this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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[–] cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 77 points 4 months ago (4 children)

It feels weird coming from LTT.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 29 points 4 months ago

I agree and I still have my doubts that he would personally use many of these alternatives. Still, we should not gatekeep the message. Anyone this big discussing the positives of de-googling will certainly push it further into mainstream society.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 9 points 4 months ago

Its is a sign of the times I suppose.

[–] mmhmm@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 months ago

I thought he stopped? Must have just been a break, but like he should have imo

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] CatTrickery@lemmy.blahaj.zone 34 points 4 months ago (5 children)

I thought I should comment to highlight that LTT has not improved and has doubled down in their attempts to cover over sexual harassment in recent days putting out the following statement earlier in the week:-

There were a series of accusations about our company last August from a former employee. Immediately following these accusations, LMG hired Roper Greyell - a large Vancouver-based law firm specializing in labor and employment law, to conduct a third-party investigation. Their website describes them as “one of the largest employment and labour law firms in Western Canada.” They work with both private and public sector employers.

To ensure a fair investigation, LMG did not comment or publicly release any data and asked our team members to do the same. Now that the investigation is complete, we’re able to provide a summary of the findings.

The investigation found that:

  • Claims of bullying and harassment were not substantiated.

  • Allegations that sexual harassment were ignored or not addressed were false.

  • Any concerns that were raised were investigated. Furthermore, from reviewing our history, the investigator is confident that if any other concerns had been raised, we would have investigated them.

  • There was no evidence of “abuse of power” or retaliation. The individual involved may not have agreed with our decisions or performance feedback, but our actions were for legitimate work-related purposes, and our business reasons were valid.

  • Allegations of process errors and miscommunication while onboarding this individual were partially substantiated, but the investigator found ample documentary evidence of LMG working to rectify the errors and the individual being treated generously and respectfully. When they had questions, they were responded to and addressed.

In summary, as confirmed by the investigation, the allegations made against the team were largely unfounded, misleading, and unfair.

With all of that said, in the spirit of ongoing improvement, the investigator shared their general recommendation that fast-growing workplaces should invest in continuing professional development. The investigator encouraged us to provide further training to our team about how to raise concerns to reinforce our existing workplace policies.

Prior to receiving this report, LMG solicited anonymous feedback from the team in an effort to ensure there was no unreported bullying and harassment and hosted a training session which reiterated our workplace policies and reinforced our reporting structure. LMG will continue to assess ongoing continuing education for our team.

At this time, we feel our case for a defamation suit would be very strong; however, our deepest wish is to simply put all of this behind us. We hope that will be the case, given the investigator’s clear findings that the allegations made online were misrepresentations of what actually occurred. We will continue to assess if there is persistent reputational damage or further defamation.

This doesn’t mean our company is perfect and our journey is over. We are continuously learning and trying to do better. Thank you all for being part of our community.

As you can see, they hired an outside legal firm to declare that they did nothing wrong in enabling said sexual harassment because there wasn't a paper trail, despite them admitting that the victim was told to talk it out with the abuser.

They followed up by threatening the victim with a lawsuit for continuing to speak out.

I feel that, as a woman and a victim of sexual harassment myself, its only fair that I must stand by other women that the patriarchy attempts to silence and ensure that those who wish to uphold a safe space for sexual harassment are held to account and not given an unopposed platform.

[–] DolphinMath@slrpnk.net 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

As you can see, they hired an outside legal firm to declare that they did nothing wrong in enabling said sexual harassment because there wasn't a paper trail, despite them admitting that the victim was told to talk it out with the abuser.

You are assuming intent, and ignoring the false statements made. What I see is them hiring a third party to do an investigation, exactly what the public called for. Would you rather the former employee pay for it?

They followed up by threatening the victim with a lawsuit for continuing to speak out.

There was no threat, only a statement of fact that the evidence was strong enough for a defamation case, and that they did not wish do go down that path.

[–] applepie@kbin.social 7 points 4 months ago

While I ain't gonna excuse some shiti company atro turf, why is this being "litigated" on the web?

Criminal misconduct should be handled by the police.

If misconduct that us not criminal gets handled by civil court.

What outcome is the victim looking for here?

[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 months ago

Frat boy, incel culture over at LTT. Shocker they treat women as they do but also a shocker nothing will change 🙄

Also their damage control wreaks of “I don’t really know what I’m doing I just want all the bad press to die already.”

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Frankly we have all moved on. If you don't want to support LTT no one is stopping you. I am not the biggest fan either but I think we need to move on.

[–] CatTrickery@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

When you say "we", who do you mean there? "Just moving on" from sexual harassment dodges accountability and moreover is what allows them to feel safe in fostering such a culture.

[–] Scary_le_Poo 1 points 4 months ago

Except, no sexual harassment actually happened.

That lady said there is smoke, and you said OK let's put this fire out. Meanwhile, the fire department called you and said that there is no smoke here and no fire. Yet, you show up, garden hose in hand yelling come on guys let's put this fire out!!!

There is no fire. She lied. It happens. Sometimes people do stupid shit for clout. That doesn't mean that you need to assume all women are lying when they claim sexual harassment.

What it does mean is that instead of believing all women without question, you should instead hear them out, then investigate, and if the evidence is there, then you support them and amplify their claims.

Supporting women can be expressed in demanding investigations into their claims.

Sometimes people lie. It's very important that you understand this. Believing anyone without question is outright stupid. However clearly there is a trend with women being sexually harassed. Because that trend exists then that lends more credence to their claims. And they should be taken VERY seriously. The claims should not be dismissed, but investigated.

In this case, the claims were investigated and found to be untrue.

[–] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 5 points 4 months ago

Oh no, not consequences for his actions! How unfair!

[–] Scary_le_Poo 4 points 4 months ago

Oh fuck off, they were found to not have done anything that was alleged. You were wrong, suck it up and apologize.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 27 points 4 months ago (2 children)

For the lazy like myself

This video is about how to degoogle your life, czyli [in Polish] to minimize your reliance on Google products and services.

In the first part of the video, the speaker discusses why you might want to degoogle your life. They mention that Google collects a lot of data on its users, and that this data is used to target ads and to train machine learning algorithms. The speaker also argues that Google's services are becoming less and less usable.

The speaker then provides a number of alternatives to Google products and services. Here are a few examples:

  • Search engines: DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ecosia, Brave Search
  • Email: Proton, Tuta
  • Photo backup: Ente, Stingle, PhotoSync, Image
  • DNS: Quad9, NextDNS, Cloudflare

The speaker acknowledges that there are many other alternatives available, and that this is just a starting point. They also recommend checking out the sponsor of the video, Pulseway, which is a monitoring and management software.

The video ends with a call to action, encouraging viewers to watch part two of the series.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 19 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] cmgvd3lw@discuss.tchncs.de 31 points 4 months ago (1 children)

See this should be what AI does. Not screenshoting my activities.

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

It literally is!

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 8 points 4 months ago

Google's 😂

[–] raqqed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al whoa thats neat! I often wish a YouTube video were just a blog post or forum thread .. how can I do something like this myself?

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 14 points 4 months ago

I used Google Gemini. Just asked it to summarise and pasted the link and voila.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 23 points 4 months ago

Nice to see a YouTuber with a massive audience demystifying some of the alternatives to Google. There are of course many smaller channels who have provided better and more in-depth guides in the past, but someone this mainstream weighing in on their side does a lot to help the cause.

[–] kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 13 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Brave has an openly homophobic founder, it’s weird to me that they’d mention the crypto issues and not this

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I did it oftn. But main reason to avoid Brave is the somewhat fishy Crypto Policy and the betrayal of users in the past, redirecting searches to related crypto companies, which shows dubious business ethics regarding the user. For me Brave is simply not trustworth.

[–] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 2 points 4 months ago

My main issue with it is the fact that the company has shown it is willing to cross boundaries.

[–] okrakai@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] ondoyant 9 points 4 months ago

plenty of people?

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And Microsoft has a habit of interfering with democracies and bribing governments. Let's not pretend any big tech is a saint. The difference between dumb billionaires like Eich and Musk and others is that they have bad PR.

[–] kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don’t like Microsoft either and I’m not sure the relevance of you bringing this up, is this trolling?

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's not trolling. Eich is a scumbag but if you ditch Brave, right now your only real options and Microsoft Bing and Google. And I think MS and Google do way more bad to the world than Eich. How many MS nd Google executives do you think are right wingers donating to anti gay groups? Definitely not zero.

[–] kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 3 points 4 months ago

I disagree that those are the only options, even in the video we are commenting on they name some others

[–] fiercekitten@lemm.ee 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I appreciated his comparison charts for various alternatives and the features they offered. I’m going to check out Ente and Stingle for self-hosted photo backup.

[–] hanke@feddit.nu 14 points 4 months ago

Check out immich as well!

[–] sajran@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago

Ente is as close as you can get to Google Photos with E2EE right now. I recently migrated there. The migration wasn't painless and involved some scripting to handle albums and duplicates but the service itself is really good. Can recommend!

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Google services I still use before being unGoogled:

  1. Voice: I have to make like 1 or 2 calls within the US a year & not worth a SIM
  2. Maps: for when OSM isn’t cutting it & I’ll contribute the missing data after I found it
  3. Translate: for when Yandex Translate doesn’t cut it (everything ‘free’ only works with European languages)
  4. YouTube: no real alternative here that isn’t limited to just a piece of its scope, but viewed thru Librewolf+uBlock Origin+SponsorBlock or PipePipe

… and the last one is just basically every employer I have worked with puts all their company data on Google & it can’t really be avoided with them >:(

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Can't help but mention Yandex is 100% as evil as Google is.

Out of popular choices, DeepL is probably least evil. Reverso is often a nice pick, too, especially Reverso Context.

There are also things like LibreTranslate, though the quality is generally lower (but can absolutely come in handy for simpler requests)

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You also can use a LLM model

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

A local open-source one, preferably.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yandex might be the same as Google, but spreading your footprint across services still has value as a technique for mitigation. The only other thing I use Yandex for is the occasional image search since it can sometimes do a better job than others.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago

Fair enough; however, to me it's only optimal when there are no alternatives.

But to each their own.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Not relly true, eg YT, there are still several scripts to gut out ads, tracks and nags from YT (take a look in Greasyfork or OpenuserJS) (for YT naturally filter the newest and recent updated scripts), if one of the front-ends dont work.

Well, OSM and forks or Here maps don't have the features of Gmaps (eg Street view) but are way enough for the most use.

For translations, OpenSource isn't sinonimo of bad, eg, CrowTranslate for Desktop or the Linguist extension for the browser are FOSS and maybe the best you can find out there, multiengines for more than 120 lenguages, they use the APIs of Google, Yandex and others (customizable, Linguist use also the Bergamot Translator(At the moment still in developement and only EU languages, but they'll add more soon)), similar to the front-ends for YT, so Google isn't a problem.

Yes, naturally if you are an Google user for your work, few you can do, but there are alternatives to use Google only the minimum needed.

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A YouTube alternative client doesn’t change that all of the infrastructure is Google’s. Even this video shows you need YouTube to reach the audience you want for this style of content.

I hadn’t heard of new translators options in the last two years, but only Lingva listed the two non-English languages I actually use. The rest are all European-based languages. I may have some time to check it out, but it looked like quite a bit of tooling to set up.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago

Both translators mencioned, Crow and Linguist are full customizable with cusom translators, Crow include, among others, also Lingva by default nd both can traduce more than 120 lenguages, depending on which engine you activate, posting even in Sanscrit if you want

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I want to get off Google photos, but I also don't want to pay a subscription. And I don't really want to self host. A pay once service I'd accept, but I haven't seen one with an extremely cursory search. I don't need any fancy features. Just store the photos, let me see them online, and let me put them in albums.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 months ago

Hosting pictures cost money