No, there are free VPN out there where you don’t need an creditcard (Windscribe, Proton, Calyx…), even if not, it can be a child on the PC from the parents. Anyway, age verification has only one reason, access and control of user data, nothing else. The resposability of the children is by the Parents and not by webpages or services, apart impossible to control the access by childrens, when they use the PC of the parents to websites which already have the ID from the adults. Nobody else as the parents can control it. Apart it isn’t a rule which is worldwide, with countries without age control in their server, easy accesible from everywhere but out of the control by goverments.

I’m still with the Yang-Mills Theory and it’s Mass gap problem.

Steganographic messages are pretty save, not so because they are very difficult to reveal, but if they see an innocent selfie, a photo from a kitten or an mp3 from a famous song, they don’t think tat it can be a hidden message and don’t cause further interests, like an encrypted unreadable message do. Snowflake is another thing, often used by journalists in totalitary countries. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/bocovich

You can’t escape when you currently appears life in one of the millons cams anywhere and even with this life in YouTube, additional to the surveillance of big corporations, banks and the own ISP. Privacy nowadays is relative, you can only patch the biggest holes. 100% privacy is stay at home and reading a book with the smartphone turned off.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=live+webcams+around+the+world

https://www.earthcam.com/

https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam.html

https://worldcams.tv/

etc… adding millons more used by police and govs with face recognition soft.

Snowflake or steganographic comunication, works even in North Corea, encrypted messages are not a solution, because they always cause suspicion in countries with strong surveillance and censorship. VPN are not the solution either, even in occidental coutries, there are a lot of webs which are not accesible with a VPN or Proxy, mostly streaming sites, eg. Rakuten and others.

Well, you can also buy an server or use an online service to selfhost apps as alternative to this.

Any image editor is valid, eg. Minipaint, which is FOSS, complete and works right in the browser (hosted in github.io), using images from eg. Pixabay (images, vectors, videos, gifs, music, sounds) which are all free to use (CC or copyleft). Really not a problem to create memes without copyright issues (and without AI).

Also devs want to eat sometimes and for services there are few possibilities to create incommings, turning it in a paid service, put ads or using afiliate links which ay an revenue if the user use these. A no go are selling private user data which are the methodes of big corporations, this is the real problem. But it isn’t avoidable, when you block these that also those which use ethical methodes are affected. The solution is only a clear legislation making it illegal to sell private user data to third parties, out of control how these use or protect these. There isn’t any other. Privacy is a basic right, period. Traffiking with user and metadata is a crime.

Ads are needed to create incommings needed by an service, but legit are only contextual ads, but not personalized ones results of surveilance and profiling, worst if also used with tracking and metadata logging. This is the main reason why the use of adblocker and other filter measures are mandatory, sorry for those which use only contextual banners to create some incommings.

Updates are needed for security and not a problem in a gutted Windows 11 (mine use <700 MB RAM), with third party privacy tools, like Portmaster, blocking not needed telemetries and unwanted traffic. Updates almost security patches and Defender definitions

Fingerprinting isn’t allways synonym of the lack of privacy. But there are differences between fingerprinting for tracking and profiling reasons, which certainly is needed to block or to spoof, and tecnically data needed to show correctly the content of a page, eg the first public IP numbers to show the content in your lenguage, the fonts used, screen resolution, OS, browser engine…, all data which are the same for millon other users. We can block por complete the fingerprinting, but than we’ll see that half of the pages are not shown correctly or don’t even work. It’s always an commitment to set the fingerprint blocking. VPNs add an privacy layer, but dont avoid fingerprintings, used as extension can’t avoid that the browser connect first to the ISP before the VPN can create the tunnel, with which it may serve to skip country restrictions, but you are still seen by your ISP. It don’t also blocking the fingerprinting, except the IP. To stay private depends more on other measures, DNScrypt, not to use apps, search engines and services which logs/share our activity, using ad/trackerblocker… and the most important, common sense, not a tin foil hat. PEBCAK

Nothing new, it’s known since years, with and without AI, Google always had read your Gmail, before AI to show personalized ads, that mean that the mails are also open to third parties. Gmail never was a private mail service.

I’ll never enable it precisely because I understand the security and privacy implications. Windows would be a nice OS without all this crap, bloatware and services to “improve the user experience” and which nobody needs.

In short: yes, because Cloudflare is the man in the middle between you and half the internet, most pages use it’s service.

There are two Windows services which are big Data hogs, slowing down the system and which you can desactivate, the hibernation service, which create temporary duplicates of every open app in a temporary file, so it open this apps after Reboot, it’s not really needed, you can put apps you use regulary simply in the Start avoiding to fill your PC with tons of temp files. Apart the Index service, which stored any change in the file system, to accelerate the search, but this in a modern PC, more if you use an SSD, don’t make much diifference, but save a lot of RAM and CPU.

For customize the UI and the Start menu, which in Win 11 is by default an absolute crap with an chunky Fisher Price design, where you can’t customize not even the Task Bar, you can use WindHawk (FOSS), it’s something like an userscript manager, which permits to change any aspect of the GUI with an click.

This always happens when those who create laws are senile old men who confuse a remote control with a mobile phone or corrupt politicians, paid by lobbies, instead of experts in the corresponding subject.

If you have to use Windows, there are two mandatory apps with which you can turn Windows in an fast, private and submissive OS without nags and trackings, Hellzerg Optimizer and Portmaster. My tweked W11 use less than 1 GB in RAM and the GUI has nothing to do with the (horrible) original one.

It’s about profiling the user, logging his activities and searches, certainly bring more money than these “rewards”.

Not only Chromiums in this alliance, also Geckos there.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/browser-choice-alliance-launch/

EDGE is an usefull app for downloading an Browser in a new Windows.