Hey Lemmy! We've released [gofoss.net](https://gofoss.net/), a beginner's guide to free and open source software, privacy and sustainable tech. The site is available in English, French and German. We hope that it can help some of you to: * safely browse the Internet * encrypt your conversations * protect your data * switch to Linux * free your phone from Google & Apple * join the Fediverse & use alternative cloud providers * self-host your stuff The source code is available on [GitLab](https://gitlab.com/curlycrixus/gofoss). Happy to chat, let us know what you think! For more information, please come find us at [gofoss.net](https://gofoss.net) :) -- PS: We are 100% non-profit: no ads, no tracking, no sponsored or paywalled content.

You might have old accounts especially cloud accounts that are just idling abandoned while still holding personal information. They might have old weak passwords just waiting to get compromised. Same goes for old email addresses that you do not use anymore but are still linked to other accounts. This is a reminder to check those, delete your data from them or to delete them altogether (delete private information manually first before deleting the account as many companies do not actually delete the data from deleted accounts and just mark the account as deleted). Some examples of this could be: * old Google accounts from old devices * old iCloud accounts * old Microsoft accounts * old Aol or similar email accounts * old accounts from smartphone vendors like Samsung, Huawei etc. that often have their own cloud services Make sure to set a strong passwords on accounts you want to keep and of course use a password manager. Besides the security password managers have the great side effect of giving you an overview over all your accounts so that you cannot just forget old ones.

I've used Yandex and it seems to be a crazy echo chamber. I searched on it and I got results for a niche subreddit that I used to visit without using [libreddit](https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit) before I started caring about my privacy. The results don't really have anything to do with what I was searching but I guess the algorithm just puts a lot of points in familiar websites. And I don't know how they've got that data anyways, probably either Google or Reddit sold them the data. I only wanted to see what the internet was like without big tech and western media. The best way for this would be to have my own [Mwmbl](https://mwmbl.org/) instance once it has user crowdsourcing, but for now I could only think of trying [marginalia](https://search.marginalia.nu) or [Yandex](yandex.com). Yandex doesn't seem to block either big tech or western media anyways, so I didn't found the experiment interesting.

just that the TV commercial looks back at you through the TV and the TV follows you around everywhere, wherever you go, whatever you do, taking note of everything to get to know every single detail about you, every interest, every prejudice, every weakness of yours, to get to know you like no person, no matter how close to you does, like not even yourself do to use that information to influence you most effectively to the TV channel's and the advertiser's advantage, to manipulate you, to sell this information about you to other companies like insurances who use the power that this knowledge provides over you to extract every last cent of money from you, to sell you.

##Some general background Discord is a privacy and security disaster. They do not make their money through ads and tracking (as of now) but they do not care about privacy or security just the slightest bit either. Discord messages are not end to end encrypted. Discord, their employees and their infrastructure partners like Google Cloud Messaging have access to your messages at all time. Do not ever send anything sensitive over Discord! Discord also does *not* delete your messages when you delete your account, leave a server or delete a channel or group. When you delete a channel or group or get removed from one your messages still stay on their server. You just lose access to them and have no way to delete them anymore. If you delete your account without deleting your messages first they will stay on their servers forever without you having any way to access or delete them. There is no official way for deleting all your messages. I am not a lawyer, but I am very sure that is a violation of the GDPR and highly illegal. They claim they anonymize that data when you delete your account, but all your messages are still tied to an account ID and there is no way to anonymize private messages that can contain personal information. Using client mods to automate deleting messages is even against their TOS. They do not comply with laws that require them to delete your data and reserve the right to ban you when you try to do that yourself. You should absolutely regularly delete your messages anyways. Make sure to have another mean of contact for your Discord friends so you do not rely on Discord as they can and do of course ban you for any or no reason whatsoever. Discord also has extremely extensive telemetry that is *not* anonymized. They basically log every click you make in the app: when you click on a profile, when you join a voice channel etc. You can see this data when you do a GDPR request. Included in this logs is your IP address, your rough location and device information for every single event. You can block some of this with uBo in a browser or with client mods. ##Settings in Discord * Opt out of personalization and other data sharing. * Set yourself to invisible/offline. Everyone on every server can see when you are online otherwise and there are bots collecting this information. ##Modifications * If you can, use Discord in a browser with uBlock Origin. * Regularly use a script like [this](https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages) to delete your messages. * Consider using a VPN to hide your IP address and location. * If you use their mobile app do not grant it storage permission and instead share files from your gallery or file manager with Discord. ##Usage Assume that absolutely everything you do on Discord – every message you send every word you say in a voice channel, every click you make – gets permanently recorded by Discord and secrete services, gets sold to advertisers either right away or in the future and breached to the public in the future. That is exactly what you risk when using Discord. Use it accordingly and do not share anything sensitive. If you need to discuss something private shift to another platform.

Brave new tech-totalitarian world

Beginning in the second half of the 1970s, the world witnessed the birth and affirmation of so-called Big Tech – the five largest companies that operate in the field of information technology, which are also known today as “GAFAM” (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). In the roughly 50 years since then, these companies have been able to build empires of intellectual property of technologies and systems – primarily through acquisitions of other companies both small and large, which allowed them to center technological innovations within their walls. “The GAFAM Empire”, a project developed by DensityDesign Lab and Tactical Tech, collects the information of more than 1,000 acquisitions made by these companies, in order to look back on the history of the industry through the limited data publicly available on the web. The information visualizes a landscape of acquisitions to identify common interests, which are then broken down into a deep analysis of GAFAM’s history. The project visualizes the data in different shapes and through different focuses, allowing the reader to understand a complex system of relationships that is constantly evolving and that is redefining the concepts of competition and monopoly.

**[CHATCONTROL - EDPB & EDPS: PROPOSAL TO COMBAT CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE ONLINE PRESENTS SERIOUS RISKS FOR FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS](https://europa.eu/!hyc4M7)** Brussels, 29 July - The European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor ( [@EDPS](https://social.network.europa.eu/users/EDPS) ) adopted a Joint Opinion on the Proposal for a Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse. The Proposal aims to impose obligations related to detecting, reporting, removing and blocking known and new online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), as well as the solicitation of children, on providers of hosting services, interpersonal communication services, software application stores, internet access services and other relevant services. The EDPB and EDPS consider child sexual abuse as a particularly serious and heinous crime. Limitations to the rights to private life and data protection must, however, respect the essence of these fundamental rights and remain limited to what is strictly necessary and proportionate. The EDPB and EDPS consider that the Proposal, in its current form, may present more risks to individuals, and, by extension, to society at large, than to the criminals pursued for CSAM. Whilst supporting the goals and intentions behind the Proposal, the EDPS and EDPB express serious concerns about the impact of the envisaged measures on individuals’ privacy and personal data. The lack of detail, clarity and precision of the conditions for issuing a detection order for CSAM and child solicitation does not ensure that only a targeted approach to CSAM detection will effectively take place. There is a risk that the Proposal could become the basis for a generalised and indiscriminate scanning of content of virtually all types of electronic communications. The EDPB and EDPS advise that the conditions for issuing a detection order should be further clarified Opinion [europa.eu/!hyc4M7](https://europa.eu/!hyc4M7) Press Release [europa.eu/!H8tN6P](https://europa.eu/!H8tN6P)

it only took 28 years; better late than never!