There's many videos warning about how electronic devices can track and/or spy on its owners, but these intrusions can be greatly mitigated, even in today's surveillance centric world. Nowadays everything has some form of surveillance tech in it. So this is a rough how–to guide to help users avoid as much of it as possible.

The obvious best way is to simply live without any of it, just like this Tech (born in 58) did for the first half of my life; I happily lived with nothing that had surveillance capabilities! I didn't get my first smartphone until Oct. of 2016 (an Honor 5X).

Nowadays I'm all Safe Tech with an e/OS phone, and Linux only on virgin hardware (sample system). I drove cars from 74 to 05, before volitionally going Car Free; all the cars I did own were made before 1997 (tech free); now they're easily tracked.

Smart TV's spy on you 🎥! Therefore, always get HDTV's without spying capabilities. Sceptre has been my favorite for 3 decades now; I bought my first TV/Monitor (in the late 90's) from LA based Sceptre via a local retailer while living in Metro LA. Click to enlarge this screenshot of a 50" Sceptre 4K sold at Walmart (shipped free); no ethernet or wireless. Just connect a NUC or Mini PC with a 4K+ HDMI cable, and an HDTV Antenna to its ATSC connection.

The antenna will pickup all broadcast channels in a viewing area. I only watch live sports, local news, the PBS News Hour, and a few one time programs that I do not want to check out from whatever local public library I'm nearby at the time. I'll rip/burn favorites to my massive collection, seen in images here & here & here & here & here.

Bill Gates Loses It as Windows 11 Users Threaten to Abandon Microsoft 🎥: That's because more people figured out their five–decade–long spying, plus their monetized ecosystem isolation (same with Apple). But breaching those Gates was not just individual users turning to Linux, it was more by Enterprise users (business; education) tired of Microsoft's endless demand for glitch ridden software updates and expensive hardware upgrades (e.g. the TPM debacle). Some turned to Google and Chrome, however, that's just another Big Tech ecosystem. Instead, move beyond MS and Google enterprise with open source and cloud native alternatives.

You may have noticed I use Brave Search & DuckDuckGo; there's a few reasons for that. I do not use nor recommend dedicated AI entities. But Brave features align better with my philosophy of using as little AI as possible. For this FOSS only Tech, the default browsers on my Linux only laptops & PC's are Firefox forks and Brave, which serves as my only Chromium based browser.

Brave browser uses Brave Search natively; it predominantly uses open source LLMs. On the Firefox forks it's default search is set at DuckDuckGo with no AI (its default setting). In Firefox, I employ uBlock Origin which blocks all ads, even on Brave Search results, so I don't see ads anywhere ever! But yes, I get that the ideals around "FOSS only" are disappearing; AI is directly or indirectly infiltrating everything.