I was wondering if there are platforms similar to Patreon or Ko-fi but they allow you to donate to creators in Monero or at least other cryptocurrencies? I want to rely less on Paypal and Stripe, especially when we have to play by their rules and recently, they have been ridiculous. I also want to give people a more private option if they wish to provide me monthly support. I know I can't cut those two payment processors out altogether because almost everyone uses them, but I am hoping I can find something similar so cut the reliance on them.

Google is quietly rolling out its Gemini AI tool as the default assistant on Android, even on devices where users never explicitly enabled it. In many cases, Gemini replaces Google Assistant by default, making it increasingly challenging to disable fully.

This deep integration means Gemini can still be active in the background, accessing your apps, system features, and personal info.

Here's what Gemini can access:

Gmail 
Google Calendar 
Google Drive & Docs 
Maps, Keep, Tasks
Messages, Phone, and even WhatsApp

Even more concerning:

Your data is used to train Google’s AI.
Human reviewers may see your chats.
Data can be shared with 3rd parties.
As of July 2025, Gemini stays connected to apps even when activity tracking is turned off.

🛑 You can’t fully disable Gemini, but you can limit it:

How to limit Gemini on Android:

Turn off activity tracking
Revoke permissions
Uninstall it (if possible)

Further options, if you’re privacy-conscious:

Reduce your reliance on Google services or fully de-Google
Consider a privacy-first OS like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS

⚠️ Google is making Gemini the default assistant for all Android devices by the end of 2025.

Choose privacy over AI surveillance.

If you want tools that respect your data, ensure you use encrypted email, a private calendar, and a secure cloud, with no AI training or human review.

I am trying to get rayhunter, but I am confused about a few things. What kind of hardware may be used? The Orbic RC400L advertises itself as being for Verizon network only, which I am not going to use. Does the rayhunter software allow it to work on arbitrary networks?

Furthermore, I don't see a good way to acquire such a device. They aren't sold locally as far as I can tell. On amazon they are available, though expensive. However, that would mean losing any form of privacy. I don't need it to be completely anonymous—someone looking at the location could probably see home and work easily enough—but better than amazon would be much preferred.

Are there any alternate devices that are known to work well in Canada? I will be keeping the device powered off most of the time anyways, (so as to hide my location) but it must be reliable when I need it.

EDIT: eSIM support is a plus, but not required

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/33213275

I now reside in Germany and my current employer pays 50% of this so called Deutschland-Job-Ticket. There is no physical card but travel information you download to an android wallet, but apparently google wallet is the only available option. See the picture:

Google is a company I don’t trust with my data, neither do I expect your regular public transportation authority employee to care about his privacy (he looked at me as I was asking if 2 + 2 equal 4). I am not aware of non google based wallets where I can download the travel information.

I tried some f-droid and droidify options but it turns out they’re pure crap.

The site: https://abo.ride-ticketing.de/app/ I log in with my username and password, get my travel information and on the bottom the picture I uploaded.

Any workarounds?

This being Germany, shouldn’t there be an alternative to those who refuse google? Don’t I have that right as a consumer?

Another question: I screenshot my logged in session on the link I provided where you see my qr code and my billing data. The public transportation employee told me that’s not allowed (wtf?). Can anyone here provide a rationale?

More and more, i see people wearing these 'smart' glasses as sunglasses which i find totally creepy and intrusive. Living in the EU, i am wondering how these glasses are even 'allowed' in public or may even be sold here. It becomes harder to avoid cause they become so hard to identify. How to deal with this? To what extend is this allowed? (cause apparently it is some way)

Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.

I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.

My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows: Locally, I want to make sure my IPs aren’t connected to public accounts. I don’t say anything online that can put me in jail for the most part, but I don’t trust that this will always be the case. I also would appreciate being a bit separated from the local internet. Elsewhere, I also don’t want my traffic to be monitored or my accounts to be tied back to my personal identity. For example, I don’t want to land in Dubai and to have my Steam account permanently affected by having “Spec Ops the Line” (banned game there) in my account (silly thing to worry about, but this is one tiny example out of many small issues that pile up). Plus, a lot of the internet is not accessible from these places, and I don’t like that, regardless of whether or not I want to peruse inaccessible internet stuff from there.

This has come with some serious downsides (online services are more expensive in Europe, where I have historically exited from), but it was/is worth the cost for me. Ironic that many VPN users seem to be trying to connect in the opposite direction than me (out of rich countries rather than in).

I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.

Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?

I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.

There is this carrier I stumbled upon called Cape, calls itself America's privacy first carrier.

It claims to offer privacy and security and to only store necessary information.

We don’t collect your name, social security number, address, or other personal information. Any data we do receive (like call logs) is deleted after 60 days.

We secure your account against SIM swaps—attacks to steal your phone number and access your accounts—with modern cryptography protocols.

Our proprietary signaling protection blocks attempts by bad actors to intercept calls and SMS via outdated signaling protocols like SS7.

Voicemails can hold sensitive information like 2FA codes. Cape encrypts your voicemails so only you have access to them.

We don’t collect your name or billing address at checkout, and Cape never sees your credit card details.

Anonymous sign-up

They are also partnered with Proton

Here is a detailed list of what data they collect

They are currently offering a $1.50 trial for one month.

The CEO, John Doyle, was a communications specialist in the U.S. Army and worked for Palantir.

Thoughts?

TLDR: Drug dealers in Catalonia have started to adopt GrapheneOS en masse leading to Catalan police suspecting anyone with a Google Pixel is a drug dealer

New eSIM vulnerabilities in Kigen eUICC cards expose billions of IoT devices to potential cyberattacks.

The issue with Google's personalised search results is, imo:

1. Not only is it not opt-in, but you can't even opt out of it. Personalised search results should be opt-in and disabled by default.
2. The data kept on you is used to sell you ads
3. The data kept on you will be handed over to state entities fairly easily

Given those three problems, how feasible would it be to self-host a search engine that personalises your results to show you things that are more relevant to you? Avoiding issues 1 & 2 as you're self-hosting so presumably you have made the decisions around those two things. And issue 3 is improved as you can host it off-shore if you are concerned about your domestic state, and if you are legally compelled to hand over data, you can make the personal choice about whether or not to take the hit of the consequences of refusing, rather than with a big company who will obviously immediately comply and not attempt to fight it even on legal grounds.

A basic use-case example is, say you're a programmer and you look up ruby, you would want to get the first result as the programming language's website rather than the wikipedia page for the gemstone. You could just make the search query ruby programming language on any privacy-respecting search engine, but it's just a bit of QoL improvement to not have to think about the different ways an ambiguous search query like that could be interpreted.

I'm picking up a new Google Pixel and want to put GrapheneOS on it. Heard about Graphene since before their splits at CopperHead, but I havent had the chance the try the OS out. So I searched around and GrapheneOS allowed Google Play sandbox.

Does this function similar to a "Private Space" on newer Android or "Secure Folder" on Samsung? So I can enjoy the Graphene stuff but whenever I need Google Play specific apps, I use the sandbox environment?

Mostly, I will be using bank apps under the sandbox. Are there problems with OTP in this environment? In Samsung's Secure Folder, my bank app will have problems sending OTP unless I send it outside, i.e. out of Secure Folder.

One downside is that i'll have no more passkeys. The vault syncing, i can do via SyncThing.

Link to the list of extensions at the end of the article

I know there are plenty of software missing from here. This is just a fun infographic I made, no need to take it seriously :)

So Freetube got hit with 403 errors again. I tried to open a video in the embedded player and I keep getting hit with them demanding I log into to prove I am not a bot. Is anyone else getting hit with this?

I'm trying to migrate off gmail and apple services and ended up getting a domain and going to proton and using simplelogin for making aliases. But now I'm looking at proton pass, which comes free with my plan and lets me create aliases and wondering why I did that.

Ideally, I want nobody to have my main email address. everything gets an alias and dumps into the main. if the main address is found out, I just kill it and get another and point all the aliases to that. if an alias gets spammy or sold off to obnoxious marketing boobs, I kill the alias and create a new one.

I got started with migrating a few things over today into the aliases I had on my domain with simplelogin. I started to wonder what would happen if I replied to any of these and unlike apple hide-my-mail, it looks like these expose my actual address, unless I go through the trouble of going to simplelogin and getting an reverse alias link through them, which is an annoying pain in the ass. looking to see if there was any integration like apple's icloud had, I find proton pass is included in my mail plus plan and lets me do what simplelogin already was doing, complete with my domain being in the alias address!

So my question is why did I set up two seperate services for this? can I reply to incoming emails from the aliases created in proton pass without them revealing my address?

I have needed to get away from google for a while and am finally getting off my ass to do it, but apple hide my email was so simple to use whereas proton seems to have these weird oversights.

I have a normal Googled Android phone and tinkered with a bunch of settings so that only what I can't uninstall or disable remains on it.

If I run a vpn on it then the Googled OS may still know my location(from wifi and bluethooth scanning that it may be doing nonstop) and browser searches.

In that case, would the vpn only mask my activity from my internet service provider?

Thanks in advance

PS: This is a locked phone and I understand that it's spyware but I can't afford an unlocked one yet thanks

So the UK is going to start requiring IDs to view adult content. I'm in the US, but I've got a friend in the UK who obviously doesn't want to deal with this.

I suggested he use a VPN, but he's apparently heard they sell your personal data. Can anyone recommend a reliable VPN that collects as little data as possible?

ETA: thanks for the suggestions, everyone! I'm gonna research em and pass the info along. :)

What do y'all recommend?

I know that stock Android itself is spyware.

What tips about setting up my stock Android phone would you give me? It's not factory unlocked so I'm sticking with Google Android.

Things I've done:

• Stopped and disabled all apps that I don't use or need.
• Replaced all apps that I can with FOSS alternatives from github using Obtainium.
• Not installed things that I can just check on my laptop like email.

Is there anything else that I can do? Thanks in advance

Edit I've also:

• Changed my DNS to Mullvad DNS
• Restricted app permissions to only what they need
• Not signed into the phone. I don't even have Gmail account.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/20989376

Where Soatok goes over why checklists are meaningless when trying to figure out if something is private or just for comparisons in general.