6mo ago

What are some privacy focused forms of entertainment?

A while ago I reached a point in my privacy journey where I simply felt bored. It's not a result of going too far in privacy, but simply my threat model has caused me to let go of a lot of things that used to entertain me (games, movie streaming, short form video, etc.) The entertainment landscape in privacy seems pretty bleak, since you no longer own the movies you watch, the games you play, and lots of proprietary software along the way. I entertain myself through FreeTube, physical copies of movies, and offline installations of games like Minecraft, but it's still a step down from how it used to be.

What do you do to keep yourselves entertained in a privacy conscious way?

49 comments

Hiking, camping, fishing, outdoor activities.
Woodworking, painting, knitting, blacksmithing.
Basically anything that's not connected to a screen.
- Gasps
  
  🫨

Go to your public library and just sit there and read a book
- Public library would be less private than just pirating the book. Public spaces tend to be thoroughly captured by stray security cameras (often with terrible Security). Impossible to avoid going outside lol so most likely fine.
  
  You’ll never be able to live your life if you never go out.

You could try jacking off
- To porn that you have painted yourself ahead of time.
  
  You ever search any torrent tracker for anything not very specific? 80% of the results are porn.
  
  Paint me like one of your French girls, Jack

Buy a book with cash. Read the book.
The entertainment landscape in privacy seems pretty bleak, since you no longer own the movies you watch
It's the other way around.
- They have cameras in the bookstores with facial recognition
  
  then don't go to those bookstores with cameras 🤦
  not all bookstores have cameras
  
  Who does?

Personally I haven't really changed anything about my entertainment other than how I attain it. Torrented movies, shows, and books, cracked games, and ad+sponsor blocked YT via Piped mean I get all the same entertainment as ever if not more (plus I actually own it forever). The only thing I'll admit I miss a bit is Reddit.

Board games with friends and family. My brother rotates hosting board game night with his friends and it's great fun.

Pirate movies, shows, and music.
That and I play old games. SMB 2 rn.

You can own movies by pirating them. same goes for games etc
- But games will still have the built in invasive telemetry I think.
  
  unshare -nc
  Not my problem.
  
  When people get games from e.g. fitgirl-repacks, do they play them offline? (just curious, I don't play games)
- False, a pirated game is still anti-libre software.

Minetest in creative mode with Radio Free Fedi's comfy channel playing in the background 🤌

Emulation is a great for offline gaming. You can also find some great FOSS games on flathub like srb2, srb2k and Mindustry. You can also get old books for free on Project Gutenberg and audiobooks on Librivox. In Germany (and other European countries) there is state financed tv which has free drmfree adfree and (relatively) privacy friendly streaming services. Newgrounds also is a treasure trove, especially for music. Also there is piracy

Cycling is amazing if there are good roads that aren't much traveled around your area and check your local arthouse cinema, they even still might have paper tickets 😸

Anything that doesn't require high tech still works really well. Don't need to worry about tracking software that tries to sell you something with say a horse or two. And as a bonus you get lots of physical activity as well which is healthy.
- Don't need to worry about tracking software
  Unless you do it near a device with gapps installed because these were proven to collect real-time microphone data (may not be the case anymore).

I just get a separate device with a fake identity and no personal data for games and proprietary software. Short videos are hosted by very invasive companies and don't have any APIs or anything to make custom privacy-friendly frontends so it's out of the question (fortunately imo because that things are addictive and can degrade a person in months). Idk much about movies because I've never used a paid movie service like Netflix but since they're paid, privacy is very questionable there.
Unfortunately digital entertainment is very privacy-invasive overall. You can fix some of the privacy issues by the cost of convenience but some things will remain too invasive to be viable in many threat models.
- Short videos are hosted by very invasive companies and don’t have any APIs or anything to make custom privacy-friendly frontends so it’s out of the question (fortunately imo because that things are addictive and can degrade a person in months).
  If you view tiktok content thru ProxiTok, it fails to be addictive because things like autoplay and recommendations are disabled.
  
  ProxiTok
  Never heard of it but if a client with proper profiling mitigation exists, it's awesome. Though (as I understand) since there's pretty much no useful content on TikTok (unless it's a shortened copy of a YouTube video or something), good recommendations are really needed to keep the user entertained so privacy-focused clients without total profiling kill the point of the app.

Go read at your local library, you don't even need to check the books out if you read them there.

You can make your own open-source games, it's pretty fun. And of course there are loads of games that have no telemetry what so ever.
- "Holy shit this guy programs games to play them what a chad." - MigratingtoLemmy

I read books. I tinker.

"Shorts" rot your brain like maggots. They are like smoking nicotine. You are probably suffering from withdraw of domine.
I think it is healthy to not be constantly entertained. Go outside and be in nature for a while. Maybe you could even meet someone new.

Motorcycling. Nearly all modern bikes have no ability to touch the internet, so you can get into a really fun hobby with practical benefits without being spied on.

49 comments

🫨