@cobweb
I don’t think a threat model drives this. It’s a conflict of social interest. It’s an economic move not an infosec move. I boycott the #MACFANG/ #CAGEMAFIA empire. Thus, I do whatever is within my power to ensure they don’t profit from my data.

As you say, defederating from them does not reduce their data access. But it still undermines the creation of data they feed on. Isolate them & ppl will leave.
@Viss @film_girl

@vfrmedia @dosch Preachin’ to the choir. I boycott #MACFANG, avoid Twitter, deGoogled my outdated smartphone which has no SMS chip & only FOSS apps, refuse to send #email. Sounds like a great talk but I’m already damn near living in a cave. So, I don’t see how I could benefit from that seminar. I know a lot of people who need that education, but those are precisely the people who would not go.

Of my four #lesserOfEvil #polls, this one shows there’s still a lot of work to do in terms of informing the public about #GAFAM/ #MACFANG wrongdoing.

As someone who tracks dirt on these companies, #Google is clearly the lesser of evils and it’s not even close.

I suspect the bad wording in the poll was mention of “surveillance advertiser”. All three are surveillance advertisers, but much of MS’s wrongdoing is outside of the advertising scope. Some ppl voted MS on the basis of less snooping.

Why? I’m often asked if I live in a cave upon revealing that I #boycott #MACFANG (#Microsoft, #Amazon, #Cloudflare, #Facebook, #Apple, #Netflix, #Google), that I will not email anyone whose accts traverse those assets or even share an email address with them, that I boycott all mobile phone services & most banks. Maybe I should find a cave.

Feature request to all ESPs¹— Please give me an account that refuses to connect to #MACFANG entities. E.g. If I send a msg to bob@<some vanity domain that leads to Outlook.com>, please bounce the msg back to me with an error. My settings should have a list of tickboxes for surveillance advertisers so I can control which ones to trust. 1. ESP: #email service provider

@aral @RLetot @aral The #MACFANG tech giants are not all equally evil, and sometimes you may have to favor one over another if you can’t boycott them all, but someone who says MS is less evil than Google & Facebook doesn’t have the big picture. I have an idea where that comes from though.

Some ppl might recall pre-Snowden days when there was speculation about echelon, there was a Swiss service called #supervillainizer which generated email noise to flood snoops w/false leads. Might that be a strategy in the hunt for #abortion patients? People who are sure to never need an abortion could generate msgs that leads #MACFANG AIs to falsely flag decoys.

@NatCor @MagicLike @volpeon @danarel @StartpageSearch @dch Thanks for digging into that. It would certainly be a bug and an injustice if losing access to email would then force Wire account persistence. I don’t use #MACFANG tech giants for email & so even my normal accts often suddenly fall off the face of the planet, in which case my only workaround would be to travel to Europe and make a GDPR /right to be forgotten/ request.

It’s amazing how hard-assed disciplined I am about boycotting #MACFANG corps, yet if there is a pile of cookies containing chocolate in my kitchen there is no hope for them lasting the day. Cookies are like crack to me the way #Amazon is like crack to most normies.

This is how I check whether an #email address is hosted by a #MACFANG tech giant privacy abuser: “torsocks dig @8.8.8.8 -t mx -q "$domain" +noclass +nocomments +nostats +short +tcp +nosearch” I thought that was sufficient, but someone with an email domain that passes that test has “Outlook.com” in the “Received:” headers of a msg they sent me. How can my test be improved?

@xpil @joeligj12 My contact list is entirely out of reach from all #MACFANG entities. The problem is not me, but all the normies who put my info in their Outlook & Google platforms. What can i do about that? At one point I gave each contact a unique forwarding address, so Google could not use email address as a key to link my profile in different friend’s DBs together but it may be futile.

Before giving a business, gov, or NGO an email address, I first check whether they have #MACFANG in the loop.

E.g. check that an MX lookup on their domain is not Google, MS, Yahoo, etc. (note vis-a-vis situations where doing the check is inconvenient are excluded from this survey):

@seachaint @shaen Another thing: normies are lazy as fuck. This is why privacy abusers will always thrive. We’ll never win over enough ppl to starve #MACFANG tech giants. The goal is to enlighten enough normies to mitigate privacy seekers from being such a small minority that we are trivially marginalized. So it makes sense to press on w/coaching as many users as possible to become streetwise.

@dpwiz @mxtthxw@mastodon.online @FediFollows @switchingsoftware if "pack your stuff" & "walk away" is a metaphor for boycott #Cloudflare, that's indeed what I do. I boycott all of #MACFANG. But this is not about me; it's about #switchingSoftware, who is betraying their readers by lying to them about the openness of the #Cloudflare site that they endorse & by concealing the pitfalls which directly contradicts the #SWISO mission.

@greenpete@fosstodon.org #MACFANG is a much needed expansion of #GAFAM, to group these tech giants: #Microsoft #Amazon #CloudFlare #Facebook #Apple #Netflix #Google

@mur2501 @strawberryfieldsforever@koyu.space when they violate their own privacy policy, that's not breaking national laws; it's violating the contract. Google is more transparent & does this less than other #MACFANG corps.

@mur2501 @strawberryfieldsforever@koyu.space #Google doesn't conceal that either.. it's right in their ToS that they can mine your email. If you look at gratis non- #MACFANG email services, inbox sizes are tiny compared to what Google offers. Google is happy to store on their servers as much email as you can get because that data has value.

@greenpete@fosstodon.org The fault lies with the patrons. These #MACFANG companies will never redeem themselves, so these are permanent boycotts. These companies will outlive me so I will boycott them my whole life.

@Truck #Searx is good at what it does, and services that deploy searx instances are the next best option for users who are too novice for Ss. I'm not on the ball about the various searx version differences, but one great thing about searx is the use of scraped results, which avoids financing #MACFANG. By contrast, #DDG & #Startpage both pay MACFANG entities for index access (not good).

@pluralistic
We developed (#)FediFlyers featuring #Peertube, partly for this reason. These tech behemoths are simply out of control.

All #MACFANG of them.