this. Also, safety concerns. Global south. Robberies and larcenies. I can’t just have a $800 brick on me all the time. I can barely replace the $150 one when it gets stolen or breaks. Unfortunately I am forced to participate in this smartphone system, and I remember when the most expensive phone was $300. 🤡

Confirmed troll

You can’t “use meta anonymously”

Hello friend. You have a leak. Someone near you may be running an Alexa or something like that; perhaps you have a gf or mom who carelessly uses technology. Other people’s phones will spy on you and link it to your profile. However, most likely, you have a forgotten device that is feeding information. Perhaps you used Tinder, which gave it access to your location. Maybe you have to use Microsoft devices for your job.

Notwithstanding this, privacy profile fingerprinting is a thing. No one is running the exact same configuration that you are. This is why Mullvad tries to pass all their users as a single generic one with their browser. Even if this is successful, there is no anonymity possible once enough data points are collected; as for YouTube, it is pretty easy to determine which user is watching a certain combination of videos/creators. There aren’t that many people who browse in English, watch John Johnson’s cooking show for 10 minutes then switch to Jack Jackson’s car repair advice and click on the exact same corner of the screen. There could be a hundred of these but how many have the same internet connection speed? How many have the exact same mouse pointer movement speed (yes, they can see what part of the screen you’re hovering and capture your clicks and movement, and it’s all standard)?

The only way to deal with natural monopolies like YouTube and Reddit is to steal their content. Which you can’t do yourself unless you are very wealthy and have the protection of an adversarial government that does not consider this stealing.