Can we please stop coming up with words that describe that we do not do a thing like it is not normal? Just like having to call yourself an atheist because you do not believe. You should call yourself a theist if you believe, because you actively do it. Call yourself what you are, do, or see fit, not what you are not.

Now do another 10 or 20 parties more and maybe america could finally become a democratic country.

LLM usage is a part of it, but it’s not the only thing. They are moving more and more in a direction that they use your usage data for marketing I feel.

For example search suggestions, where they started tracking in which location you are searching for what and tell that third party advertisers, so that they can show you ads depending on your information. Additionally they also state very clear that they will handle personal information and location data and give that to third parties if you use advanced search.

Another example is the “new tab” in which they show ads and sponsored content and track how you interact with that for showing you better ads.

There are a lot of other features which will track behavior or usage, but you have to actively use them.

Then there is the debate about the “you grant us non exclusive, worldwide” rights to use your uploaded and typed in data discussion. Yes, they need to have rights to handle my data I input, but together with the ads stuff this smells fishy. Maybe more so because this is the first ever Terms of Use and all of that has been working without that in the past.

In the meantime they set usage reports and studies active per default. You can disable it, but you have to know about that option.

All of that is far from other browsers like Chrome and Edge but they seem to slowly change in a more ads-driven way. Firefox was basically surviving on google money the last decade, and that may stop, so we have to be extra careful.

Well, Firefox tries really hard to go to shit as well with their new Privacy Policy and their first ever Terms of Service.

I get that some things like screen resolution and basic stuff is needed, however most websites don’t need to know how many ram I have, or which CPU I use and so on. I would wish for an opt-in on this topics: So only make the bare minimum available and ask the user, when more is needed. For example playing games in the browser, for that case it could be useful to know how much ram is available, however for most other things it is not.

It would be nice to hammer a manually created fingerprint into the browser and share that fingerprint around. When everyone has the same fingerprint, no one can be uniquely identified. Could we make such a thing possible?

But why would any browser accept access to those metadata so freely? I get that programming languages can find out about the environment they are operating in, but why would a browser agree to something like reading installed fonts or extensions without asking the user first? I understand why Chrome does this, but all of the mayor ones and even Firefox?

Hmmmm, money

What happened 2023?

I very rarely ever did. And when I did I made sure I trusted the studio and knew enough. But even with this preparation I was burned most of the time preordering.

Nowadays I notice a game I like and I wait for 1-3 years, then pick it up DRM free, with all the extensions and fully patched for oftentimes 15€ or so.

Lemmy, the Fediverse, and open source in general too. Every time bullshit happens I find myself more and more replacing closed systems with community-developed and community-run systems. It’s not only the giving back/contributing/being part, and the openness, it’s also that this cannot be taken away so easily. Taken by buying the company, a software update, agreement change or the fact that someday you may not be able to pay your monthly fee and loose access to all your stuff.

Almost no corporation has benefits operating in a liberal/left country, they are harder to exploit and make profit of. Why would they promote things like worker protection, parental leave, unions, reducing their own rights to favor the society, paying for healthcare etc? Edit: Wording