This shouldn’t be this way. Thanks to the numerous ads, my YouTube experience was a calculated nightmare. As my usage grew in the last few weeks because of my daytime job, my time on YouTube felt light a nightmare with no end. I decided to put an end to all this by subscribing to YouTube Premium. I feel in full contradiction to my values. YouTube Premium so much better. But it shouldn’t be this way. Continue reading →

For those who likes newsletters, I’ve got one too! It’a about Apple, photography, privacy and climate change, in that order! https://numericcitizen.substack.com/p/2021-02

It’s becoming quite frustrating to see Apple’s Safari not being supported for browser extensions. Safari is now reportedly supporting standard web extensions but with an Apple twist making it cumbersome for developers to add support. Apple being Apple, I think it is related to the requirement of having to download an application in order to be able to expose an extension to Safari’s engine. Thanks to privacy protection, Apple is forcing the game here, but this has real consequences. Continue reading →

Today, January 28th, is data privacy day. I didn’t know that. Now I know, thanks to Mr. Phillip Schiller. I paid a visit to Apple’s privacy web page. What I found is a super nicely designed page with highlights of Apple’s ecosystem privacy focused features. To me, Apple’s privacy stance is a product, not a feature. “Privacy is a fundamental human right. At Apple, it’s also one of our core values. Continue reading →

Apple made mandatory privacy protection “nutrition” labels on its App Store. One guy refuses to update its apps since then: Google. Maybe they are even worst than Facebook if such a thing is even possible. Was Google caught by surprise? Highly impossible. They had many months to prepare for that. When your business model highly depends on sucking all users data, it’s hard to escape suspicion. Continue reading →

A recent article by Benedict Evans exposes how hard it is to “fix” social networks. “The internet and then social platforms break a lot of our definitions of different kinds of speech, and yet somehow Facebook / Google / Twitter are supposed to recreate that whole 200-year tapestry of implicit structures and consensus, and answer all of those questions, from office parks in the San Francisco Bay Area, for both the USA and Myanmar, right now. Continue reading →

DHH on Twitter seems happy that the messaging app, Signal, finally has its moment. I don’t really know about Signal, but I do know about another one, Telegram. Now that Parler is out of this world, I’m wondering if people prefer Signal over Telegram. Is Signal more secure than Telegram? According to this website, Telegram, is apparently not as secure as its maker pretends it is. Now, I’m wonder how these movements between messaging platforms would be affected if Apple decided to make iMessage cross-platform: on iOS, on macOS, on the web and on Android. Continue reading →

In What to do about Apple devices and iCloud content when the owner dies from AppleInsider, there are so many unanswered questions. For example, are the requirements from Apple different from one country to another? Something critical when someone dies, having access to his or her smartphone with a PIN. Without it, the challenge is close to impossible to meet. That is one of the many requirements explained in A Guide for Preparing to Leave Your Numeric Legacy. Continue reading →

Thanks to all the teams at Apple for putting this App privacy feature together. Just like food labels, application labels were long overdue. Apple is far from perfect, I wrote about that a few weeks ago, but at the very least they do move the needle quite a bit. Bravo. Continue reading →

Wait for the previous gif to load and animate. What the fusk is wrong with the owners of iPhone in Canada website? This animated gif shows how wrong the web can become. There are 21 trackers on this website. The more trackers, the more ads, the less content there is. What a pity. For this reason, I don’t visit their website, I only subscribe to their RSS feed and Safari notifications. Continue reading →

Following this statement from Microsoft, here is one question for you, Microsoft: why haven’t they thought, at the very beginning, that this Office 365 feature wasn’t a good idea to begin with? Here is another question: Who do you think you are to devise a “Microsoft Productivity Score”? “a tool that helps organizations measure and manage the adoption of Microsoft 365” — Microsoft There is a difference in semantic here: measuring adoption vs measuring productivity score. Continue reading →

Interesting post from @Gruber about Facebook application design. The lack of support for basic things like dark mode, more than a year after its introduction is a simple example, but very telling about something: Facebook doesn’t give a shit about those things. They don’t give a shit about privacy protection either. They don’t give a shit about democracy. They are are bad at design. They are bad at everything. And their growth is slowly declining which is a bit of fresh air to know. Continue reading →

According to the New York Time regarding the antitrust lawsuit in the works, Google is paying between 8 to 12 billions $ a year to be the default search engine on iOS. That is a lot of money, but apparently, that’s the price to pay for Apple to bend over their privacy stance. If there is one reason why Apple should get out of this deal and build their own search tech or buy DuckDuckGo altogether: put the walk behind the talk. Continue reading →

After installing Safari 14 on macOS Catalina, I went on Apple.com to see what trackers would be reported. Unsurprisingly, Apple doesn’t use any trackers. Now, the big question: do you believe Apple doesn’t track its main website usage? Continue reading →

Is Apple bending towards Facebook? Not a good day for privacy protection. 😒

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Forgot to put the evidence for my previous post. Here it is.

I can’t wait to watch this, even if I know it will be a troubling portrait of our modern society. While waiting for it, here is something even more troubling. The email I got announcing this new short film to be shown on Netflix does contain a tracking pixel, according to Hey. How curious this is. 🧐 From Center for Humane Technology. youtu.be/uaaC57tcc… Continue reading →

Something I should show to all my friends on Facebook who doesn’t care about privacy…

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iOS 14 is a massive update in regards to privacy protection. I love that! #apple #ios14 #privacy twitter.com/kuba_sude…

Bravo. How many takes the time to “clean up” gathered online accounts? Privacy protection has many many facets. m.signalvnoise.com/celebrati…