1. You can probably re-use a burner phone again and again
2. What do you need a phone for? Could it be replaced with other items? (Cameras, walkie-talkies, printed maps?)

Now everyone will know they aren’t show-ers

NDCNSNNTS2

It’s just ASCII art, I think. One could make this manually in any OS, or have it be generated by an ASCII Art generator

The gist is that marketing uses scare tactics, then consumers fall for the fear and believe that…

• they’re unsafe unless they have the products
• they’re safe if they have the products, and thus don’t need to use critical thinking skills or follow best practices

Are you saying the two sides are…

• Do literally everything possible for privacy, and
• No, some things are not necessary

?

Fun, sure, but not an experiment that would actually be meaningful.

The data from your phone’s microphone doesn’t magically appear in Google’s advertising servers. It would have to go through a lot of steps before it gets there, and one of the first steps is in your home (if you’re on WiFi). One can analyze the traffic/data that leaves their phone.

It’s good to be cautious, but worrying about your phone’s microphone is potentially like worrying about your windows while leaving your front door open.

Yet again, someone mistakes an anecdote for evidence. And evidence is also not the plural form of anecdote.

I’m sure we have people here who are tech-savvy enough to have actually examined the kinds of data that their phone is sharing.

If you have something like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, then yeah, those would be sending voice data back, and yeah, they could probably use it for advertising. But as far as I know, there is no evidence that phones are “always listening” and “always sending information back” when they’re idle.

Different meaning, though!

Mozilla FirefOS?

I agree on the point of security theatre. I think the tracking stuff provides more actual useful information, but I also imagine it’s more for reactionary investigations rather than pre-emptive protections.

I could be wrong, though.

I’d call it both. Hassling people for taking sunscreen or water onboard is probably mostly theatre. All of the tracking and scanning is probably what they actually use to find any naughty people.

Your comment reminded me of the time I tried to connect my new phone number to my accounts, but had trouble with Amazon and AirBnB because the last guy with the number forgot to update his accounts.

Amazon told me it’d have to delete the old account before allowing me to connect my new number.

That’s not even the worst one though.

AirBnB gave me no other option than to log in to the other guy’s account through nothing but the SMS recovery code (which came to my phone since I have his old number now), starting the account recovery process from within his account, and then removing the phone number from his account.

After logging out (and closing the private browsing window and turning off the VPN), I was then able to link the phone number to my account. (And yes, I tried everything else – from within my account, it told me “Sorry, this number is linked to another account”)

Never had a problem with AirBnB or the new phone number since then though!

Trying to stop kids from using drugs on school property is “stupid shit”?

It’s not surveilling children, it’s surveilling the byproducts of vaping.

…so kids can freely vape in school buildings during school hours?

That’s probably more commonly accepted. I defer to whatever my team is doing, but for my own files, I wouldn’t want things like UsStudentList or USStudentList which both look wrong to me.

USstudentList looks right to me, and if that’s wrong, I’m okay with being wrong! Haha

Camel case, but with a twist – if the next word is about to start after a capital letter, I’ll have it lower case.

topSecretFBIfile.txt for example

people share phone numbers to people they personally know.

This is about Signal having the phone numbers. I don’t think anybody “personally knows” Signal…

Yup. My bank was even “translating” passwords to PINs behind the scene specifically so your password for the website would be the same as your password on the telephone.