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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • Some are required in order to approve purchases or to access customer service on case a fraud warning prevents a transaction from going through the first time or if you just need some savings money transferred to your checking in order to make a purchase which you might use a mobile app or call customer service to do rather than having to go home and come back to the store. There are several reasons to need to access your money when you are outside of the house. The things that require the app authentication vary by bank, but some are going to be urgent enough that it’s going to risk purchases getting rejected if you don’t have the app with you at all times.




  • It’s become a pretty standard practice on Apple, Samsung, and Google devices as well as many other Android manufacturers to enable data sharing by default in the US. Especially the last few administrations want as much data as possible about the people, and in the US pretty much all of the companies share this kind of data pretty freely without requiring any judicial oversight since the supreme court has been corrupted. And the current administration HSS basically cut all investigation into any corporations that are friendly to them, so there’s no essentially no risk in collecting, leaking, or selling this data, so why bother making it opt-in. And recently, it’s explicitly risky to not collect and share as much data as possible with the government.


  • This is what I use. I mostly just have the DNS filter turned on to allow for blocking similar to what my pihole does at home, bit allows me to have it when I’m outside of the house, too. But it has lots of other capabilities like a firewall, proxying through Wiegaurd or Tor, anti-censorship features, etc. It does use your device’s VPN connection but it creates a local VPN just to force routing all apps through it and then if you want an additional external VPN you use the proxying, but that’s optional.

    But the DNS-only option doesn’t drain the battery like a full filter/firewall may, so that’s one reason I only use it for that. And I use GrapheneOS, so apps are easier to control at the OS level than standard Android, do it’s not as necessary for me anyway.












  • It definitely depends on the application. But when you’re installing it, it should yell you if it’s installing other things. Otherwise you’ll have to look at the actual files it installed. There should ne documentation you can read on the site or st least it should have given you a readme to look at when you install it that has the info or links to a website with the info. There also should be a privacy policy in the application or on its site that describes what info it collects and tracks assuming this is from a reputable company. I’m just not familiar with it.



  • Anti-cheat software in either testing or gaming as well as employee productivity monitoring software (which is similar) generally has wide ranging permissions to do its job. So without doing research to confirm, I’d assume it has full access to everything you do across all applications, including when it’s not running in the foreground if it has background services running.

    Personally, I never install that stuff on my primary operating system. I either use a dedicated device, dual boot, or if it is less sophisticated, use a virtual machine with only Windows and the necessary software. Of course I don’t use Windows for any personal computers anyway, too inefficient, and these days, too unstable and too much spyware built-in. I only use Windows on my work laptop these days which spys on me constantly to the point of crashing a lot as it collects all of its info when I use development software at the same time as WebEx or other necessary software.

    If you want to know details, you need to look at the software they had you install as well as the dependencies it might install.



  • Because you trade privacy for convenience. You could have a totally private communication platform, but you’d need to trade current IP addresses of your devices if there’s no users and no centralized routing server or at least a list of what device is associated what person.

    It’s secure because people can’t read the content of your message. It’s not private because people can find you with your phone number or username and associate encrypted message packages with the sender and receiver so they know who you called and when, but not what you said.

    So if your contacts are tech savvy enough to call you to get your current unique IPv6 address, something that Android doesn’t really support out of the box, and IPv4 often won’t work due to layers of routing caused by the world running out of addresses, or some other unique network identifier, and there are no firewalls between you or they’ve all been configured appropriately to allow the particular message protocol then you could send simple IP Messages to each other.

    But as long as you want to use a system that routes messages and has a user database, that central location will always be a privacy hole.