In some cases you trade the purchase history information for the 2% cash back or whatever.

You can also use a service like privacy.com to get credit card numbers for online services for a modicum of privacy.

I had friends who were addicted to ingress even though they knew it was vacuuming up their usage data, years before Pokemon Go

More like they can learn what the corner of the bank looks like

Also Obligatory: “You can pay for something and still be the product”

Yes, and if you follow people you’re interested in. There is an account called https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows which posts themed lists of interesting accounts. I followed Cory Doctorow because I knew he was on Mastodon, and then followed a lot of people who posted interesting posts that came across my feed from people I didn’t follow yet. There’s no algorithm so you discover stuff more naturally as people you follow share stuff, and you decide to follow that too

Here is the original reporting https://www.404media.co/pokemon-go-players-have-unwittingly-trained-ai-to-navigate-the-world/

Every day that I play Pokemon Go, I’m aware that I’m making a Faustian bargain for motivation to take a walk in exchange for my privacy.

Yeah I don’t know why, I never really got twitter. But Mastodon was addictive for me. I always want to see what people are posting

Not right now, except that it’s going to follow the same cycle as everything else: good to users at first, good to shareholders at the end.

Build an account on Mastodon if you want to escape the cycle and tangle with different problems ;)

It really is nice there; people seem to like talking to each other about varied things, but it is smaller than Twitter so you may need to be on mastodon for some things and Bluesky for others you can’t get on mastodon

What if the whole survey is just a ploy for donations

Nothing, and it’s already run by web3 folk

Like making a datacenter so hungry it needs an obsolete nuclear plant, yeah. They should be building new nuclear for existing datacenters.

My sister was telling me she saves space by deleting attachments from texts, but on the screen to do that, you have to select each one individually… There is no select all button…

But if you buy iCloud, it magically resolves the issue and your phone has free space again. Talk about friction points and abusing their position as makers of the os

Can they do the same thing on signal?

Do you propose some alchemy that transforms carbon to another element? Remove carbon from the atmosphere and stop putting more up in there.

Too bad all that cool stuff is negligible compared to what actually makes a difference

Well you see, it’s not wrong if the right people do it ;)

Laws that protect but do not bind

It’s amazing how simple something like this can be and still be effective.

Machine learning is not that necessary for this use case 😉

The best guide isn’t written down: don’t be afraid to try a few instances until you find one you like!

Once you’re on Mastodon and following people, you’ll start to notice the servers and gravitate towards the ones you like.

I would advise against mastodon.social since it is the biggest and also has some problems with moderation. But some people like it, so maybe it is good enough also.

To choose a server, check out https://fedi.tips/which-server-should-i-join-how-do-i-find-out-more-about-a-server/

The fedi.tips account also posts a lot of helpful tips and themed lists of accounts to follow/discover so I recommend following them too!

For some reason I thought Nostr was started up by someone else and Dorsey just liked it