Depending on your situation, most of your issues can be avoided by not owning a smartphone. It's extreme (by today's standards, at least), but it does work. I ditched my smartphone back in 2017 for a cheap flip phone. I can find spare parts on eBay easily. My car is older, so there is no SaaS crap in it. If I need to keep in touch with someone, we can use SMS, call each other or meet in real life. I use a Linux laptop for banking/browsing the web and I keep a physical GPS in my car in case of emergency.

and I agree with you. Privacy is pretty much gone already.

You will own nothing and you will be happy

If the companies and our government have their way, then yes, they will be able to monitor our every move and make sure we rent everything and own nothing.

This runs against the grain of the Constitution of the United States, but our Federalist Society SCOTUS jurists have been gutting the fourth and fifth amendments long before the Dobbs decision triggered a public hue and cry.

And it's going to be up to us to regard censorship as damage and route around it. Essentially, there are repair shops that can fix your iPhone for you even if they're not authorized and will even replace proprietary bolts with standard ones. Eventually right-to-repair will be established by courts if not legislators, state-by-state if not federally.

There are too many complexities in the system to lock us down permanently into their walled gardens, but they will try until we respond with [redacted] until ashes cloud the skys.

3. I'm guessing that Google apps would be problematic. Except those apps, I didn't have any compatibility issues, on Custom ROMs. Especially GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, LineageOS, and /e/OS.

4. On a different user, I installed banking app that would usually prevent you from using it. No problems to use the app whatsoever.

Seriously watch this video posted here: https://lemmy.world/post/2126185

If Yann is correct about how AI will work in the VERY near future, google is already dead. It has no future Personal offline open source assistant AI is near at hand. This will kill the entire digital ecosystem as it stands now. If you understand this, contextually, all the BS right now is from desperate venture capitalists trying to get as much return on investment as possible.

Get a machine with at least 16GB of VRAM on a GPU and start leaning to mess with FOSS AI. This is the next digital age.

Privacy is something we control. You don't actually NEED the conveniences. You vote with your wallet. As far as devices, I love Graphene, but I also live without anything that only comes from the proprietary google framework like the Play store. I only use open source Android apps. The Play store is not Android, it is proprietary google garbage.

Yes, we need to pass laws that prevent companies from blocking access to their services on the basis of using privacy tools. Basically apps should be able to run on any customised client device and they should only legally able to say "no" if my session is clearly demonstrating malicious interactions.

We need better consumer protection laws.

Dunno, I don't use shitty apps that aren't available in F-Droid and I'm all the better for it.

If it's a physical object, how can you turn one into 1000? How can it be both the alignment of magnetic domains on a spinning disk, or an area containing more or less electrons than normal, or a sequence of letters printed on a page? It can even be stored in meat if you memorize a sequence, or separated in space and time then reunited

Data isn't a physical object, it's any pattern that can be decoded to result in the same useful sequence. It's information.

At best, you can call it a property of a physical object

Here where I live is very hard privacy, school apps and governments are very intrusive and doesnt care for linux, custom roms for my model is so rare and to unlock oem is everything manual and mostly local sites are paywalled or useless, really thinking stop using html protocol lol

Graphene OS does a great job of protecting your privacy. Although, since it doesn't rely on google services, unless you want to sandbox some, most of the time you don't get push notifications. Which isn't that bad.

And in terms of actually owning things, instead of relying on subscriptions services, that's what Web3/NFTs are trying to solve. Despite the fact that everyone loves to shit on them, and they're in their infancy, their utility far exceeds overpriced pictures. Right now you have to indefinitely subscribe to Netflix or Prime to access movies and shows you've already paid for, but if you bought an NFT of the movie, no one could gate keep that media from you. Musicians could cheaply disburse their songs to people and not be price gouged by Spotify, and any digital asset you bought would truly be yours, including video games and their skins/weapons/pets/etc, with the ability to resell those as you saw fit. As well, there would be an incentive for the studios that create this media to make them into NFTs, because unlike with physical copies, they would make a cut of every single sale that happens. So, they'd make money on the initial sale, and then a cut of you selling to a friend, your friend selling to someone else, ect.

What I think it, ultimately, comes down to is people getting, too, complacent and just accepting any ToS that's thrown in their face, because they can be dozens of pages long, and we just want to use the service right then and there.