Your supermarket accepts payments in cash, which is better anyway.

(I say as someone who pays for certain services in Monero)

That's why here, giving a student a laptop without supervision is unthinkable... Good if the school has computers at all anyway.

My issue is effective impossibility to selfhost. XMPP, Simplex, even Matrix are very possible to run on your own, while a Session node would be insanely, arbitrarily expensive (requires around $1000 now, IIRC used to be more). A hobbyist like me and you would not want to pour this much into something they provide out of the goodness of their heart.

Seriously, if you have this much disposable money, you'd be better off running a few Tor nodes in various places).

Huh, and for me Searx hasn't been great for searching in Russian in particular.

I just have a profile on each that are always both in the same groups. IDK about private messaging though.

There is a full-featured desktop client now! What I am waiting for are third-party lighter clients, because the official one is obscenely heavy.

I personally don't need sophistication, I just want to not sound like a woman in a game voice chat. I wonder if this is what I need.

I hear a lot about gait detection, but I wonder how widely it is implemented.

And - gasp! - you can do it from your computer directly! No Android emulators, no inconvenient command-line client!

If I cared about the contents of email staying safe, would rather not depend on a provider and just use provider-independent PGP. If safety is more important than universality - then I'd use something outside of email in general, like XMPP+OMEMO or maybe Simplex.

Yea, my main issue is that because of the price, you're locked to phones that are either out or almost out of support, or secondhand. Even the last generation's cheapest model is $300! Though very tempted to try to save that anyway.

Plus they are not officially sold here, so always a bit of a gamble.

I mean, running outdated software is bad practice. Do you think backdoors would have to be cleverly hidden every time, like what we almost got with XZ? If it is in plain sight, I highly doubt a person outside of the oppressed jurisdictions (or just someone anonymous) wouldn't make a malware-removing fork.

Why necessarily an older version? Do you think a XZ-like well-hidden backdoor in some update is likely?

Funny how first association is "eend-to-end encryption is broken" and not, you know, that whoever used the message got hold of one of the "ends".

I do not blame Proton for complying with a request - it is a completely expected action from a company. However, I would blame them for advertising that makes them seem safer than they are for people who don't know better.

No thanks, I would rather not have to use Waydroid and deal with Google's services because of course you didn't make the app available on your website or on F-Droid.

Yes! I don't get why Matrix is the one that's more popular now. My Prosody is botherless, consumes little RAM and does not have storage concerns like Matrix does. It just does all the messaging basics. It needs more love.

The shadowban I am pissed about is Reddit. The comments would appear for me just fine, but not visible outside of my account. Given that I have pretty much only commented about very neutral, even childish topics - I blame my email, which is on my own domain.

This defeatist attitude, as well as "all-or-nothing" one, is one of the major privacy enemies by itself.

modern cars

You can not own a car at all, have an older one (which, granted, is not quite a universal longterm option), or from wht I've seen in discussions - depending on the model, a lot of them can have the telematics units disconnected.

phones

Not using a smartphone, leaving it at home or using a Faraday cage (same goes for a dumbphone), using Lineage/Graphene/whatever on it.

credit cards

Cash. Even in a lot of online stores (the smaller ones, not large universal Amazon-like) I've shopped at you can order delivery to the store's office (which is usually at no extra cost) and pay with cash.

Yes, there are a lot of areas where you have lost. But that doesn't mean you should give up on everything at once then. Privacy is not binary, it is a spectrum.

I wish I could, but desktop application is limited in functionality and I don't know how to make the mobile app function properly (Waydroid doesn't allow bluetooth use). I don't have a mobile device I can make as private as my desktop, so I would not want to have my chats there.