I have recently started university and am required to use an app that has three Facebook trackers, one of them being a Facebook location tracker according to Exodus App Privacy, for the dining plan, when it would literally work perfectly fine using your student ID and ordering to a real cashier, LIKE HOW IT HAS BEEN DONE FOR DECADES.
I have also read many stories of people that live in apartments that require them to use a mobile app for god damn LAUNDRY. All you need, is a card reader, and it will work perfectly fine like it has been for the longest time.
Privacy concerns aside, it is just annoying that you need this app and that app and this app and that app and it just clutters space on your phone. Security concerns too as now they have all of this additional info on you online, such as your phone number your email your real name, instead of just your credit card info like a card reader would have. And I am willing to guarantee that their security model is absolute horseshit because they have such a small team of engineers working on the app and the servers.
Literal enshitification
How can people push back on this insanity? I don’t want 500 goddamn apps on my phone nor do I want 500 accounts on “portals” or what fucking ever your calling it today.
I agree with OP, but how do we resist the borg?
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Yet some local retailers somewhat insist on doing their own app.
One instead of a website where I could look at their course catalog and book had App Store/Google Play apps. They were terrible, and wouldn’t install on a still-supported Google Pixel phone, a friend with an iPhone tried the Apple version and said it was horrendous and uninstalled it immediately.
I don’t understand why they went with terrible custom apps, a responsive website would have been so much more convenient and easier to maintain! Also, call me old-fashioned but some things I just prefer doing from the comfort of my desktop with a nice big screen, keyboard, and mouse.
In things where I can’t avoid an account, I use an email alias (personally I use Mozilla Relay, but Proton Pass offers logins as well if I recall.
Edit: for clarity, this adds at least a level of abstraction from my actual data. It’s not the only thing I do, such as blackhole DNS via PiHole, VPN in other scenarios, Tor for others (for those curious, pihole and Tor don’t work at the same time, and pihole and VPN generally doesn’t either without extra work and it’s not compatible with every VPN).
The 80s movie classic War Games has the answer:
STRANGE GAME…THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TOO PLAY…
One way is to just lie and say you only have a flip phone. There are probably millions of old people that refuse to use smartphones because they don’t understand them and there no reason you can’t pretend to also have a dumb phone.
GREAT idea! I have both a flip and a smart phone.