I hate you. How do I unsee that now?

I love you brother…

“galactic balls” - I am so going to use this phrase…

Linkedin is Facebook with a necktie and a blazer on.

Agree? (Lol)

Privacy is not binary, it is a spectrum.

You have no fucking idea what a beautiful thing you just wrote.

Not an email service per se, but rather an email-forwarding service, and offers unlimited duck [dot] com aliases with their browser extension and/or mobile app.

I have used their email forwarding service for a while (it is quite decent) before moving over to Firefox Relay.

And if you wsnt a FOSS option for unlimited email aliases - Duckduckgo is a good option.

Thanks for pointing it out. Edited the title.

Does your medical insurance advocate on your behalf, can you send them the bill yourself for them to deal with?

They generally do. In fact the previous incident I mentioned about in my post - the provider said they sent the claim to my insurance, while in reality they did not. My insurance stepped in at that time (because the bill explicitly mentioned “claimed to XYZ insurance”, and that was obviously a lie) - and they sorted it out with the provider (basically the provider admitting that some intern screwed it up and they had to actually submit the claim). I still left that provider.

This time it’s different - because the provider has not yet submitted the claim and are is not hiding it either. They are just ignoring my requests to first claim then bill.

Not sure if my insurance has anything to do here.

Correct, but only if you can make the European Union to agree to slash the value of 1 Euro from $1.09 as of now, to $0.36 ( what you proposed) - and then get every other currency in the world to follow suit.

Good luck with that.

It’s an interesting idea, but the caveat here will be to do this for all currencies in the world, otherwise the concept of foreign exchange rates would get fucked up.

One of the primary parameters for determining exchange rate between two currencies is to first determine how much the same service/product/lifestyle cost in those two currencies.

Unless you “adjust” both the currencies (and in turn, all the currencies in the world), one currency (or country) would spiral into an economic abyss.

They were sold to ZippoApps, who specializes in adding crapware to apps.

What else would we expect anyway…

To provide “personal recommendation”, an App would most likely need to profile you, i.e. track your viewing habits and trends, and forecast your areas of interests.

IMO this goes directly against the concept of privacy.

On the brighter side, I think Freetube (local, on windows) and LibreTube (on Android, but needs a piped account) can provide personalized video suggestions, but you yourself should check them out.

Whenever I hear this argument

“Most people are not interesting enough to profile, so they don’t need this XYZ privacy tool…”

I always have this ready as a counter argument

"Only a stupid person would not care about pickpockets just because his wallet does not have much cash - a pickpocket will not ask you how much cash you have before picking your wallet, and even if your wallet turns up to be empty, the pickpocket is not going to be a gentleman and return that to you.

Tracking/profiling for Ads on the internet happen en masse; you are just one of a million data points that build a profile - it doesn’t care whether you as an individual are interesting or not".

When will the search function in Jerboa “search everything, not just communities” ? I am waiting for that day…

That wins material too, but why take the Rook by playing Nb6+ when you can win the Queen by Nf6+ ?

Nxf6+ wins the black Queen.

and every single one of my friends created accounts and hopped on to chat rooms

FOMO and Privacy usually do not mix well. Unless you can come out of “All my friends are doing it, so it must be cool” mindset, you will find it difficult to appreciate privacy.

You yourself said

and that social life also includes the use of social media apps

Note the keyword “includes”. So Social Life is not JUST social media apps. As someone mentioned already, dating starts best with face to face interactions.

Have you tried the good old phone number exchange, may be to try out texting?

Lastly, if someone wants to understand the real me based on my Instagram profile and activities - I would stay away from that person. YMMV.

However, I would probably trust a provider more if there has been an actual case where police tried getting the logs and the VPN provider gave them nothing

That literally is what happened with Mullvad.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/mullvad-vpn-hit-with-search-warrant-in-attempted-police-raid

Yeah I agree. Let them die alone, thinking about Alien abduction and crop circles.

“Stilted”?

You sir, are one of those fucking amazing people who profusely apologize for not being a native English speaker and then blurt out 37 paragraphs of perfect English.

You have nothing to be ashamed of - your English is better than a lot of them native speakers ! And always remember this :

“You are speaking English because that is the only language you know; I am speaking English because that is the only language you know. We are not the same.”

And as to your original question - if I ever ask them “what evidence did you see which proves X happens?”, I have almost always been hit with the reply, “Oh yeah? What proof do you have that says X does not happen???”. And then I tell them the anecdote of the Invisible Dragon by Carl Sagan. Look it up if this is new to you, and for a more formal treatment, check out Karl Popper’s theory of Falsifiability.

I have personally converted at least one conspiracy theorist to being an Agnostic. So I know it works. Try them out, it’s fun.

And I also am not a native English speaker to be honest :-)