I do this, too. I’ve noticed local companies who advertise heavily on local TV/radio often charge 2x as much as the competition who don’t. And the aggressive advertisers are often arrogant and difficult to work with.

And it pisses me off when I see giant insurance companies spending millions on celebrity spokespeople and Superbowl ads. That represents a lot of denied claims.

Beyond all that: fuck reddit. Don’t give money to spez.

I agree with you. However, in part this is often done because giving or receiving medical advice online is generally ill advised. There can, in theory, even be legal concerns (potentially). Say someone gives bad advice and the person is harmed from it. I also think that all the misinformation that got disseminated during the pandemic left people gun-shy on these topics.

But I still agree with you in spirit. The “talk to your doctor” thing can be a too cold and reflexive with some folks. And there are a few home remedies that do work. And maybe the person asking just wants some emotional support and not the usual soulless canned advice.

This topic reminds me of people who automatically throw an 800 number out there whenever certain key words get mentioned. There’s almost always good intentions behind that. But in the USA at least, calling such a number can make a person’s life much worse. Loss of agency followed by a huge medical bill. Because it’s not really about helping the person. It’s about optics and collecting money.

Unfortunately, once you share something online it’s moved beyond anyone’s control. Even if the platform respects your wishes and does everything right, there’s always 3rd party web crawlers, data harvesters, archival services, etc. They are always around, busily vacuuming up everything they can on the web. Few if any shared posts or comments will ever be truly deleted. Storage of text is cheap, and a lot of entities love hoarding data.

So, try to only post stuff you wouldn’t mind your parents, coworkers, friends, etc. knowing about. Corporations and governments are moving more and more towards 100% surveillance and away from privacy and anonymity. It’s a giant problem, and I hate it. But the only element of this you can control is your own behavior.

If you want to get away with something evil, hide it inside of something boring. That’s what they’re doing.

Appreciate the links. Thanks!

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I figured someone was on top of this and the reddit dipstick was just being overly dramatic as usual.

Right, but I think the difference here is lemmy allows users to embed these in their markdown text.

When it comes to posting on lemmy I’d also consider bringing up that old bromide: don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see.

At least for now, anyway.

random angry guy just hates lemmy for whatever reason

There is definitely some of that at play here. I am hoping some smarter cybersec folks without the anti-lemmy-rage-bias can weigh in on t.

I am not a cybersecurity expert. And these are good questions. The problem is certainly not unique to Lemmy.

However, my (limited) understanding of it the opposing opinion is. 1. This is bad for privacy (marketers and other bad actors use these to track down your IP and other metadata) and 2. It should have been thought of before now and already had some protections put into place.

Thanks. Not a fan of guilt by association of this type. The idea of FUD has been around for decades. It’s not inherently crypto or inherently anything. It’s just a useful acronym for a tactic some people use.

VeraCrypt was created as a fork of TrueCrypt because TrueCrypt underwent a code audit and they felt it wasn’t secure enough. Older version of VeraCrypt were also found to have vulnerabilities. It’s a never ending race between castle walls and cannonballs when it comes to this stuff. Maybe the journalist had TrueCrypt or an older unpatched version of VeraCrypt.

I’ve blocked their ads for years. I support content creators by buying merchandise and with Patreon.

After hearing about this, I’ve decided to give YouTube Premium a try. It seems like an easier and more consistent way for me to support creators. I watch YT almost daily, and get a lot of value from it. I hate ads and refuse to watch them, but Premium users don’t see them.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for walking away from YouTube over this. But for me at least, this was kind of a no-brainer.

I know Google tracks users and targets us with ads. I’m deep in their ecosystem anyway, and rely on their services for work, hobbies, and managing my data. I am stuck with them, unfortunately.

I do block what I can (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon) with Pi Hole and browser extensions. But there’s no total escape from an internet footprint, short of dropping off the grid. I’m dependent on Alphabet to live my lifestyle, for better or worse.