It’s not that we don’t care about it

That's not true. People who give the slightest shit about it are in the minority. My supposedly tech savvy relative told me I am "overthinking" smart TVs by never wanting one connected to the internet. The next day after that conversation, the most recent LG scandal came to light. I sent them a link to the video. I saw that they were supposedly typing for a few seconds and then they never responded. I suspect they considered arguing with me about it being a problem and then realized it was going to be a tough argument to have. I doubt that made them think twice about getting more Internet connected devices though. They've personally overseen installing Alexas in multiple homes and they think I'm absurd for seeing those as bad for privacy.

Linux home computers are where this starts.

Mozilla created such a list: Privacy Not Included.

Sadly most chips contain backdoors especially Intel and AMD. Unless a performant open source RiscV chip comes along everything has spyware

Good thing framework doesn’t advertise Racist arch dotfiles. /s

Robert Braxman is a fraud and so is his Brax Phone.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20165-response-to-dishonest-attacks-on-the-grapheneos-project-by-robert-braxman

Anyway stop buying or caring about brand new "products", creating e-waste, and feeding this stupid exponential growth economy and extractive capitalism. You don't need everything to be the latest version. Engage in the local circular economy, buy used on local marketplaces, reuse and repair old devices. Give second life to old things we already produced.

You don't even need to try hard to be private with old, used stuff. Bought an old laptop? Good, it only runs Linux. Bought an old MP3 player? Good, it doesn't even have Spotify or internet. Bought an old gaming console? Good, you can find any torrent you could ever want, any genre, completely for free, offline.

How do we start a class action lawsuit for violations of the fourth ammendment?

I don’t know a ton about it, but I’ve been looking at the Brax phone recently for this reason

Raspberry Pi? Fairphone 6? I love my ancient iPod Classic. Also, OpenWRT One router? Wired headphones? Get monitor instead of TV?

We really do need a list.

For eink, the XTEink devices work offline. If you put https://crosspointreader.com/ on them, then it’s not even XTEink’s software running on it.

@hperrin@lemmy.ca Thanks the post is updated

https://lemmy.ml/post/52928541 is locked so I replied here

PC

I currently still use my iPad as my daily driver, do not have the money to replace it yet. I do have a handful of pi’s, and a old (2014) Mac mini with Debian installed, doing things on my LAN that my iPad cannot. Snapdragon and other ARM or RISC-V CPU’s are not Intel/AMD or x86.

Smart phone

I am waiting a little while until I can get a Motorola phone that I can install Graphen OS on.

Wireless Speakers

Just don’t. Get wired ones.

TV’s

Turn off all the “smart” features you may have to search around to find instructions to turn off the negging for an internet connection but get something like a pi 5 or a media centre PC (with Linux) to replace the smart features. Than you decide how your media is stored and hosted on your LAN.

Printers

Do not connect them to the internet, full stop. I find it iffy to even let them host their own wifi as well, mine is attached to a pi running CUPS.

Anything else?

I swear by pihole, while others in the ad-blocker/tracker community swear by adguard I tried it but came back to pihole. You will find debates for or against either one, probably the first one you choose will be the one you like because you will mod it and add the ad lists/blacklists that work best for you. I have 2 piholes on two pi 5s (they run on other pis as well, I have had pihole running on a pi 0 2 before), one as the primary DNS and one as the secondary DNS. I think only the primary is also running unbound along side of it but I don’t remember if the second one is.

Self host as much as you can when I started down the journey of self hosting I thought it would last 3 months at most; I had been watching youtube videos for a few years so I thought I knew everything I wanted to do, I had been running pihole and homebridge for years already so I thought I would be ready for this journey oh how wrong was I, I thought nextcloud would be fine for everything I needed turns out no I think I found pictures was the first issue I had with it so I found immich, than calendars so I found an app for that than contacts, and so on and so forth nextcloud tries to do to many things so it does nothing well, I am still looking for something that does files better than samba as I would like either a gui or webui. I have a VPN from my GL.iNET firewall (running vanilla-ish OpenWRT, it is a clean install but I have installed things and modded it to my needs and likings) so I can access all my stuff from outside of my LAN. I wanna say my firewall forces all DNS stuff through port 53 even if it is hard coded to go elsewhere on my IoT vLAN (10.66.6.x), which than goes to my pihole set up.

I have my own domain that has a wildcard email setup so everything gets it’s own email; when I mapped out my 3 month self hosting journey I had email setup set for a week long project for after I got my 2 static IP’s, I found out that was not a realistic plan. My old host, who I would not suggest (hosthero), did not offer a wild card option fot email so I had to go create a new address each time I wanted to signup for a free trial, as many times as I wanted to, but now with my new host, who I would suggest (easydns), offers a wild card option so I can come up with one on the spot. I was furniture shopping recently and I was asked for an email, I quickly had a thought and gave them their store name my domain.

For printer options we can keep an eye on this project that I saw today https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/openprinter

My elegoo 3d printer is also way too dumb to know the concept of telemetry.

Router-wise, I can throw in a recommendation for the Turris devices by CZ.NIC. (MOX, Omnia, Omni-NG)

They're using their own Turris OS, which is built on a clean OpenWrt base, they don't upload telemetry or display ads of any kind - but they do have a multi-step opt-in if you wish to run honeypots and/or push data to the Sentinel distributed firewall research project.

If you use a robot vacuum, it might help to get one without a camera, only Lidar.

(I also made a point of buying a smart tv without a microphone, but it was already hard to find one in 2023, I imagine it's even worse now.)

E-ink devices: I think you can put all of them in flight mode, at least that's what I do, and upload books via USB cable. No need for network features.

Speakers: Just buy a cheap and basic wired one?

Smartwatch: How would one work without telemetry? It's kinda the whole point 🤔 I guess you can try to replace the software with Gadgetbridge.

AMD has their equivalent of Intel's ME. They call it the PSP.

You can probably add pebble under smartwatch. The new devices have fully open source firmware (and app). There are no ads and the store is to my understanding run by volunteers (rebble, a perfect born after pebbles first attempt at a watch failed many years ago).

The watches are also fully supported by gadgetbridge.

As for laptops, there are a lot of other options like Tuxedo, NovaCustom, and Slimbook

I would avoid the Brax phone, they haven’t fulfilled orders and are super shady + social media influencer platform is never a great look. I would prefer the Fairphone, they’ve been around for ages, and you can install mobile Linux on their devices too since they let you unlock the boot loader. postmarketOS on the FP6 is developing rapidly and very exciting! Other pmOS supported devices like the OP6 or Pixel 3a series could be considered too, as well as the custom Android ROMs (Graphene, Calyx, etc.)

AsteroidOS is Linux on smartwatches, what more do you want? You also have Pebble if you’re into e-ink and that sort

As for TVs, it’s tricky, but just look for the non-smart ones (there are quite a few!), and I know Sony makes the Bravia TVs where you can set them to be “basic” non-smart mode. You could also go with a projector instead, those usually don’t have smart TV shenanigans. You can also use a Linux mini PC running Plasma Bigscreen and/or Kodi as an alternative to Google TV.

Mini PCs running some form of Linux (Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, Mint, whatever) are always awesome. You also have emulation stuff, like the MiSTER Pi mentioned by another user, but you could run emulation stuff on any cheap hardware (running Linux) just fine.

OpenWRT is supported by lots of routers, and GL.iNet makes routers that have it preinstalled. You also have the MikroTik routers, which run the Linux-based RouterOS (+ they are based in Latvia 🇱🇻)

Reolink cameras w/ Frigate and Home Assistant is the best combo.

The only wireless headphones I would recommend are the Fairphone Fairbuds Gen 2, since they won’t die in a few years w/ replaceable parts and battery, and even then, for 99% of usecases, I would rather go with IEMs + some wireless dongle (I use the Fiio BTR11, but others exist too, in particular, the Fiio Snowsky Retro Nano has replaceable batteries of an esoteric form factor). You get the convenience of wireless as well as all the benefits of wired: harder to lose, better audio quality, WAY cheaper (seriously, I spent less than $30 on my kit), longer lasting, etc. I would recommend the Kiwi Ears Cadenza and Truthear Gate, and I’ve heard the Hexa/Pure is great too. Moondrop’s Chu 2 are awesome too with a metal shell for a ridiculously low price, but the brass nozzle oxidises and clogs in humid environments (I am in the humid land of HK, so no go for me)

As for printers, the Open Printer is crowd funding and looks really neat! You of course have the Brother laser printers too, but not sure about their telemetry and tracking.

I am moving to Piefed at scallisto@retrofed.com (https://retrofed.com/u/scallisto)

@sbeak@sopuli.xyz Thanks for the suggestions. I have updated the post. https://lemmy.ml/post/52928541 is locked so I replied here

Last I checked (which, admittedly, was a few years ago) I literally couldn’t find any security cameras that weren’t compromised in some way. The only options are basically:

Consumer models tied to “cloud” services
Generic Chinese ONVIF cameras that probably phone home to who knows where unless you firewall them off from the Internet
ONVIF cameras that might have a slightly better reputation than the previous category but are only sold through security system installers, not normal retail channels
Analog (not IP) cameras that you hook up via coaxial cable
Building your own goddamn camera from scratch with a Raspberry Pi or something

It’s ridiculous!

For TVs, there used to be the option of Sceptre dumb TVs, but even those have disappeared from the market in the last year or so.

I’ve been looking for a smartwatch/fitness tracker (and a bike computer, which is kind of a similar category) and the pickings seem very slim there, too. There’s the Pebble and the PineTime, which are open but maybe lack some of the sensors one might want in a fitness tracker, and there’s stuff that’s intended to be proprietary but supported by Gadgetbridge (e.g. iGPSPORT bike computers) . There might be others, but I don’t know about them.

It’s fuckin’ bleak, y’all. I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering building almost all my own tech out of Raspberry Pis and/or ESP32s because that’s easier than searching for needles in the infinite haystack of surveillance capitalist slop!

@grue@lemmy.world Thanks the post is updated

https://lemmy.ml/post/52928541 is locked so I replied here

But why is the list not hosted in a repo or something but instead needs to be over at lemmy.ml?

@lokalhorst@feddit.org Anyone is more than welcome to put this in a repo. I will add the link to the post.

https://lemmy.ml/post/52928541 is locked so I replied here