Black belt in Mikado, Photo model, for the photos where they put under ‘BEFORE’
Ads as such are not the background problem. But the problem begins when they are based on user data and activities, instead of being contextual and when they are abusive and highly annoying, as they are often. Nobody wants several unskipable Ads of minutes on dishwasher or life insurance in the middle of a concert or that is difficult to read an article chopped by dozens of banners. Apart often also ads of fishy companies and services, which is also an security risk.
I don’t see ads nor cookie advices or other crap.
Tuta, Proton, Murena, Nextcloud Mail, or use disposable mails like Maildrop or Altmails.
Google even in this way logs your activity, because half of the internet, apps and services, apart of YT, use Google APIs, like google-taskmanager, googleanalytics, doubleclick.net and others, not only the Google services. Google permiys to manage and delete all this data, naturally it don’t say it and only few user know it, in the Google Dashboard. but only if you have an account. It’s a mess, but Google (Alphabet INC) is everywhere, you can’t avoid it completly, even avoiding its services, except using exclusively i2p or other descentralized apps and services. Google has had too many years a complete freedom to dominate the internet and ending its “don’t be evil”.
That isn’t “something bad could have happened”, but “how much has already happened” because of this.
You can’t with an OS full controlled by Google or Apple. You can only alleviate the problem, using alternatives, such as LinageOS, Ubuntu Mobile, de-googled Android or another distro, but only if you have root access. https://www.pcmag.com/picks/break-away-from-android-ios-7-free-open-source-mobile-oses-to-try
Phones are spyware by definition
It’s not so easy to detect a steganographic message in a photo, soundfile or video, it’s only detectable with specific apps. But the main reason is that goverments and security services first need a suspicion that these cute catphoto or an selfi of this guy in a beach is an secret message to make this analyse, much more likely to be suspicious of an encrypted message not feddable. This is surely more interesting to perform an in -depth analysis, instead of wasting time with thousands of vacations, selfies and kitten photos or analyzing the sound archive of your son playing Happy Birthday on his flute.
LLO, but this isn’t the way how steganography works. In a photo any pixel has a hex value, a minimal change to another value of one or some bits can’t be seen by an human and so the change of several pixels to an predefined value can hide an message, beeing invisible by sight, but readable by an corresponding app.
For every dirty trick to obtain user data used by govs and companies, exist an dev which release an measure to show them the middle finger. It’s so since more than 20 years.
Also innocent cat photos, a piece of music or in a voice message, in all of these you can encrypt hidden messages.
In 2026 good old steganographic messages, like in North Corea
I shall do it, because i hate this URL ads, even more the fucking link shortener, because they disguised it and avoid to see the destination. Because of this i use 2 extension, a Link unshortener, which reveal the real URL, when i click on a shorten link also the Adguardfilter in the Vivaldi’s own trackerblocker, You can find more filters here:
I use several search engines. All have their + and -. As main search I use Andi, apart Startpage, Mojeek, Whoogle, Ghostery Search, Groot and some others, apart some specific ones, like Forums, Pixabay, Wolphram Alpha, etc., I find what I’m searching for. Multisearch engines are fine, but they don’t show the same results of the engines which API’s they use. Apart of privacy, it’s mayby more important to avoid search engines which logs the searh history, because the filter bubble effect, causing an biased information.