It really isn’t that complicated. All these major EU services adhering to the oh-so-sacred GDPR doesn’t mean or guarantee anything in the grand scheme of things for as long as they run their services with Google Ad Services, AWS, Cloudflare, etc…

No matter how many times GDPR violations have been paid for, these services aren’t exactly punished for doing what they do when they pay their dues in pennies.

Even if they don’t use or embed tracking into their services like “promised” (which we don’t even know or can confirm since most of them are closed-source), they’re still under EU jurisdiction, any request for data from the service’s respective origin EU country HAS to be fulfilled and they can just make up any pretense (e.g. “think of the children!!” and like we see there linked in the article about “Enhanced Border Security Partnership”). They’ll also gladly incorporate literal spyware (Pegasus), with the EU’s full approval.

So yes, blindly switching from US to EU services, believing that EU services are so great because muh GDPR, doesn’t actually achieve “more privacy”, it is simply nationalist delusion, you can read every single article linked to see why.

Regardless of which service it is, it shouldn’t be selected on national lines (this “Buy European”/“Use European” crutch is reactionary nationalist bs), but rather on pragmatic terms: F/LOSS. Because even European services and legislation don’t have your best interests in mind:

• The EU Funds Surveillance Around the World: Here’s What Must be Done About it
• AI mass surveillance at Paris Olympics – a legal scholar on the security boon and privacy nightmare
• Investigation of the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware
• Female health apps aren’t doing enough to protect sensitive data, study says
• 20 Biggest GDPR Fines of All Time

Border-transcending, fully transparent and easily accessible and auditable F/LOSS software is what should be strived for.

oh… yeah okay I completely fell for it 🤦‍♂️… Honestly to me, the line between sarcasm/memeposts and realposts nowadays are so thin, to the point of making me dense as fuck…

Sorry, I’ll carry along.

Epresso machines. washing machines, fridges, freezers, TV’s, who the fuck connects that shit to the internet.

TVs make sense… other appliances, not so much. Your energy is best spent on companies for peddling IoT into things that don’t need the “I” in IoT.

I’ve decided I am going to de-auth the espresso machine for a few days, so they cant have coffee before work. That has got to be the worst way to teach privacy to common people. What this will end up doing is just turn you from a smug know-it-all to a smug script kiddie asshole, and as for the recipient, they’d just end up getting their “faulty” appliance replaced at most.

Does it kill you to just raise awareness about privacy in a less intrusive way or what? If that’s a bougie you’re disrupting then forget anything I said, otherwise this is silly as hell.

edit: I can’t tell what’s real or what’s a meme anymore…

have been through something similar. What helped for me is to try to figure out your threat profile first… Because jumping straight into total lockdown mode on everything and frantically uninstalling anything that so much has any ties with GAFAM not only doesn’t actually help, it can take a toll on your mental health…

It’s also sometimes a good idea to “blend in” and have a few undesirable software (that don’t do tracking), just a thought.

If that doesn’t help, and you’re sure that your threat profile is clear as day, there’s also the option of getting a secondary phone or laptop (if you can afford it) and install all the unwanted/non-FOSS software there.