Sorry I wasn’t clear - I should have worded it differently. I meant to infer that I was referring to whomever did.

Does “the feds” include Amazon?

Gotta laugh at the downvotes. Maybe you’d like to be her tech support?

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If the Kindle never has Internet access (and that includes access through another app) Amazon should not be able to connect at all, but even if your books are from a public library Amazon will still be provided a record of them.

From one library’s site: “…we want you to know that when you check out a Kindle eBook you must use your Amazon account. At that point we no longer have control over protecting your records associated with this transaction. At the very least, Amazon may use this information to recommend other items for purchase to you, as is the case with any purchases you make through the site.”

YouTube buffers content and your device may have already downloaded the entire file, but if it’s a phone it would just switch to the mobile network.

Sometimes I think I’m too paranoid about this stuff and the next day they’ll be another headline about corporate abuse of “protected” consumer data or yet another breach. Remember Facebook’s years long access of protected medical records through a tracking tool installed on a third of medical websites? I’m probably not paranoid enough.

Pretty sure a decent amount of them are bots.

Could be, but those bots must be programmed to simulate actual Maggots. They don’t know how to spell, capitalize or use punctuation, much less write more than a single barely comprehensible sentence.

Apple.

I’ve used Massgrave, but that and the other things you mentioned are not options in this case.

A few years ago I helped a different friend when her printer quit working on Windows 10. What started as occasional help turned into near daily phone calls and demands for tech support to get the printer working again. Turned out her boyfriend was getting pissed off when he was playing a game and killing Windows with the power button on the PC.

Lesson learned.

I’m not willing to become anyone’s tech support rep. I’ll help this friend occasionally but won’t go further than that.

I found it useful for some things. We have a pack of coyotes in town that preys on dogs and occasionally is spotted in the neighborhood. It was also useful for business & contractor recommendations, but have to otherwise agree with you.

It goes deeper with Nextdoor. During Covid someone living next to a local evangelical church posted pictures of a packed event where no one was wearing a mask. Some of those pictures included the backs of a few kid’s heads.

The “Good Christian” church members complained that he was a pedophile and Nextdoor deleted his account! This could not be done by moderators and required Nextdoor executive approval.

Nextdoor is a Maggot haven from top to bottom.

Even in my relatively liberal U.S. city, Next Door is overrun by Magats who are cheered on and protected by right-wing Magat moderators. It needs to die and this looks like a great replacement.

I find it puzzling that people are OK with allowing a mammoth, regularly hostile corporation know exactly what books they’re reading as well as the exact details of their reading habits. Everything is accessible to Amazon - when and how often you access a book, how fast you read and when you linger on or return to a page. I wonder when they’ll implement camera-based eye tracking so they know what word you’re on?

The same public libraries that vigorously defend the privacy of our reading lists are simultaneously fine outsourcing all ebook access to Amazon where there’s no expectation of privacy at all. Epubs at those libraries are now so well hidden they’re not even mentioned anymore and access is buried multiple levels deep in the mandatory Libby app.

I love the ease of access and convenience of ebooks, but paper books are becoming more and more appealing by comparison.

Microsoft is making it impossible to use Windows PCs without an online account. Obviously there’s Linux, but I’m not willing to be her only source of tech support. That leaves Apple.

Lots of people miss posts and there’s always a main character who’s oh-so offended because if they’ve seen something before, obviously everyone else has too. Thanks for reposting(?) this.

Let me, for once, not mince words here: Windows 11 is a travesty, a loose collection of dark patterns and incompetence, run by people who have zero interest in lovingly crafting an operating system they can be proud of. Windows has become a vessel for subscriptions and ads, and cannot reasonably be considered anything other than a massive pile of user-hostile dark patterns designed to extract data, ad time, and subscription money from its users.

I ran into the same type of problem trying to reset the forgotten MS password for a friend. In her case she could log in to her PC with a PIN but not her password. Outlook was still accessible from the PC but not her phone.

Attempting to change the password resulted in an “SMS service not available” message 90% of the time over a period of days. The few times the service was available and it said we successfully changed the password, the new password would not work, even when we were positive it was entered correctly. The SSD wasn’t anywhere near full.

Microsoft then turned the days already wasted because of their incompetence into a week. As a last ditch effort we tried Microsoft’s 24 hour turn-around password reset questionnaire three times. After going through the process the new password was still rejected both on her PC and phone every single time.

We eventually had to give up. If her PC or her Outlook app ever asks for a password she’ll lose all access and that’s apparently just fine with Microsoft. When she does buy a new PC it’ll be an Apple.