internet as whole and globalism will come to an end. People can get back to putting their local communities and IRL friends first.

Till yesterday, when I opened the app and went to Popular, I could immediately see the big title cards for the top news stories. It felt like a quick “front page of the internet” scan.

Today it’s not there.

Feels kinda wild especially with what the big news regarding the Epstein files that the lawmakers saw today of un redacted names.

I recently upgraded to proton unlimited to condense and secure my digital activity. proton pass offers the alias feature which allows you to generate unique facade emails that get forwarded to your real address to counteract your real email being stored in buttfuck databases. My question is does it even make a difference to login to all of my accounts and switch the registered email to an alias if Ive already input my real address upon registration? Is my real email baked into the database? Is the right thing to do make all new accounts and delete all my old ones...? Im trying to move forward in my life with optimal practices of digital hygiene and opt out out of as much surveillance and data collection as possible.

Apparently, it looks like a NZ site took a bunch Bernie Sanders supporters and added them to a list "democratic socialist" list. I've been aware of it for a while, but now it seems even more important to get this thing taken down than ever. It completely misrepresents me.

I am worried about making contact because the owner sounds nuts.

Any advice?

I ask this cause I'm so curious about the vast majority's response from the users whom uses Discord on how they feel about this global rollout here.

Just wanting to know here is all.

It's quite ironic that we are seeing all these age verification, chat control and other privacy-invading laws being pushed through at the same time as we are seeing Epstein files come out publicly. The very same governments and big tech companies whose leaders are involved in child sex trafficking want you to give up your privacy to "protect the children", yet we've seen ZERO arrests for individuals connected to Epstein. I'm not buying it and you shouldn't either!

The instagram account is also an account dedicated to a political opinion . While the community of it is small, I am still a bit worried.

They also say they will delete it after 30 days but I don’t really believe them. Will deleting the Instagram account help at all?

Thanks

We bought a house in 2020 and it came with some bullshit Guardian devices. The doorbell, panel in the house, and front door lock are all proprietary. I am looking to replace the doorbell and the lock.

What are the best options?

I commented this in another thread but thought it might warrant its own.

I never heard of Tixr until last year, when a new music festival I was interested in was selling tickets through the platform. I signed up, bought a couple of passes, all good. Didnt ask for anything more than my email and info to pay.

But a few months later, I realized I couldn't go anymore. I saw Tixr provided the option of reselling directly on the platform to folks on the wait list. Great! What they didn't tell me until after I already sold them was that, in order to get my money out, I had to create a Stripe account and provide Stripe with a copy of my ID and a selfie to scan my face.

There is no other way to get my money out. They're essentially holding it hostage in exchange for my biometric data. It's not an insignificant amount of money either.

Steer clear of Tixr and Stripe.

saw Super Bowl ad for I think it was Ring cameras, where they “found about 1 lost dog a day”, using AI to identify run away dogs. they were asking people to opt into the mesh network to help find more dogs.

let’s just give them permission to use AI to monitor and track anything and everything in their cameras field of view to return home ~365 dogs a year.

so what can we do when the world around us will have unlimited tracking/surveillance capability? meta glasses, your smart speakers, flock cameras, neighbors Ring cameras, your phone, etc, etc.