Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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Advice on cleaning bloatware off of a new PC (www.bestbuy.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I helped my 77 year old mother purchase a new laptop, and I want to be sure to get all the bloatware off of it, and set her up with with some better privacy options. I am aMac guy at home so I haven't done this kind of thing for many years. (I use Windows at work, so I'm quite familiar and capable, but obviously I have to rely on IT knowing what they are doing (they don't)). I did make sure to get the pro version of Windows 11. I'm going to set her up with Proton mail I think. This is the computer that is coming:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-thinkbook-16-g6-abp-amd-in-16-touch-screen-notebook-amd-ryzen-5-with-16gb-memory-512gb-ssd-gray/6565272.p?skuId=6565272

(Forgive me if this is not the correct place to post)

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[–] rdyoung 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Your making an assumption and your infantilizing someone you've never met. It's entirely possible that she is old enough that even if she did have the ability to discern this stuff that she's more likely to fall for shit, but it's also possible that she can learn how to spot stuff and avoid it. It's been awhile since I have played with Linux, is it really ready for prime time? Especially if someone had spent decades using windows?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Here where I live people after 50 don't even know what the word "browser" means and of course they can't spot fakes that well
As I understood from the post, she's not much of a computer user. If it's the case, the OS doesn't matter because she isn't used to any of them

[–] rdyoung 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

You aren't OP and again your assuming and infantilizing. Remember that it's those over 50, 60, etc that brought us the tech that evolved into what we are using now.

As for the spotting scams, fakes, etc, that not an age thing, that is something you have to be taught and learn from experience. There are 20 year olds who fall for the crypto spam and websites. This is why I suggest using noscript, ublock origin and maybe even a vpn that also blocks this shit. Though with the script blockers people need to be taught how to tell which domain is probably safe to enable. I sometimes have to go through and allow certain ones until the site works well enough to be usable.

For the record. I'm soon to be 43 and my wife is soon to be 54. My wife is less tech savvy than me but is definitely not an easy mark for scams and definitely knows more about computers than some people younger than her.