Pretty much. Iirc there are a handful of places in the US that allow license plate covers but it’s usually illegal to obscure it for any reason when driving on public roads

• You have to hand over a huge amount of personal info about yourself & others to estate agents when renting a property - which they then sell to advertisers & you have no opt-out
• Similarly, landords can require you to use a proprietary app for rent payments, which of course collects & sells your private data too
• Burner phones are effectively illegal (telcos are required to collect & retain ID of every phone number they register)
• Telcos and ISPs are required to collect & retain logs of all your activities for a minimum of two years
• In some cities police can detain & search you & your property for no reason, and require you to remove any facial coverings
• It’s illegal to refuse to hand over passwords to cops (6 years jail is the max term I think)
• Police can hack your device, take over your social media, delete or modify your data for an investigation, or survey any digital device if they “think it is likely to be used by someone subject to a warrant” (this particular bill was announced and then rushed through parliament in less than 24 hours to give the public as little time as possible to protest it
• Some social media sites (including github(wtf)) are now required to age-verify all users beginning next month. Which will obviously lead to mass leaks & breaches of private data which the gov will turn a blind eye to

This is Australia. I hate it here

Exactly. The lead dev can come across as frustrated or confrontational on his social media posts but really the amount of noobs criticising Graphene for nonsense reasons or repeatedly bringing up other ‘secure’ OSes to him that he’s already thoroughly debunked again and again like e/OS would drive me insane

Not stupid, just uninformed. A lot of people are confused by how things like targeted ads work and because of that they just accept it as inevitable. They think “This website knows what I searched for on another website because it’s all linked. That’s how the internet works” and once you break down how the tracking is actually done, they realise it’s not infallible

It’s the same thing as people not knowing how planes stay in the air or what makes a car engine work. Nobody can be an expert on everything. I don’t mean to give you a lecture btw, I just think it’s counterproductive to dismiss people. But of course there are exceptions and some people just don’t want to know

I was talking to a friend the other day and she mentioned she’d searched for a product online and then started getting ads for it, and asked how often it’d happened to me. She was very surprised when I said never and I explained that I’d been using an ad blocker for the last 15 years. And by the end of our conversation I’d walked her through setting it up on her devices and now she’s one step closer to regaining her privacy

I often find people really aren’t happy with their privacy being undermined but they don’t realise there are things they can do about it. They’ll say things like “well it’s happening to everyone else too” as a coping mechanism but it’s not something they want. More education is critical