A while ago I reached a point in my privacy journey where I simply felt bored. It’s not a result of going too far in privacy, but simply my threat model has caused me to let go of a lot of things that used to entertain me (games, movie streaming, short form video, etc.) The entertainment landscape in privacy seems pretty bleak, since you no longer own the movies you watch, the games you play, and lots of proprietary software along the way. I entertain myself through FreeTube, physical copies of movies, and offline installations of games like Minecraft, but it’s still a step down from how it used to be.
What do you do to keep yourselves entertained in a privacy conscious way?
Hiking, camping, fishing, outdoor activities.
Woodworking, painting, knitting, blacksmithing.
Basically anything that’s not connected to a screen.
Gasps
🫨
Go to your public library and just sit there and read a book
Public library would be less private than just pirating the book. Public spaces tend to be thoroughly captured by stray security cameras (often with terrible Security). Impossible to avoid going outside lol so most likely fine.
You’ll never be able to live your life if you never go out.
Yes, I know that. Some people may need to take extra precautions when going outside. The reason for my original comment is that “outside” does not equal “more private” in many circumstances.
Humans need sunlight and it helps to release dopamine and vitamin D. Important.
You could try jacking off
To porn that you have painted yourself ahead of time.
You ever search any torrent tracker for anything not very specific? 80% of the results are porn.
Paint me like one of your French girls, Jack
Buy a book with cash. Read the book.
The entertainment landscape in privacy seems pretty bleak, since you no longer own the movies you watch
It’s the other way around.
They have cameras in the bookstores with facial recognition
then don’t go to those bookstores with cameras 🤦
not all bookstores have cameras
I was being facetious to make a point. There is a limit to the amount of privacy that one can achieve while still residing within a modern society. As with all things, it’s a personal choice. Everyone has a limit up to which they are comfortable surrendering their privacy. You can be tracked and recorded even walking the streets in many cities, and in most retail stores. How far is one willing to go to be private?
deleted by creator
Poor point poorly made
Ok, I’ll give you that. But don’t you agree there are certain aspects of privacy one must forego to live in a modern society?
Who does?
deleted by creator
Never mind the security cameras, and the drones, and the smartphones, and the satellites…
deleted by creator
Where I live, there are security cameras all over the buildings and the lamposts and the traffic intersections and the parking lots, plus Ring/Nest doorbells everywhere. There are more cameras outside the buildings than inside. Everybody is carrying a smartphone and I see people taking pictures or video with them all the time.
Drones and satellites are really only outside.
So I don’t agree with your conclusion.
Where I live there are no cameras, so I agree with their conclusion.
Personally I haven’t really changed anything about my entertainment other than how I attain it. Torrented movies, shows, and books, cracked games, and ad+sponsor blocked YT via Piped mean I get all the same entertainment as ever if not more (plus I actually own it forever). The only thing I’ll admit I miss a bit is Reddit.
Board games with friends and family. My brother rotates hosting board game night with his friends and it’s great fun.
You can own movies by pirating them. same goes for games etc
But games will still have the built in invasive telemetry I think.
When people get games from e.g. fitgirl-repacks, do they play them offline? (just curious, I don’t play games)
Online features don’t work on pirated games in 99% cases (it says “connection error”, “failed to connect to insert the developer company name here servers” or something similar) but I’m afraid the telemetry still works.
You’re missing a pretty key fact; any good repack is going to disable everything trying to connect outwards. Otherwise the methods for pirating that content will be easier to detect and block.
It’s also really easy to just check for yourself when a program is phoning home. https://superuser.com/questions/99039/any-good-utility-to-track-outgoing-traffic-and-requests-from-win-pc
Hmm this is a good point.
You’d be surprised how often none of that is touched, and I really doubt any repackers are bothering to block any network calls if the original scene release didn’t. I’ve used some equivalent of OpenSnitch that prompts on all network requests that I haven’t explicitly allowed already for the past decade, and at least 90% of all games I downloaded during that time tried to phone home.
ALWAYS set firewall rules to block internet access to any software you pirate.
unshare -ncNot my problem.
False, a pirated game is still anti-libre software.
Pirate movies, shows, and music.
That and I play old games. SMB 2 rn.
Minetest in creative mode with Radio Free Fedi’s comfy channel playing in the background 🤌
Emulation is a great for offline gaming. You can also find some great FOSS games on flathub like srb2, srb2k and Mindustry. You can also get old books for free on Project Gutenberg and audiobooks on Librivox. In Germany (and other European countries) there is state financed tv which has free drmfree adfree and (relatively) privacy friendly streaming services. Newgrounds also is a treasure trove, especially for music. Also there is piracy
Cycling is amazing if there are good roads that aren’t much traveled around your area and check your local arthouse cinema, they even still might have paper tickets 😸
Anything that doesn’t require high tech still works really well. Don’t need to worry about tracking software that tries to sell you something with say a horse or two. And as a bonus you get lots of physical activity as well which is healthy.
Don’t need to worry about tracking software
Unless you do it near a device with gapps installed because these were proven to collect real-time microphone data (may not be the case anymore).
Go read at your local library, you don’t even need to check the books out if you read them there.
I just get a separate device with a fake identity and no personal data for games and proprietary software. Short videos are hosted by very invasive companies and don’t have any APIs or anything to make custom privacy-friendly frontends so it’s out of the question (fortunately imo because that things are addictive and can degrade a person in months). Idk much about movies because I’ve never used a paid movie service like Netflix but since they’re paid, privacy is very questionable there.
Unfortunately digital entertainment is very privacy-invasive overall. You can fix some of the privacy issues by the cost of convenience but some things will remain too invasive to be viable in many threat models.
Short videos are hosted by very invasive companies and don’t have any APIs or anything to make custom privacy-friendly frontends so it’s out of the question (fortunately imo because that things are addictive and can degrade a person in months).
If you view tiktok content thru ProxiTok, it fails to be addictive because things like autoplay and recommendations are disabled.
ProxiTok
Never heard of it but if a client with proper profiling mitigation exists, it’s awesome. Though (as I understand) since there’s pretty much no useful content on TikTok (unless it’s a shortened copy of a YouTube video or something), good recommendations are really needed to keep the user entertained so privacy-focused clients without total profiling kill the point of the app.
since there’s pretty much no useful content on TikTok
Just like any other major social platform, it has been used to pretty good effect in organizing protests against various issues. https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/nation/2023/12/14/starbucks-why-everyone-boycotting-controversies-explained/71885557007/
I don’t personally use it though. Too scared i wont be able to put it down.
Just like any other major social platform, it has been used to pretty good effect in organizing protests against various issues.
Yea but come on we all know that stupid memes and harmful propaganda of all sorts will be at least 95% of your feed so it will degrade you fast. It’s a nice platform for creation and advertising but not for consumption.
