I switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago, because it’s just better for personal privacy and the freedom of the web as a whole. Brave would be my second choice, but FF lets you easily self-host a sync server for all your browsing data.
The Opera of today is not the same as the one from back in the days! The original company sold all their code and rights to a chinese consortium in 2016. Since then it’s basically a variant of chromium, with some propriatary features and tracking added. I don’t know the new owners, so I don’t trust them with my browsing data!
Here is a good resource for these kinds of questions: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/
This is suspicion on the level of “you can’t be sure reality didn’t just pop into existence 10 seconds ago”. You can never be 100% sure of what others are doing on their hardware, or of anything really, especially if other people are involved. Your chat partners could leak all your chats and metadata for all you know!
What we do know is that Signal is operated by a non-profit foundation, their client and protocol are open source and considered the gold standard for privacy by pretty much every expert on the subject, they had multiple independent audits and a very good track record, they were subpoenaed and couldn’t comply because they didn’t have the requested data. That’s about as good as you can get.
Depends on the level of technology we are using. If we’re zapping around from one habitable planet or interesting space phenomenon to another star trek style then absolutely yes! But a hard no with our current level of technology. I like to spend my time in an environment that’s actually somewhat friendly to life.
Here is an in-depth technical explaination video.
I won’t buy Apple hardware as long as they keep being absolute dicks in the tech and app world. It’s a shame really, because they build awesome devices, but I would feel bad everytime I use them.
Also they are much more restricted in many aspects (e.g. sideloading!), so it would be a downgrade for me.
I think federating with an instance that would actually want federation to die (have a monopoly) is a very bad idea. Meta would use it’s leverage to actively undermine and harm the Fediverse, because it’s not in their interest to distribute the userbase to multiple servers they don’t own. They only need it to bootstrap their own service.
Ever heard the phrase “democracy without democrats”? That would be Meta in the Fediverse.
Signal if possible, WhatsApp if not. I’m also trying out Session, but it’s still very much work-in-progress.