I realized that may be the case after commenting. I didn’t read your post as closely as I should have, but I kept the comment up in case someone finds it helpful.
Unfortunately I’m not aware of any solutions beyond buy bigger drives, stand up a backup NAS, or omit unimportant/non-critical/easily recoverable data from backups. I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for though.
Consider implementing networked attached storage (NAS) like TrueNAS or Unraid. There are other options (both NAS and non-NAS options) that will help you achieve this. Going with a NAS will help you mitigate risks relating to drive failure (ie - you install multiple hard drives and if one hard drive fails, the system will keep working until you get the failed drive replaced), will make the storage accessible across the devices on your network (depending on how you configure your NAS and network) instead of just the device the hard drive is plugged into, can run additional services/applications on the system, and will likely have some sort of backup system that you can enable/configure for either cloud backups or local backups to another device. The downside is that it will likely require additional hardware and/or some network work. It can be done pretty easily though depending on your needs. For example, Network Chuck has a tutorial on setting up a NAS on a Raspberry Pi.
While I would love to see this for many reasons, I’m not convinced it would eliminate all tracking/data collection on its own. For example, in this case Google provided seemingly good, “non-advertising” related reasons for this data collection. Companies could do this to justify just about anything that they wanted to collect. However, banning behavorial based advertising without any loopholes (eg - users are in South America, servers are in EU, but the law only impacts services where both users and servers are in North America) would hopefully lead to a sharp decline in the market of shared/sold data. So while it would help change the current landscape where we are giving up our privacy in exchange for companies’ profits, we would be giving up our privacy for (presumably better) services. In that case, at least consumers are (ideally) able to directly benefit from the data that they are sharing/giving up.
While all good points, they don’t specifically address the problems mentioned in the post.
Douglas Leith, a computer science professor at the Trinity College Dublin, claims in his “What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages Apps on Android Send to Google?” paper that Google’s Messages and Dialer apps have been sending data to the company’s servers without taking explicit user consent. More specifically, these apps collect information about user communications, including an SHA256 hash of the messages and their timestamp, phone numbers, incoming and outgoing call logs, call duration, and length. This is then shared with Google’s servers using Google Play Services Clearcut logger service and the Firebase Analytics service. The data helps the company link the message sender and receiver and/or the two devices in the call, enabling features like spam filtering and business caller IDs. - similar report from Android Police
The quickest/easiest thing to do to mitigate any risks from the accusations is to just use a more privacy friendly SMS app and phone app. However, doing so may lead to some unwanted outcomes (eg - no RCS, loss of phone call functionality that Google has implemented over the years) and it may not eliminate Google’s ability to collect this information anyway due to Google Play Services. These are small prices to pay and aren’t difficult to adjust to if you’re concerned with Google abusing or mishandling your data.
An even better quick win would be using private and secure messenging, calling, and video chatting services instead of traditional SMS and phone calls. There have been a few mentioned in the thread. Doing so may be frustrating as you’ll have to convince everyone you communicate with to use the app(ss of your choosing and you’ll likely run into situations where using those apps are not possible (eg - school/work activities, interacting with businesses, etc.).
Aside from not using a cell phone at all, the best thing you could do is ditch traditional Android (ie - Android with Google Play Services, the Google Play Store, etc.). Moving to iOS may help mitigate Google’s data collection ability, but it shifts the risk from Google to Apple. Instead, as /u/Jouissance_juice mentioned, using GrapheneOS would help tremendously with the recent accusations (in addition many other privacy and security risks). The downside is that it requires a Pixel phone and it can be a bit of a jarring experience for people who ate used to the ttraditional “Google” Android experience. There are other ROMs (eg - CalyxOS, LineageOS, etc.) that may offer a less jarring experience at the expense of a (possibly only a little bit of) security and privacy. Keep in mind that even if you do this and still communicate over SMS and traditional phone calls that the carriers and others (including Google if the other person you’re communicating with uses Android) will still be able to access most of the information as before you made the change. You would still need to move to a private and secure communication app to mitigate your privacy concerns as much as possible.
No, adblockers are not piracy. It’s more similar to using a “free service/resource” that has a recommended (or even expected) donation, which you decide not to pay.
If you’re somehow using adblockers to get past a paywall or some other authentication/authorization system, then we have a legitimate piracy conversation.
This is nice. I’ve seen something similar before for Nitter as a browser extension. I’ve been trying to find a solution that does this for multiple privacy friendly front ends, but haven’t found exactly what I’m looking for just yet. The closest I’ve found is the results presented in Whoogle, but it only works for results displayed on the page.
I’m also not sure how this would work from a technical perspective. Would community creators have to share their Matrix credentials with their Lemmy instance/client? Would the Matrix room be created by a different Matrix account managed by the Lemmy instance maintainer? How would it work if the Lemmy community creator wanted to use a different Matrix homeserver than matrix.org? What if a space was better suited for Matrix than a room? How would the community maintainer change the room in the future? What if the maintainer for a community switches and the new maintainer doesn’t have access to the account that is running the Matrix room?
I’m not sure if this is already available, but I think a field to enter a Matrix room/space link would be better than the ability to automatically create a Matrix room. It would give the community creator more flexibility and creating a room/space doesn’t take too much time. If a person is going out of their way to create/maintain a Lemmy community, they should also have the ability (or the ability to figure out how) to create a Matrix room/space.