this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026
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cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/70348978

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[–] dsilverz@catodon.rocks 11 points 2 days ago (9 children)

I once stumbled upon this app automatically installed on the phone I happen to have paid for (because at this point I doubt I could call this piece of metallic tile "my phone" and suing Google Inc. for them to refund me this phone would be as successful as if I tried to push and move a certain Mountain View building from its place with my own muscles). Shortly after that, it seems to have vanished from the list of apps as mysteriously as it initially appeared, either it uninstalled itself or it was changed names.

In any case, as soon as I realized that presence and realized I wouldn't have an "uninstall" option without turning on options that would straightforwardly break banking apps and government apps (gov.br the Brazilian app for everything citizen-related) I was compelled to use, I started filling the phone's gallery with all sorts of potentially-triggering stuff I either find online or (mainly) make myself: dark art including FNAF-like jump scares, haunted/cursed artifacts and occult/ritualistic imagery, photos and videos depicting snakes and scorpions, lots of Memento Mori including photos of cemeteries and tombstones, archaeological skeletons, buzzards eating animal carcasses in the wilderness, as well as media of my own cut wr... I mean, uhm, media of my own cute wrathful owl I sculpted on Blender. Yeah, several different 3d rendered scenes and short animation videos as well, especially scenes in which she's performing chases and huntings... Not to mention the plethora of owl photos and videos, many of which are birdwatching of them catching and eating prey on nature, in potentially gory settings (i.e. the unfiltered, untamed nature who doesn't care about our anthropocentric definitions of good and evil).

So if Google decides to start "protecting me from (my own) sensitive imagery", their clanker is essentially going to have a hard time having to go through gibibytes of media and potentially wiping the whole device as I made sure to fill the entire storage (even non-media things too, such as using provoking nicknames for fictional contacts like a contact card for "Inanna", as well as odd descriptions for bank transactions such as "my soul belongs to Ereshkigal") with purposefully sensitive content. If they do that, I'll then have something more concrete to sue them for: religious intolerance, as it's all representing of my left-hand path spirituality.

And with all this I leave this one absurdist idea on how to try and boycott the corporate nanny (and surveillance). A phone gallery full of sensitive items (not nudes, but dark/provocative art purposefully built to trigger similar nannying responses) will hopefully overwhelm their servers, shall they offload the computing to their data centers. If this doesn't overwhelm their servers, at least the techbros and their clankers are going to have an interesting time when scrolling through legal-yet-disturbing content they hoarded from Android users' phones.

!technology@lemmy.world

[–] plz1@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

So...

  1. They really don't care about that stuff
  2. They are using your own phone's processing power to scan, not theirs. I'm sure they have a phone-home mechanism, but they have no vested interest in scanning server-side when they can do it phone-side.
[–] dsilverz@catodon.rocks 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As I said to borari, when stuff involves lots (GiBs) of nonindexed files (my private art) and a smartphone whose hardware can barely make a distilled Llama/Gemma to spit out a "The sum of the squares of the sides is the square of the hypotenuse" (yes, I did try local LLMs so I'm aware of my hardware limits), they would have no choice other than phone home, and thus carrying haunting voices through the ongoing call.

Also, they have some inner desire to hoard people's data for training their clanker. Except the data can (and will) be poisoned, thus poisoning the well.

!technology@lemmy.world

[–] willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago

I appreciate the spirit of reistance, also +1 for the left hand path, however, the broader society needs a more solid solution to these privacy-invading and covertly installing apps. I get it you're doing the best you know how. I am in the same boat. But we need something more solid for the long term.

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