Privacy : Ever had the feeling you are being followed? You are.

A year ago, I was travelling extensively around the world talking about the importance of privacy on the Internet. I spoke fiercely against data collection and targeting of individuals. This is something that has been on my mind for a long time. The erosion of privacy on the Internet is a very significant problem.

During conversations with my friends, they told me how they felt being watched – whether this was from playing Monopoly and seeing ads for Monopoly afterwards or looking at a dress in a store and later seeing ads for the same clothing online.

Are things this bad?

Almost everything we do online is constantly being collected, scrutinized and processed by algorithms. And this has been happening for some time and is increasing. With the addition of logins on your devices – computers, mobile phones, and tablets – you are continually being tracked. Through logins into services such as Google and Facebook, data is thus collected on you, not just on a random device. Even when you are not connected to the Internet, these logins enable the recording of your location all the time.

But things have got even worse – stealthily and silently.

A few years ago we got the Beacons. When we talk about Beacon tracking technology, it all begins with Apple and Google. In 2013 Apple created iBeacon, which is a technology based on Bluetooth. Here is what Wikipedia says about iBeacon:

iBeacon is based on Bluetooth low energy proximity sensing by transmitting a universally unique identifier picked up by a compatible app or operating system. The identifier and several bytes sent with it can be used to determine the device’s physical location, track customers, or trigger a location-based action on the device such as a check-in on social media or a push notification.”

Google quickly followed suit with the release of Eddystone, a technology similar to iBeacons.

The gates to complete tracking were open.

The most common technology used for tracking location is GPS. Our mobile phones send signals to the local towers, Wi-Fi setups, and Bluetooth devices all the time. With the help of these signals, our movements are being marked on a granular scale. And now with the Beacon technology, we can be followed even more closely, even inside buildings. For instance, when you take a close look at a particular dress in a store, the store knows it and saves all that information.

How does this happen?

While we walk around, our mobile phone listens for and communicates with, any Bluetooth beacons it encounters. The Bluetooth beacons can be placed anywhere – outside in a street, inside a clothing shop, inside a vending machine, or even inside our place of business. Every time our phone walks past one, the beacon knows our phone was there. If someone can collect the data from all of the beacons, they can piece together exactly where we went, and how long we were at each location. This can be used to decide which item in the store we spent the most time looking at – food, magazines, clothes and more.

Some time ago, a story on a Norwegian startup, Unacast, caught my eye. The story was about them getting funding, but the article in question did not go into detail about the services they provided. I decided to read more and found that they were doing something quite interesting and at the same time, scary. This is the way they describe themselves:

“We empower companies to make smarter decisions by providing the most accurate understanding of human activity in the real world through the Real World Graph.”

Still not getting it? Here’s an excerpt from their recent press release:

Unacast is the first company to enable a scalable way for retailers and brands to retarget customers online based on accurate behavior in the physical space.”

I continued to dig and to my dismay discovered that my old company had been involved in this as well. I am appalled, but not surprised. My old company has changed a lot.

“Opera/Unacast partnership connects advertisers to global beacon data for the first time.”

“Advertisers can now segment and target consumers based on where they went in the real world”.

As a proponent of privacy, I am concerned. Are you – as a user – fully aware of the data collection happening when you walk into a store? And even if you are, do you know what’s being collected?

Companies such as Unacast are making a complete picture of us and our habits by combining our data from both online tracking and real-world tracking, and in many cases, they are succeeding to an alarming degree allowing us to lose all ability to remain private.

In the earlier days, this was called spyware – software that spies on you. Unfortunately, the large companies, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook all resort to spying on us. They indulge in hyper-targeted advertising based on more and more intrusive personal surveillance. This, in my opinion, is unethical and wrong. Collection of massive information on people should be banned. Our data should be no-one’s business but our own.

Privacy is not something that we should have to justify or argue for – it should be assumed. A default. Only regulation and responsible technological solutions will make privacy possible in its true sense.

And I sincerely hope the authorities can do the right thing and ban the combination of data sources and the trading of customer information. But regulation can take time to come into effect.

The most pragmatic way to protect our own interests then is to boycott companies that indulge in such practices. At the end of the day, the options are there. Taking our privacy back is not as arduous as we think. Be more vigilant and stop regarding technology as only a matter of convenience. The choice is ours – either we get watched and stalked or, we live the lives that we deserve free from constant surveillance.

So are you still wondering if you are being followed? You are. Online and off. And this has got to stop!

Join the Conversation

  1. Hi Jon,
    Thanks for your concern about my privacy. I’m about 50% there. And currently don’t need a cell phone. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat. I can live without them.
    But, I love Google Maps and can get around their wanting my location all the time. Monetization is a hard road to travel. Keep up the good work.
    MoonDawg

    1. IMHO there is a misunderstanding somewhere that just because companies have access to information that they could use that information and sell it. This has in turn led to companies seeking information that they do not need to perform the services they are providing and building business models around spying on their customers. It can be quite lucrative to build spyware, but so can robbing banks, but that does not make it legal. Just because you can do something does not give you the right to.

    2. You could try OpenStreetMap, It’s a FOSS map of the world. Their website doesn’t have tracking as far as I know. There are a bunch of apps out there that source data from them such as MAPS.ME and OsmAnd. Google maps has very good data in the US, but elsewhere in the world it’s about on par with OpenStreetMap.

  2. At the end of the day, isn’t is possible that big data feeds our military systems? Do those in power (that you seek) have any power to reverse the present course? The audit trail seems to be clear, as the likes of Google/Facebook etc…map to powerful investment banking circles (think about the financial models that justify valuable IPO’s with negative cash-flows etc. These financial circles benefit from quantitative easing. It’s a loop, or even evolution, that cares very little about personal privacy. Perhaps the answer to any push-back will stem from East/West polarities/rivalries.

    1. The military systems are based on the same, the “cookies” were intended for them to use. However, in the US, the Internet was free and it assumed that there were no charge per MB used, so an extra packet to inform them was considered “acceptable”.
      But the US DoD has its own signature, and when you are a mobile operator (US “Carrier”) you see that as much as 30% of all traffic on the net is not to Facebook or Google. This can be taken down and removed – no need to route these packets that nobody pays for, but the subscribers are charged. Google with AdSense pays for this, but nothing special for mobile networks. The rest is the network you use. So you pay for the intelligence to snoop and track you than Google and even Facebook – all the internet services combined.

  3. I am on the same way as previous comment. I don’t want to repeat his comment but I have a question. What do you think about adblockers on mobile such as Blokada for example?

    1. Vlada,

      I am not familiar with Blokade. Personally I feel that we need ads to work on the Internet, just not ad systems that spy on us. We have a lot of wonderful content on the Web and much of it has been ad sponsored. That worked just fine until the large ad companies started to target individuals instead of location. That is where it all went wrong and we need to ban that advertising model.

      Best,
      Jon.

  4. I prefer the generic ads vs the highly targeted ads that are based on everything you do on the web and your location and browser and OS. It gets creepy how much data they get, some of them sell that collected data to other companies.

  5. Why doesn’t Vivaldi have a NEVER save history?????? Not even ONE session….nobody’s business. I don’t want to have to find a way to delete every time I use my browser. Geez, can’t browsers stay out of our hair?

  6. Does Vivaldi provide better safeguards for its mail service as opposed to GMail, Outlook and Yahoo etc. who do not?

    Also, is there more security from prying eyes in Vivaldi browser compared to “omnipresent” Google Chrome and Edge?

    1. Daniel,

      We do not scan your email for content to sell to advertisers and we do not collect information about your browsing habits, so in many ways it is what we do not do that is more important than what we do. That being said, we will continue to look at ways to keep you safe! Watch this space!

      Best,
      Jon.

      1. First of all, thank you and everyone at Vivaldi, for making the right choice; to really care for the privacy of users. That deliberate stance is, unfortunately, quite rare these days. Even GNOME does gather telemetry!

        I do have some questions, which are rather technical. If you feel uncomfortable to answering them publicly, feel free to contact me through e-mail:

        Security is one of the safeguards of privacy in this case. Chromium, where the engine of Vivaldi is based on, continuously improves this. Not just patches to fix eventual flaws, but items like exploit mitigation (ASLR, DEP, etc), runtime hardening, implementing new web standards (the now-defunct HPKP, DNT, Expect-CT, strict site isolation, etc). How does Vivaldi handle this? Are all these upstream changes merged into the Vivaldi codebase soon-ish?
        Encryption is another powerful safeguard. Like the support for new ciphers, protocols, etc. Does Vivaldi use the SSL library shipped with the OS or a built-in library? If the latter: how keen are you on keeping it up to date and enable new functionality, like TLSv1.3?
        Sane defaults is important, IMHO. I’d rather see Startpage or DuckDuckGo as the default search engine, to give an example. Are the Vivaldi defaults secure (like preferring PFS ciphers, protocols, having strict site isolation enabled by default, etc)? And is there documentation on how to further harden Vivaldi (eg, by disabling WebRTC).

        Again, thanks for all your efforts and hard work! Highly appreciated.

    2. My only objection to Vivaldi browser is that it is based on the same Chromium project as spyware Chrome, Opera. I like and use Vivaldi but that bother me. Who knows..?

  7. I am excited, Mr von Tetzchner, that people like you worry about what is happening right now in the big stores of browsers, operating systems and gadgets of all kinds.

    Personally, there is not much I have to hide and I am afraid that if there is someone interested in doing business with my data, it will be pyrrhic, very pyrrhic, what it gets. Of course, that has not freed me from having, for stupid political reasons of the last Harper government in Canada, poked into one of my email accounts for the sole reason of a criticism that I made for the closure of the external broadcasts of Radio Canada International.

    Certainly, I believe that there are elements of our private life that should be kept away from the databases of the merchants we already know and those who come later.

    One of the first lessons I learned in my childhood was not to see over the shoulder what another person is writing or reading. Writing or reading privately is an inalienable right that belongs wholly to anyone.

    That is precisely what these vulgar and anti-social data merchants do: Look over our shoulders at what does not matter to them.

    Now, Mr. von Tetzchner, when I see between your admirable attitude and courage to write these issues and what has been done so far by Vivaldi, that leaves me the impression that there is a small gap that must be eliminated for the user’s happiness with your browser to be complete

    Indeed, if I accept Vivaldi as it give to me (with the paternal greetings of Google included), I am very much afraid that I will continue to be subject to some of the problems that you point out in your excellent essay.

    Receive my best regards.

    PS / I have been following the development of Vivaldi since its first appearance in public. Contrary to what many feel, I never expected nor expect that your browser is the resurrection of that glorious Opera 12x Presto that all the ‘sopranos’ knew: I am sincere, that Opera also had its ugly maculae, but its size on the hard disk was not more than a quarter part of the space occupied by Vivaldi. In this item, it seems to me, it is impossible to overcome it.

  8. Months ago, a couple of friends and I were talking about certain event on an app, and it turns out that hours later one of them entered a social network and a couple of ads about that “appeared” over and over…

    Thanks a lot for pointing this out in a very precise way that can be shared with others 🙂

  9. Jon,

    First, Many Thanks for writing this post. This is something I have been interested in since the early 90’s.
    We only had IE and Netscape that were stable enough to use. In those days only cookies seemed to be the enemy. I can’t remember which, but one would keep cookies in a file (cookies.txt). With some knowledge of Windows I deleted that file and created a Folder named cookies.txt.
    Personally, I tunneled into my Freenet account (I think it means something different 25 years later) and did my browsing through them using Lynx simply because I preferred the less cluttered text format. But I digress.

    You are quite right in saying that user privacy should be the “Default”. You are also correct about companies adding to their business model to collect ***all*** info (or any info they can), whether they need it or not, selling it to marketers or other like businesses and increase that profit margin. Can this be reversed?

    Doubtful, but as consumers ***we*** become the ones who must to turn off bluetooth, not to automatically seek wi-fi, not to stay Logged On to social media or e-mail all day and night.

    Everyone tracks us because each device ha a unique “signature”… from my ISP to my search engine of choice. What does ***one user*** do?

    Browsers are now ***desined*** to track users. Using Flash cookies, Supercookies, The Battery Status API (now defunct, but allowed for cookie free tracking), the beacons you mentioned, various databases we can’t access and God only knows what else.

    Mark Stockley, of Sophos Security, said just today (March 12th) that:

    “These [browser] features, often APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)
    that allow websites to act more like native apps, give sites access to some
    of your device’s most sophisticated capabilities, exposing everything from
    your GPS, gyroscopes and accelerometers, to proximity and ambient light
    sensors.”

    The browser maker now has to play a balancing act as to which features can become security issues advising and explaining possible vulnerabilities to users should they decide to activate them.

    I got the Alpha version of Vivaldi as soon as I heard you had it released. You had developed the best browser on the planet, perhaps you would do it again giving me the security and functionality of the Opera I still use but trust, that’s another thing. With you here at the helm of Vivaldi, Jon, I feel I can again trust my browser.

    The big point now, as I see it, is that now the user(s), has to do all the work to secure their data. Do we really ***care enough*** to take the time to do that work?

    For my fmily and myself, I try.
    I also try to help friends and neighbours when they tell me they have issues and will even intervene if I see them having trouble with something that may compromize them (asking politely if they need help).

    P.S.
    I know you do the occasional tour to promote Vivaldi, so if you are ever in the Toronto area let me know. I would love to hear one of your talks.

  10. This piece was very insightful, and informative. I wasn’t aware of Bluetooth beacons, but I am now.

    As far as moving forward – there’s a tactical way I see that can be implemented today: Algorithms are collecting our data, and they’re making predictions, but they aren’t theory driven (meaning, they don’t understand why we behave the way we do, they simply make Bayesian estimates from previous behavior). What most consumers don’t understand is that these Algorithms are black boxes to the companies that use and develop them fail (look into back propagation, genetic algorithms and ‘hidden nodes’). The point being, if our behaviour changes, these Algorithms will fail.

    My question is, is anyone considering digital mechanisms designed to obfuscate user behavior? If not, they should be.

  11. I too am disappointed but not surprised to see where Opera has gone.

    I can still feel that shock at how it so rudely betrayed the very principles that made its Presto users adopt it and love it. From the first hints (lets just kill all these unique old features since they’re not mainstream enough) to the shock of dumping Presto for Blink (like catching your lover cheating! – literally could not trust them after that) to the lies and avoiding clear answers on the future of mail, dropping of bookmarks(*) etc. to the “innovation” of imposing suggested sites into the front of the interface. Reading press releases about how Opera facilitated blah blah blah advertising blah blah blah targeted revenue streams blah just made me sick to my stomach.

    (*) with hindsight, dropping bookmarks was obviously just a way to force users to do everything through Google – more targeted advertising dollars for Opera…

  12. Dear Jon:

    That’s interesting. A few years ago in the earlier days of the vivaldi browser, when I wrote in the forums my concerns about any lingering data-capturing google hooks, I was met with faux concern and lightly mocked [not by you but] by some members of the vivaldi community. Perhaps they see it differently today.

    Unfortunately, the best way to protect oneself online is to opt out of services from the 5 main companies that harvest, exploit and sell your data – goog, fb, msft, appl, amzn + smaller players to the extent possible. In my case that means that I have no fb account, no gmail, no whatsapp, no instagram, no itunes etc. There are substitutes for many of these expensive services – expensive because the price is your personal private data. And when you walk around, turn off the BT, wifi and location on your devices.

    But given cameras hanging everywhere, and fast facial recognition software being available, soon you will be recognized, tracked and logged pretty much everywhere you go in urban areas even without a device in your pocket.

    Even without being logged in to one of these services, one is being watched on the web.
    Another technique that is used to track you is fingerprinting. Your device has several characteristics such as the OS type, browser, screen size, screen resolution, plug-in details, etc which can be used to identify you uniquely. You might think that there are millions of devices that are the same as yours, but with so many parameters it turns out that your client is probably unique. Have a look at mybrowserinfo.com or whoer.net/#extended or panopticlick.eff.org/ to see what I mean.
    (as a browser expert, I guess that you are familiar with this, I am writing this also for other readers)

    What can vivaldi do to help? One thing that vivaldi could do is to build in multidimensional auto-rotating parameter spoofing (an unwieldy term indeed) to frustrate fingerprinting. There used to be a good add-on (called Random Agent Spoofer) for firefox which did this, but since it is not compatible with webextensions, after version 56 of firefox it no longer works. It allowed you to either spoof or block access to many parameters and to change them in a time interval that the user chose. There are several existing add-ons which change the basic user agent string, but that is not enough. There is still too much information in other parameters which can be used to identify your device uniquely, such as the fonts that are installed, the size of your screen, the size of the browser window, the time zone your clock is set to, language setting, etc etc. If you are serious about implementing this in vivaldi, you might want to perform a temporary install of firefox portable 56, and put in the add-on mentioned above, and look through the menus to see which parameters they spoofed.

    This addition would make vivaldi an even better browser than it already is today!

    -J

  13. I must first appology that my English is not good enough.
    I live in Japan since I was born and I am a native Japanese.
    I am really concerned about my privacy, but the law system of Japan is very weak to protect everyone and the contiousness of privacy is very low in general.
    I was forced to use iPhone by the company whrere I work.
    I have no option but to accept it against my will or quit.
    So I have been looking for any email services which I can trust enough since then.
    I found Vivaldi is one of the most prominent services around the world, so I am looking forward to register in the near future.
    I am very grateful about the way Vivaldi treats any information regarding privacy and the organization seems very serious about it.
    I wish your team continues to do so for the sake of better world.
    Thank you for your great job.

  14. It’s terrifying to thing that we are constantly being listened to. I was talking with a lady at work and she mentioned something about a cat. An hour or two later I start getting Ads for general cat things on Facebook. Funny thing is I have never owned a feline as I am allergic. I am working as a PC Tech and how advanced some of these worms have gotten. I had a businesses who was hacked a couple of weeks ago. The worm got into the Hard Drive Firmware. You have to replace the drive at that point as the Virus is living in the basic code that the HDD. Scary….

  15. Powerless as I feel about all that “datamining” by corporations, I have one consolation: they are doing it “only” for financial gains.

    Now, I would feel a lot, LOT worse, if the government/s were the same kind of information gathering about me, because while companies are “only” in it for the money, govenments are in it for power over me… (NSA, Echelon, PRISM and whatnot, anyone?)

  16. Thanks for the interesting clarifications. For my own, I am worried by the fact that Vivaldi is built on Chromium. It is possibly not the place to launch such aspect. However a post on the specific precautions taken by Vivaldi to avoid infiltration of unwanted technology and drifts through chromium would be of interest for me and perhaps others. Cheers.

  17. There is an easy way to stop most of the tracking abuse, as predominantly it about selling you products or a way of life.
    It should be a legal requirement that if you carry advertising for a product, that you have a direct relationship with that company.
    You should also be held liable for any advertising you carry, and that you host the adverts on your domain.

    This is the old-fashioned method that twit.tv use.
    Direct sponsorship deals with companies and products that are suited to the audience.
    You don’t have to track and follow your target audience, you just need to be where they go.

    Advert companies have far more power than they should, and zero moral standards to guide it with.
    I do a weekly tech/nerd show on my local radio station, and would happily have a sponsor for it, but would be horrified if it was a product I did not trust.
    In that situation I have the power to say no.
    Compared to my WordPress blog and youtube channels, where I do not want any adverts and I was forced to choose several generic categories. which means including totally non-relevant advertising.
    This means I have no idea what viewers may see, or if I like the products.
    I have no way to stop someone paying for malvertising to be shown, and no way to object to the content.
    Conversely any advertiser on my channels can object to my content !

    Advertising and advertising companies were invented before we were connected.
    We no longer need most middlemen in this world.
    Often now the general public can buy direct from the source, or a vendor 1-step away from source.
    Look at ebay and Amazon for example. All that is needed is a market place and a way to use it.

    Do you use the Yellow pages, or use a search engine ?
    Times are changing and the middlemen are trying to make us believe we still need them.

    Originally there was some sanity to web adverts when they were sponsor banners, and later used a “pay-per-click” system, based on genuine user interest.
    Now you can make money by showing a load of adverts to an empty room, meaning no user interest is needed for money to be made.
    They do not care if people buy any of the products, only that they made a lot of money showing the same image on as many surfaces as possible.

    If we can stop the advertisers tracking us, we can just worry about our Governments tracking us instead

  18. I agree with everything you say. Ironic however, that Vivaldi is just a skin of Chrome and heads off to google.com whenever you click on an error message or try and install an extension.

    I would like to block Google and Facebook at the router level.

    I hope GDPR will disrupt their business models and wake the sheeple up.

  19. These modern spyware technologies are presumably made for more effective customer targeting. But, even by what you choose to show to and hide from someone, you can effectively manipulate where the person goes, what he buys, the cash flows, etc etc.
    At first glance it’s just marketing, at the 2nd or 3rd deeper look this technology stack has high potential to become a great instrument for social engineering (like in engineering/manipulating the society). If (when) developed further, such tech can allow unprecedented targeted or “broadcast” control on the global scale. Television was doing similar job pretty effectively for its era, but it lacked the fine-tuned targeting and real-time feedback; that is being “fixed” today.
    Yes, legal regulations must be created, but keep in mind that governments are interested in such techology, too. The question is, who will be leading: local militarized ‘legitimate’ corporations (governments) or transnational business organizations, or maybe some symbiosis of both. Feels like dystopian fiction turning reality.

  20. A thought on what-to-do.
    Looks like we – the end users – will HAVE to study programming languages and everyday hardware to be able to control our devices at least to some extent. Our hope lays in open architectures and modular hardware with fully disclosed specifications, opensource software, and our own knowledge of how it all works. Because “Knowledge itself is power” (F. Bacon).

  21. Hi Jon,

    Thank you very much for your post.

    I believe the tracking will only get worse.
    By the way: does this spying, as you describe it, also occur with stone age phones, like my trusted Noka 1100? Or do you need a smartphone to fully enjoy all the tracking, tracing and spying?

  22. (First post)
    Bravo, Jon. This is an amazingly important topic for me personally, and professionally. I live in the United States, where we are learning just how vulnerable we actually are. There is much to be said on this topic. Why is this happening? Why is it that right now is such a volatile time for this subject, and how do we “discover” the length and breadth of its scope?

    As a citizen, consumer, and professional in the web development field, how do I create web presence “safe and secure” from such nefarious interventions?

    I look forward to your responses, and do look forward to learning, growing and sharing with you and this community.

    Very well done, Jon and teams.

  23. If you care about privacy, please read what I just wrote on the Vivaldi forum and support me in my quest to persuade Vivaldi to include the Ask Me Every Time privacy option.

  24. Balance is more important in life that most other things,
    you can see balance everywhere in nature.

    on the other hand dis-balance in privacy come from dis-balanced psychology of those who take and make decisions to take and harvest and exploit, so to me it seems that in colloquial terms we are dealing with multiplication of Crazy+Greedy which is being propelled as new neo norm! (it isn’t and both parties aware but they continue)

    Although Government should take steps and prevent it all from happening… in reality it does NOT, and that is because of arms race mentality, which again feeds progress of technological advances across the globe. similarly to the military industrial complexes that were not interested in peace deals and sabotaged them to continue feeding the “machine” in say 70s. today we have “IF NOT US ITS THEM” excuse in corporations that is playing in hand with NSA GCHQ.

    there is a saying “its more easy to catch fish in muddy waters” noise helps them cover their data harvesting and allows to control cattle feed.

    I’m glad there is an effort like Vivaldi keep it up. and thanks

  25. Thank you so much for caring about the serious concerns of being tracked and watched. I love the functionality of your browser and that you are doing what you say you do. I am curious as to how you fund this wonderful browser to allow us to use it for free?

    And, that being said, do you have plans to put your browser (or is it already), built on the block chain? And, do you have plans to make an Android version of your browser?

    Thank you,

    Caroline

  26. Some months ago I got angry when I bought a Blender course in Udemy (Blender is a 3D design software) and the next time I opened Facebook, before talking to anybody about it and never publishing anything there about any 3D related thing, suddenly all ads and suggestion from Facebook were related to 3D: sites to buy textures, Facebook groups about 3D design, other 3D programs, etc. I got really angry because it was so clear that Facebook was spying me even outside of Facebook.com, that I had to do something about it. First, uBlock and Privacy Badger, and then, getting rid of Chrome, Opera, or any other not privacy-focused software. I’m currently using Firefox, but I’m not that happy with it (having Pocket forced there no matter if you want it or not, is not a good initial feeling) I’m very pleased to read Vivaldi is concerned about its users and I’m really looking forward to use it.
    I’m only waiting for sync to be released in the stable channel to do the jump 😉

    Thank you and cheers 🙂

  27. There are cell phone aps that map Bluetooth Beacons.

    I am wondering if there are aps available for one’s phone that can stop the relaying of info to Bluetooth Beacons?

  28. I weight more on EU internet services after Microsoft’s outlook free mail continuously pops up [spam abuse alarm] and asks for mobile number for text verification, even that email address has not even sent a single email out! I am not sure Microsoft dares to collect personal information this way under EU’s regulation. The big name companies have got the power to hijack email inboxes or online storage for any information they interested in.

  29. I am wondering if you are going to support an alternative operating system like ubports.com or puri.sm? I am using Ubports on my nexus 5 and it is my daily drive. Of course there are things that I miss that Android/apple has that do not exist in the Linux world. Hopefully they manage to get Anbox stable enough to inclued these apps that I would like to have.

  30. I had thought that Vivaldi was also going to be a “social media network.” After downloading the browser, I don’t see any mention of such a network. Did it go bust? If so, that is too bad as we are in desperate need of an uncensored social media alternative to Facebook and Twitter. Thanks!

  31. thanks for the links to Unacast and Eddystone . I didn’t know about these companies and looking at their websites is an eye-opener ! Scary stuff that could be used against someone besides tracking Ads in this increasingly A.I. world !

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