I would think a sea-side city, of all the cities would need such a legislation due to the abundance of boats in their neighborhoods.

I agree. Being willing to pay for services reduces companies from doing such things,

But offering something to the public for free for years and once they make an essential useful place in the society, using their position as ransom to extract money is still unethical in my eyes. e.g. If Reddit was going to be a paid service from the beginning, this would not have happened. They only shove their advertisement and dark patterns ridden app when they have gotten their users addicted. Same thing with Youtube, Gmail and other services. Reaching critical mass and then using their market position to extract money or selling data.

Or you could be grateful for what you got for free when you had it for free. But if there's one rule for the 21st century, it is that nobody is ever grateful for anything. Give a man a fish and he'll scream "I wanted steak!"

I am not even a power vim user but having vimium on firefox helps reduce the thought to action latency significantly.

If someone is able to get over the steep learning curve, having vim bindings on your fingertips is awesome.

Yes Ghost profiles is what people used to refer it to.

Browser fingerprinting is how they are able to track you across the internet despite having no connection with facebook.

One way to fix this to stop your PC from communicating with any facebook servers.

- Firefox provides an extension for this.

There must be other methods that I am not aware of but if anybody knows.

Not being forced is the wall behind which every un-ethical tech company hides.

- Nobody is forcing me to use youtube, but youtube has years of collection of important tutorials and educational material.

- Nobody is forcing me to use facebook (and its products) but fb has gathered users over the years that forces me to use the product in order to remain a part of the social sphere. Kids feeling left out in high-school because of not using instagram is an example.

- Nobody is forcing me to use Netflix, but if I want to watch the trendy movie that my friends are talking about, I do not have a choice.

If you see the pattern, tech companies by the virtue of their money have created a social effect where they might not "force" me to use their product but I have to use it if I wish to remain a part of the society.

It is difficult to swim upstream and the companies by the virtue of their deep pockets have shifted the flow that helps them make the most money.

Facebook is founded on 3 pillars of unethicalities.

1. Data Privacy - They will try to find every possible way to sell your data and not get noticed. An easy example of that is when fb started throwing fits when apple didnt let it track users activity across all apps by default. They tried to hide behind the fact that it would "severely" affect small businesses.

2. Depleting Mental Health - They will try to find every possible way to keep you engaged on the platform. That is often done by algorithmically promoting content that inspires extreme emotions in you. Emotions such as anger, jealousy, lust etc. Experiencing these emotions for an extended period of time EVERYDAY is not healthy for maintaining a good emotional balance.

3. Fake News - They will try to find every possible way to shrug off responsibility for spreading fake news. This affects politics by creating echo chambers, healthcare by preventing people from believing in the correct diagnostics and other areas.

I agree that nobody is stopping you from opening facebook, but facebook is like smoking. Everyone only wants to try it once, and then many fall into the downward spiral.

I was reading somewhere that how resisting facebook and all of facebook products everyday is not possible with the will power reserves that an average human has. This is because he is competing with psychologists and researchers employed by facebook who have been studying human behaviour for years.

I do not have any sources to back my claims. Social Media has personally affected me a lot so I keep reading about the phenomena out of curiosity. Here's one little article that breifly describes what I am talking about. https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peop...

Hi jayzalowitz,

I am a researcher in statistics and data science from university at Buffalo. Just reaching out to see if you have any potential opportunities that I might consider

Indian marriages are a sham in my opinion. I would like to respectfully disagree with you. Most Indian marriages do survive because of tolerance but the tolerance arises from the societal pressure and stigma that surrounds separation. I am getting close to a marital age and have been observing Indian couples. I see a pattern where many couples are not happy but are still together because they can tolerate each other. I don't like that. Not everyone is like that but many are and they are okay with it

Leechblock is incredibly helpful and has saved my innumerable amount of unproductive hours. It is highly customisable.

I agree with your premise, but I am curious what apps are you side loading. Are these important apps? I value this freedom as well but I have only needed to install blokada. I am a working professional and do not tinker with android as much as I used too.

If you install apps from F-Droid (an alt app store on Android), they are all open source and built by F-Droid themselves. The benefit of this is, zero malware. And much better privacy. It's a nice peace of mind. The Play Store and App Store don't have such a good track record. And there's a lot of great apps on F-Droid (like clients for Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, etc)