You say that like they ever do things the right way, even a fair chunk of the proposals I see for Linux take it out of the user’s hands.

I already nuked my hard drive and went to Debian when Microslop kept trying to force me to “update” my local account and turned their creepy AI stuff back on again and again no matter how many times I dug in with PowerShell to shut it off.

We’re going to be running a fork not licensed for use in the US or Europe soon enough, or bowing to surveillance and de-anonymization. Or maybe go back to legacy systems, like dumping systemd and wayland for init and x11, just to have things actually work for us again rather than embrace the ever-present creep of the “Framework of Fuckery” ™ that is being pushed by the corpo scum and their pet “Representatives.”

The rules have always been for us, not for them.

The police are enforcers for the elites, they don’t stop crime, they extract fines from people and provide a deterrent to anyone standing up for themselves.

Except it’s more ZuckID, since Meta was behind the “grassroots” campaigns and wrote the script “representatives” are using globally.

The models were made to be run locally on your own data, let the corpos in and they’ll find a way to destroy the world, screw the people, and add eshitification to literally everything.

Honestly, I prefer someone else’s untrustworthy.

I don’t trust China at all, but I trust them over the US, if only because they have no stake in me as a foreigner.

Watching all the new laws spew out in Europe I don’t trust them, either.

I’m down to Romania and Iceland, now.

Been dumping German stuff like a plague lately, and already pulled all data out of Canada.

I have one thing in Amsterdam, but their laws have been getting worse and worse, and they’re… Nine, I think it is, eyes which is bad for trusting them with your data. Even Switzerland is getting sus af.

I refer to it as “Boomer Social” as it is the exclusive form of communication for family members over 60. When I purged my Meta accounts, finally, I completely lost contact with my sister.

Seems that old people who were around for email being the norm can’t manage to use it anymore…

Cards are their own issue…

I had a bank that would always deny my purchase of a game with fraud detection, though I suspect it was because GOG was still banking in Gibraltar then, but then my card was actually stolen and they just let them spend $5 at every store in town until I was overdrawn by the maximum they allowed.

Definitely an adult account, I have kids who are adults, and I had been on Google since I used to use it at the public library. I seem to remember there being a different version of mail from them, before GMail, that was converted when they did the big release. I could be wrong, it’s been nearly thirty years, but I was very relieved to be able to get off Yahoo which only released one good product (Answers, by the way) in the history of ever.

I also started with Android using my account long enough ago to be “adult” as I was using a HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) running Android 1.0 released in 2008, moving from my brief foray into Blackberry from Palm to them and staying through the Galaxy Note 8. Now I use WayDroid to run a few Android apps, Google has just gotten too creepy, and they do derpy things like make me need to fiddle with workarounds to access my files on my device and now they’re pushing the signing for Android trying to kill (or at least data harvest) alternative stores.

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They finally lost me completely when I loaded a music video marked “adult” for language and it demanded I upload ID on an account that was legally an adult.

I made that account in 1999, it’s not even from this millennium, and they still derp out on it. I’m getting close to 50, at this point, and the only thing ads, age verification, and extreme right wing content on top of state sponsored disinformation campaigns will get you is a blacklist.

We should have seen it coming, I mean they used to have the “Don’t be evil” motto, removing that was a declaration of intent.

I scrape from the command line, Google doesn’t even tough a web browser, leech the webm/webp/whatever content and transcode it into mkv/mp3 to watch locally, offline, with no ads or tracking.