Marcus @gerowen@mastodon.social

Anybody else ever look at these and think, "Ain't no way I'm plugging my phone into a random-ass USB cable." Am I the weird one? Also refuse to use those public "charging stations" where it's just a wad of USB cables hanging out of a podium. #privacy #security #walmart

Everybody and their brother on my Facebook page is uploading pictures of themselves, their kids, their parents, etc. to this new app called "New Profile Picture". Upon checking the Whois registration, I noticed something a bit sus. #privacy #russia #cybersecurity

Maybe it's because I'm a noob, but the ability to collapse blocks of code when you're done with them to save screen space in #Geany is just awesome as hell. #Linux

Koji Kondo has got to be one of the great composers of our time, if not ever. #nintendo

Mental health and prayer apps are incredibly invasive when it comes to user #privacy. Some of them even keep transcripts of your conversations and sell those conversations to advertisers.

https://surveillance-report.castos.com/episodes/these-apps-spy-on-your-mental-health-sr87

Lurch (the great dane) has been my best bud since we got him, and every time I would leave with just him, Copper, our younger husky, would throw a fit crying want to come along. He absolutely adores Lurch. So, I picked up another leash and s-biner to properly secure him in the bed so he can stand up, but can't get over the bed sides, and took him with me today while I ran some errands. He thought it was the greatest day ever getting to ride around with Lurch. #dogsofmastodon #pets #dogs

I did have a thought though. I don't recall my last takeout including YouTube, so I think the reason this one is so large is that it possibly contains copies of all the YouTube videos I've ever uploaded, which would actually be quite a lot.

I apologize, but I forgot to add a caption to the above image, but it's just a screenshot showing 10 of 18 parts of my Takeout, measuring about 50GB per part.

We might live out in the woods where the nearest Walmart is a half hour away and don't even think about a Starbucks unless you're willing to drive an hour, but with symmetric gigabit, no blocked ports and no data caps from our local co-op for $110 a month, I really can't complain about the internet speeds we get, :-)

I have yet to finish downloading all the bits and pieces, but my reason for doing a fresh one is that I've heard that, since my last one, Google's practices and policies have changed somewhat, Amazon sends less useful information in their email receipts, etc. So my intention is to compare my takeout from 2019 to this one from 2022. I still intend to do that, but with this much data, it might take a while...

So in light of the attention my previous posts regarding #Google data collection is getting, on the 28th I decided to do a fresh Google Takeout of my data, since the one in my posts is from like 2019. Since then I basically stopped using Google services; deleted all my e-mails/contacts and regularly clean out my spam folder, deleted all my photos and drive files. Despite all this, this new one is MASSIVE. My 2019 takeout is less than 7GB. My new one appears to be close to 1TB... #privacy