True. But it’s still up to us whether to use those “memory enhancements” on other, non-consenting people.

I think it’s way too precise and permanent to compare to human memory.

Even if it’s private and independent, I would feel uneasy with that. I might want to store and analyze the recordings of my life - but would people that I caught on camera want the same?..

I don’t think this is a good idea still. First - the very fact that you bought crypto can be suspicious. Second - then your anonymity depends on the assumption that Monero wouldn’t have flaws found in it later, which is just not a good approach with any technology, no matter how well-regarded. And third, most mundane - introduces yet another place from where your ID can leak.

using it purely for tunneling without detection by my ISP. Anonymity would be more of a bonus.

I feel like people like you and me end up helping people who actually need anonymity - by creating a larger crowd :)

can’t go online if your webcam is off

I think spoofing a webcam should be pretty easy.

I wonder if Tor and I2P’s other hops could eventually be obfuscated like bridges are now, so that a network could entirely exist within plain sight without being as blatant.

…Yes, I just said that.

The comments below say “local transit app”, but I don’t get it - those could be proprietary and pretty invasive. So instead, I use the “undesired” maps in the browser. Both for when public transit arrives and for more up-to-date information on businesses.

Doesn’t seem to work on my phone, even thouvgh I have given it the permissions it asked…

First - I’m not sure Sealed Sender would help against the server being changed to be actively malicious and trying to build social graphs. Second - even metadata concerns aside, a centralized system is just not resilient. Proposals like Chat Control are A LOT more easily enforceable with them than with tiny selfhosted servers.

I checked that (together with the clearnet link) a few times recently, got a nondescript error like “sorry something went wrong” every time.

TBH I feel like so many project leaders are wackos that I don’t even judge the products by those, just by things they do. I still have hope in Simplex, but there were a couple of red flags, such as content scanning proposals, including clientside. Sure, it can probably be relatively easily forked to remove that specific thing, or you can choose the servers that don’t do that, but it’s still alarming that they try.

Conversations is a good client for mobile. Pretty much on par with Whatsapp in ease of use.

I prefer it because of resilience. A centralized service can be weakened, geoblocked or shut down by proposals like Chat Control. Decentralized protocols are much safer in such an environment, especially if there is variety in clients and servers.

Most of the mainstream social media is blocked where I am. Good news: a huge part of even uneducated population does indeed learn to evade censorship. Bad news: they tend use the most easily-accessible services, which are sketchy, like reselling the users’ IPs as residential proxies.

They can’t force ISPs to block all of the VPN protocols in general

They very much can, I’ve seen it happen last year. The main protocols are VERY easily recognizable by DPI. However, there are obfuscation methods that can get through even Chinese Firewall, and they’re constantly improving.