There’s nothing that can express my disdain for Google’s reCaptcha.

😒 We’re training its AI models 😒 It’s free labor for Google 😒 Sometimes it wants the corner of an object, sometimes it doesn’t 😒 Wildly inconsistent 😒 Always blurry and hard to see 😒 Seemingly endless 😒 It’s the robot asking us humans if we’re the robots

Nice, that’s my screenshot (but not my post). Dope to see it surface again. 🤘

Feel free to pop them into the Markdown file, or send em my way.

Oof, here we go:

• 📊 OptikAnalytics: Privacy-respecting Google Analytics alternative
• 🏀 InThePaintCrew: Basketball blog
• 📱 SwapMyOS: GrapheneOS installation services
• 🍪 CookieSlayers: A directory of products, services, and companies that don’t use third-party tracking cookies
• ✲ OpenSourcely: Forum-style news aggregator about open source
• 📆 No-Code Calendar: The no-code community’s event calendar
• 🌇 LifeViaChicago: Chicago photography and lifestyle
• 👕 WindyCityBay: Making clothes, shoes, and other items more sustainable
• 🙈 idcaboutprivacy: A running list of real-life situations that show how privacy is foundational
• 🔖 Hiram’s Digishop: Digital products for a better web

Sounds like it. It happens with other Google services too. Someone could share a GDoc to your non-Gmail email, but if that non-Gmail email isn’t a Google account, then you won’t be able to access the doc/comments/whatever else (depending on the doc permissions, of course).

I suppose “harm” can be subjective in this context, and there are already some good replies here.

One more thing to add to the list that I’d consider harmful in creating a Gmail account is all of the privacy issues that come with having a Gmail account.

Out of respect for my recipients and myself, I wouldn’t want all of our emails being read.

We can go down the rabbit hole of “Email is inherently insecure anyways,” but that’s a separate discussion.

Nice to see this as a standard, thanks. Edited to reflect this.

Thoughts and takeaways, plus 3 viable solutions:

Thoughts

1️⃣ I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Enshittification might be a good thing. Here’s why

I don’t “like” that things have gotten this bad, but I do like that the worse things get, the more we can collectively organize and pressure reform to fix these things.

2️⃣ These tests are usually run on relatively small subsets of the user base. Remember when they rolled out hiding likes? That was rolled out periodically as well.

They typically also run different types of user bases. They already know the hardcore “influencers” and people who have built a public following will never leave the platform, since they’re too invested already, and are the people/publications that contribute the most to network effects. I.e., you’re on there because they’re on there.

3️⃣ Remember when Tim Kendall (former executive at Facebook) says that they talked about Zuckerberg having ultimate control over these 3 distinct goals?

1. Engagement: Drive up your usage. Keep you scrolling, liking, commenting, and remaining active on the platform.
2. Growth: Encouraging you to keep coming back and inviting your friends, and getting them to invite their friends, and so on.
3. Advertising: Make sure that as growth and engagement are happening, advertising revenue is maximized.

That’s what’s happening here—this is dial #3 being turned up.

Solutions

1. The most obvious: Delete your account

I know, I know—network effects are tough to break.

Tell your friends and family to delete theirs. Make yourself unreachable on Facebook-owned platforms.

Most people are posting less as traditional posts, and more as stories. If stories is your thing, Signal has stories. This is a really secure, private, and still convenient way to share whatever you want throughout the day.

If your favorite restaurant changes your dish’s recipe, you’d prolly stop going, right? Well, that recipe’s been changing, and we continue to put up with it despite an increasingly worse product.

2. For those looking for an alternative: Use Pixelfed

It doesn’t have nearly the same type of content or user base size that Instagram does. But the same way that we built Facebook little by little, the same can be done for healthier alternative platforms.

This might also help your reduction in using social media, if you’re looking for that.

3. For those who can’t/will never leave Instagram: Use an open source native mobile app (Android-specific)

If you have an Android-based mobile operating system, there are apps like MyInsta and Instander that give you a native Instagram experience while blocking all of the ads.

They also have app-specific settings that allow you to customize your Instagram experience even further, such as (but limited to):

• Downloading photos/reels/entire carousels
• Reduces data sent to Instagram (analytics, ads, and other requests)
• Ghost mode
• Block reels, posts, stories, explore, comments, or whatever else
• Tons more

I run a basketball media outlet (InThePaintCrew) and a lifestyle/photography page (LifeViaChicago), and being able to modify the experience to remove the noise/clutter when a native Instagram app is needed is helpful.

Lol it was the other way around… I actually added a word instead. Fixed

now.

Fixed it, thanks for flagging

Nice, thanks. Your site is really clean. Dig it.

Glad you like it.

And yeah, it’s foundational. We tolerate things digitally that we’d never tolerate in person.

Once I start connecting and analogizing digital to physical concepts in a conversation, it appears to “click” in their heads and they end up saying something along the lines of, “You’re right. It makes sense.”

Hence this project. I hope people can use this website and link it to people who need it to understand how this affects us all—now, not in the future.

Not the first time facial recognition tech has been misused, and certainly won’t be the last. The UK in particular has caught a lotta flak around this.

We seem to have a hard time connecting the digital world to the physical world and realizing just how interwoven they are at this point.

Therefore, I made an open source website called idcaboutprivacy to demonstrate the importance—and dangers—of tech like this.

It’s a list of news articles that demonstrate real-life situations where people are impacted.

If you wanna contribute to the project, please do. I made it simple enough to where you don’t need to know Git or anything advanced to contribute to it. (I don’t even really know Git.)

Yep. Hence why we need to remake the internet.

That’s nice of you, but it appears that the ad-supported business model doesn’t work. It just results in enshittification and surveillance.

“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”

Jaron Lanier: How we need to remake the internet

We gonna see a GoldeneOS?

Cases like these are why this extension exists: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/don-t-fuck-with-paste/

Nonprofit news organizations. The Markup has a very public-interest technology approach, and is most well-known for it’s Blacklight tool.

Don’t worry, it’s not complicated at all. A little inconvenient maybe, but that’s always the trade-off when it comes to privacy and security.

Here are the two most convenient ways that I can think of on each OS.

iOS: Bookmark the frontend URL. When you get sent a link, pop open the page and paste the TikTok URL.

Android: Get Firefox and set it as your default browser. Install the LibRedirect add-on (browser extension). Whenever you get sent a URL, just tap it and it’ll automatically get redirected to the privacy-friendly frontend.

Only time will tell.

I know this one also went down recently for Instagram: proxigram.privacyfrontends.repl.co

But I’m not sure if it was an Instagram change that did it, or Replit took it down or what.