A bit annoyed.

[welshpixie@mastodon.art]

A bit annoyed. I want to get more active with the community in my area, especially around the arts & crafts and mental health scene, but of course every place/organization and all the people use Facebook to communicate -.- I deleted my FB account ages ago but then had to make a 'fake' one in order to communicate with the cat rescue place I foster from, they work through Facebook.

Looks like I may need to flesh that one out a bit.

[andycarolan@social.lol]

@welshpixie Too many places still use it for their comms. Same with WhatsApp groups sadly.

[welshpixie@mastodon.art]

@andycarolan Aye :(

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@welshpixie @andycarolan the parents’ group chat at my little one’s nursery school is on WhatsApp. Nobody is on Signal.

I deleted my WA account almost 6 years ago and wouldn’t want to associate my real number to it… or give it access to my address book.

So I got a second pre-paid SIM card and have WhatsApp on a GrapheneOS phone in a sandboxed user profile.

The things you gotta do these days to minimize predatory data harvesting by Meta… 😒

[andycarolan@social.lol]

@_elena Ugh, that's tedious. I think people gravitate to WA purely because "all the people I know are on there". I have like one person on Signal, and everyone else is on iMessage. I refuse to use WA or anything Meta.

Great solution with the second phone! In an ideal world, we wouldn't all have to take such measures though.

We shouldn't have to choose between privacy, and social connections.

@welshpixie

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@andycarolan @welshpixie people would find me odd because I'd say: "I have Whatsapp installed on a burner phone that's not always with me... so sorry if it takes me a while to answer your messages".

I ended up doing a bridge via the Beeper app on my main phone... but you have to use it actively or else the bridge is severed and you have to re-link it.

Still, I like that WA doesn't have access to my address book or my photo albums anymore... It's just that I know my info gets leaked by others

[andycarolan@social.lol]

@_elena Sounds like a great precaution to me!

I really don’t think most people care about their data being harvested by meta, or sold, leaked, distributed. Either that or they don’t really know how bad it all is for their privacy, and in some cases, their safety.

@welshpixie

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@andycarolan True.
This is precisely why I found a great community on the Fediverse: people here deeply care about privacy, consent and protecting themselves & their loved ones against the toxic, predatory ways of Big Tech.

I may appear eccentric by people in my real life… who then tell me - years later, after a scandal erupts - “oh you were right”.

It’s exhausting to be a Cassandra. But here I’m just a regular person… maybe even a little behind in the path to tech empowerment 😅

@welshpixie