Now, you can’t perma-crack your new PC with a “real” HWID key, then years later reinstall Windows and keep your “real” license anymore! And you can’t upgrade anymore on that new PC either! You have to patch Windows every time!

For those who are paranoid about this - some of you have a Facebook account, and half of you have a Google-filled smartphone. Privacy is important, but IMO there should be a balance between convenience and privacy - unless you actually do stuff that requires the utmost privacy or you need to stay fully anonymous everywhere as much as possible.

Division of identity - that is, having unique profiles/identities for different types of things you do on the web, using alias emails and anonymous email for certain things etc. - is a more viable strategy than trying to be 100% anonymous on the web.

Commercial social media that is free does and will track your activity on the site, whether for personalized ads or for algorithm purposes. Lemmy and Mastodon don’t because they’re FOSS, and don’t run on ads (99.9% of the time).

In our country, texting (through the built-in Messenger app) is mostly done as an emergency measure, as most people here use Meta’s other messaging app, WhatsApp.