A few months ago, I did a similar assessment where I categorized potential threats in the following manner.

Category 1 - financial impact

A criminal might gain access to my account, steal my money or make online purchases in my name. The impact is potentially great, but the probability is low. Overall risk is medium. Using good online practices helps mitigate the risk.

Category 2 - social impact

I may carelessly share personal information online and coworkers, friends or family may find out something they aren’t supposed to. The impact is medium to high, but the probability is very low. Overall risk is low. Not sharing personal information online helps mitigate the risk. Besides, I don’t even use Facebook, Xitter and other modern online trash. I do share stuff on Lemmy, but I try to keep my personal details out of it. Also, I don’t use my real name here, so a random family members probably aren’t going to stumble upon this account without first putting in some serious snooping effort.

Category 3 - matters of principle

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and all the other large companies are constantly trying to learn as much as possible. The potential harm is low, but the probability is very high. Overall risk is still low. I’m using many techniques to limit the amount of information professional snoopers might get their hands on.

So, category 1 is obviously the highest priority, and that’s where I put most of my effort. Category 3 is nice to have, but screwing up here isn’t going the be the end of the world. If you want to know more about the actual mitigation methods, don’t be afraid to ask.

No problem, we’ll just start calling him “the general secretary who must not be named”.

When looking at Fox, CNN or NY times, the cookie count looks realistic, but nothing else does. I refuse to believe these sites don’t use any other methods.

Any hardware that couples with a mobile app is potentially a bad idea. Eventually, the company will stop developing that app, which means you just have to use that device without the mobile app. If it’s an RC car without a controller, you’re left with e-waste. If it’s an electric toothbrush, you can probably still use it, but with fewer features than before. Either way, it’s bad news for the user.

I follow the official upgrade method. Can’t be bothered to mess around with anything more complicated than that. Besides, the devs probably understand the system better than I do, so there has to be a reason why that is the preferred way.

I wish my washing machine had an ethernet port so that I could SSH into it.

Me too. Read the title, looked at the picture and concluded that some people have really fancy washing machines. 😃

KaOS exists too, so it was a matter of time.

It also apples to mushrooms. All mushrooms are edible, some more than once.

In what way? There are tech savvy people on the team, so obviously many of them are well aware of the privacy concerns. Besides, they don’t live in a vacuum, so they see the same posts and videos we do.

Probably they just noticed that now is the right time to talk about this.

Nah, just switched to searx for a day, and came back once DDG was up again.

That capslock idea was pretty good. Next time I’ll start with that to see if all hope is lost.

And even if you did manage to do something 2 years ago, you can’t remember how to do it today. Do you really want up go down that same rabbit hole again? Spending 5 minutes reading stuff and running a single command takes a lot more time than 15 mouse clicks.

Relevant XKCD