Back to 1990 on My Librem 5

By the time I got my Librem 5 fully locked down, I felt like I had traveled back in time via my Librem 5. When you fully lock everyone out of your Librem 5 and refuse to comply with any authentication attempts and refuse to accept any cookies from anyone, you end up pretty much alone in an internet that reminds me of the internet of 1990. You’ll find a few legacy bulletin boards and an occasional web page that works normally. But in most cases the world says to you “…if you won’t authenticate yourself, we want nothing to do with you and our doors are locked to you”. Even my Cox cable internet account warned me about my Librem 5, identifying it as only “unknown device”. So nobody spies on my Librem 5. In exchange, my Librem 5 is a pariah on the internet. Anyone else experience this? Where is the happy medium?

As soon as I start complying with anything, I have no idea what security breeches will result. As soon as you give any sight what it wants in the way of loostening security or accepting any cookies, they’re going to say something like “oh yes, we know all about you. We have your PC profile and your Android profiles right here. So now we’ll add your Librem 5 to our existing profiles of you and every time we see your Librem 5 online going forward now, we’ll know it’s you and continue collecting data about you from your Librem 5 as well. Even with hardware kill switches, you"ve got to go online sooner or larer. And we’ll be waiting for you there”. Anyone who doesn’t like this and who takes effective countermeasures seems to be relegated to the internet of 1990.

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Hard to say if you don’t say with what kind of settings you go online. Blocking all scripts? Or just reject fingerprinting and cookies? What else do you do?

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A compromise with cookies is to throw away all cookies when you exit the browser except those pertaining to specific trusted domains and make sure that you do exit from the browser reasonably often.

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Well at least you don’t need to use a telephone keypad 2=ABC, etc.

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Most websites are antagonistic toward personal privacy or attempts at anonymity now. They’re literally built around tools that collect and exploit data about us for profit.

Thanks a lot, Google, Meta, Amazon, et al! :rage:

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