Ahh, Google’s tried and true method of throwing a million half-baked features to people before promptly cancelling them all. This will definitely work for them.

Yes-- same with bluetooth or ordering groceries for delivery and giving your home address. There’s always ways to leak data and make it no longer anonymous. However, from my knowledge of how some of these datasets work, they aren’t putting in a lot of effort into truly trying to make sure the joins are 100% accurate because it rarely matters. They generally don’t give a shit about you as an individual. The most common uses of the data are for advertising and mistargeting doesn’t cost enough to justify the time to verify the data.

Paying in cash though can make it anonymous, or by using virtual cards that mask your card id.

Sure, but you can usually register with fake info though. I’ve never seen one really verify much of any information.

Just use one of those email forwarding services that generates unique addresses.

everyone can sign up as “JP Morgan” at “555 Fuckoff Lane”. I’m guessing it might be better if we all standardize to make it harder to connect the sold datasets. If they have address checking we should find some tiny town with 200 people from google maps.

Protip: Many grocery stores allow you to just grab cards without signing up (in the US at least). You can tell them you’ll send it in later.

Then, you can use whatever the fuck info you want and still get the “rewards” so it’s not attached to you. If you use the apps on your phone, make sure they don’t have bluetooth access.

You should care, but it’s maybe more of a question about how much and about what specific things. There are some easy-to-do things, and then there’s others that get exhausting

Some of this depends on why you care about privacy and where you live. It’s a lot of work, and in some places, like the US, there’s a lot of data being sold anyway (credit/debit cards, tvs, streaming services, and stores can almost all sell some of your data and it can be difficult to stop them). Keeping Bluetooth on also enables you to be tracked going in and out of stores and other various locations.

It can be a lot of work, but some things are more worthwhile than others. There are likely some things you’re just going to have to live with.

This. Works for many, but there are some services that recognize it’s a VoIP service and won’t allow it (I think discord was one that won’t work)

Another option is a burner phone, which are relatively cheap. You have to use them periodically or they’ll disable and recycle the number, but you can typically find them for around 25$.

Is there a company they wouldn’t buy? Unity maybe?

Chrome lost its way years ago. I value not seeing ads or getting personalized content more than I value 99% of the chrome features.

Since Firefox finally fixed that weird memory fragmentation issue, it’s been pretty smooth sailing for me. Inspector & Debugger could use a few performance patches though.

YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Exactly. The only other choices here are to buy used with a risk or wait longer to upgrade.

In this particular case, it’s a bit more complicated.

I suspect the majority of 30x0 & 40x0 card sales continue to be for non-gaming or hybrid uses. I suspect that if pure gamers stopped buying them today for months, it wouldn’t make much of a difference to their bottom line.

Until there’s reasonable competition for training AI models at reasonable prices, people are going to continue buying their cards because it’s the most cost-effective thing – even at the outrageous prices.

I’ve met a ton of people that just don’t care. The problem often isn’t that they don’t know companies are collecting a shit-ton of data. That’s really not new or isolated to tech companies.

“If I get better ads and it saves me time, what do I care?”
“I’m getting something for free. What does it matter if they know?”

“It’s too much work to avoid”

Ive used pihole and also just removed the network’s settings.

If you want to stream, i don’t know how useful any of these mitigations are. You’re giving them some data to subscribe and use. Even if you share accounts, who knows what the apps collect.

1 & 2 were both bioware developed games - including their original expansions.

It was never a processor issue. It was a few motherboards with buggy bioses (Asus and Gigabyte I believe) that would overvolt in a few instances and it has been patched since april or may.

You can see a bit of the details here if you care: GamersNexus