So I pay monthly for a few streaming services, those are rarely worth the money, although Qobuz is pretty close. I could pirate my music or buy CDs and rip them, but that would be a huge hassle and expensive for the CD route as I like to listen to a lot of random artists.
Other services I pay monthly for that I think are good value are the National Trust and the RSPB. National Trust is particularly good value if you like looking at gardens/old houses, you save a fortune. RSPB works for me as I have two on my door step and just the car parking alone is almost the cost is the cost of the months membership.
Seedbox. I’ve had mine for over 10 years and I’m still paying the same $15/month, so it’s effectively gotten cheaper, and they’ve actually upgraded me at least twice in that time to give me more storage & bandwidth.
PBS Passport. Support your local PBS station
Housing, transportation, internet, electricity, water and a VPN if your country doesn’t let you pirate without it.
Everything else is either superfluous or you can pirate it.
Kagi.
Protonmail/VPN.
Namecheap (custom domains).
Nabu Casa (I could route subdomain myself but I love Home Assistant and want to support them).
PBS Passport.
Consumer Reports.
Nebula.
PDF-XChange Editor.
Tidal.
ServRica VPS (for Urbackup).Libro.fm - Audiobooks but (unlike Audible) you can download drm-free audio files to listen however you want.
YNAB
Rotterdam Deli Deliveries. Unfortunately they are not taking any new subscriptions at the moment.
Internet, the shit show is 24/7 no need to pay more for anything.
I actually pay for quite a few digital service subscriptions. Off the top my head: Proton (email/VPN), Mega (storage), Kagi (search engine), Inoreader (feed aggregator), Signal (both voluntary donation and for online backup), Audible (audiobooks), Reuters (news), a few newspaper and magazines (online editions), some apps, …
I know it’s an unpopular one around here, but definitely YouTube Premium
What do you even gain from it? Seems like a waste of money to me.
Library membership
You pay to use the library or what??
Electricity has been a pretty good subscription. Zero sales or promos ever though.
It was an expensive service, so we started to self host. It’s been pretty good since then.
What? We get sales, like every night.
Not everywhere has variable electricity pricing like that. Actually I’d guess it’s still uncommon.
For the amount of work it does heck yeah.
But we also pay 40-50c per KWH so it really stacks up quick.
Email to avoid email providers from companies like Google or Microsoft.
It’s a great deal too! My own domain was 50€ for 10 years, and Purelymail hosting is 10 bucks per year.
I’m still using the services of Big Email, which means I’m the product in this setting. From a philosophical standpoint, that sucks. From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides. Surely there are some that I’m just not aware of.
If they want to show me some ads, I have ublock origin and NextDNS to take care of that. What else should I know about my situation?
From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides.
Studies have shown that you see worse online prices than I do, because they know what you are going to buy next and they have a good guess the maximum amount you are willing to pay.
VPNs aren’t enough to solve this, but you may be unaffected if you have other strong anti-fingerprinting habits, including routinely deleting all cookies and disabling JavaScript.
A terrible
The worstthing they could be doing is providing an annual report to potential employers on how much money you make, helping your employers minimize how much they pay you. Of course, Visa could also be doing this.The other thing they could be doing is sharing your health history, ethnicity, and any religious or political leanings with potential employers, health insurers, or governments.
In certain cases (cough the USA) we know the government has a legal right to a wire tap, if any of the servers are inside the USA.
How much any of that could affect you long term depends on who has power where, of course.
Sorry to drop all this for you. It got to where I didn’t feel the risk was worth it for free email, for me. I wish I had jumped to a privacy respecting solution sooner, since I don’t know how long my data will take to age out of their systems.
Edit: Sorry…I realized I used the word “worst” pretty lightly here. Worst is more like…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
I already use several Firefox forks for different purposes, and all of them are reasonably resistant to fingerprinting. I also have a special container for all the corpo trash I have to deal with. When I click a random news articles on Lemmy, those sites are opened in a different container and their creepy cookies get deleted as soon as I close the tab.
I’m doing all of this out of of philosophical reasons. It’s also pretty easy to set up, and there are hardly any downsides. Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that’s where I had to draw the line.
Regardless, I still find the idea of a privacy respecting email appealing. Philosophical reasons again… Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn’t see an urgent need to mitigate them. The practical side of it still requires a bit more reading before I can justify an ongoing expense like this. Naturally, the email provider would have to be EU based.
Disabling java script is something I have tried too, but it did come with all sorts of severe downsides, so that’s where I had to draw the line.
I get that, 100%. That is exactly where most people land, on the topic.
I feel obligated to mention that, to the best of my knowledge, JavaScript being globally enabled means a person is 100% not anonymous at any time.
Trackers can, and do, ask JavaScript hundreds of questions about the browser, it’s region, it’s underlying OS, and plugins.
Studies show they typically arrive at a 100% certainly unique fingerprint that they can attach to a real name and home address, before cookies even get involved.
Your choices of browsers should greatly help, but there’s evidence that most of them don’t do enough to prevent a unique fingerprint, while JavaScript is enabled.
The GrapheneOS Vanadium project team blog about this privacy battle regularly. The current privacy outlook with JavaScript enabled seems to still be pretty poor, to me.
Sorry, I don’t have a good solution. But I figure as long as we’re discussing this publicly, we can raise some awareness.
The right answer is to throw corporate criminals in jail to deter their arms race, but I don’t see much evidence that will happen soon.
One option is to use a a dumpster browser for all the corpo trash that requires JavaScript. Just disable JS on all the good browsers and carry on as usual. If a site doesn’t work there, throw it into the dumpster.
Recently, I also made a quick and dirty risk assessment about the potential risks, and I still didn’t see an urgent need to mitigate them.
I agree 100%. I moved in an orderly fashion, myself!
Your overall logic and position matches mine from maybe six months ago quite well.
The thing I couldn’t let go of was what Google might be doing with my income and employment prospects, selling what they know about me from my inbox.
I see plenty of evidence for the character of Google’s leadership, and I realized it made me angry that someone like that could be accessing my inbox.
It also depends on how do you use that mailbox for. In my case, Gmail doesn’t get to see anything related to my professional life. I have another email provider for more serious conversations like that. For the most part, Gmail gets to see a bunch of mailing list junk I never subscribed to. I also use Gmail to logging into various services I don’t really care that much about. Nothing important, nothing serious. If it involves money in any way, Gmail doesn’t get to read those communications.
However, I am tempted to move all my serious email communications to a more serious paid service. There might be immediate practical benefits too. I could set up a dedicated email address for each creepy company and that way I would find out which one sold my data to spammers.
They get access to all emails used for banking, shopping, social media accounts, etc. Depends on if you are fine with them being able to build a detailed profile off your emails.
Ads is like the least problematic aspect.
Your email is the root of your digital identity, and pretty much everything in your digital life is tied to it. If your email is provided by Big Email, they own your digital identity and it exists at their whim, with no recourse if it gets taken away, compromised, or abused.
If you own your domain and pay for mail hosting, you can at least move your email between providers if something goes wrong, and have some recourse with those providers since you’re a customer instead of a product.
You have zero privacy and also generate power for them to do the things they do, which is gargle trump’s sharty grey scrote and thus empower trump
Whats some good ones?
I use Tutanota with a private domain, but you can get a free address with them also.
Mullvad, and a strong internet connection from the spyware company of your choice. With that you can pirate any media, and browse the internet. I have never needed more.
