It is so difficult to find modern electronics without telemetry and ads. Smartphones, laptops, TVs, home routers, security cameras, cars, game consoles, e-readers, projectors, 3D printers, fitness trackers, speakers, and even some printers. Why can’t customers be free from this data collection and advertising? It’s not that we don’t care about it. There simply aren’t many alternatives, and the few that do exist are either more expensive or offer fewer features. Seriously, we need a list of products we can buy and use directly without worrying about telemetry or advertising.

The following list is updated at https://lemmy.ml/post/52706206. Please note that this list may contain errors.

Other suggestions:

  • Reannlegge ( Reannlegge@lemmy.ca ) 
    2·
    9 days ago

    PC

    I currently still use my iPad as my daily driver, do not have the money to replace it yet. I do have a handful of pi’s, and a old (2014) Mac mini with Debian installed, doing things on my LAN that my iPad cannot. Snapdragon and other ARM or RISC-V CPU’s are not Intel/AMD or x86.

    Smart phone

    I am waiting a little while until I can get a Motorola phone that I can install Graphen OS on.

    Wireless Speakers

    Just don’t. Get wired ones.

    TV’s

    Turn off all the “smart” features you may have to search around to find instructions to turn off the negging for an internet connection but get something like a pi 5 or a media centre PC (with Linux) to replace the smart features. Than you decide how your media is stored and hosted on your LAN.

    Printers

    Do not connect them to the internet, full stop. I find it iffy to even let them host their own wifi as well, mine is attached to a pi running CUPS.

    Anything else?

    I swear by pihole, while others in the ad-blocker/tracker community swear by adguard I tried it but came back to pihole. You will find debates for or against either one, probably the first one you choose will be the one you like because you will mod it and add the ad lists/blacklists that work best for you. I have 2 piholes on two pi 5s (they run on other pis as well, I have had pihole running on a pi 0 2 before), one as the primary DNS and one as the secondary DNS. I think only the primary is also running unbound along side of it but I don’t remember if the second one is.

    Self host as much as you can when I started down the journey of self hosting I thought it would last 3 months at most; I had been watching youtube videos for a few years so I thought I knew everything I wanted to do, I had been running pihole and homebridge for years already so I thought I would be ready for this journey oh how wrong was I, I thought nextcloud would be fine for everything I needed turns out no I think I found pictures was the first issue I had with it so I found immich, than calendars so I found an app for that than contacts, and so on and so forth nextcloud tries to do to many things so it does nothing well, I am still looking for something that does files better than samba as I would like either a gui or webui. I have a VPN from my GL.iNET firewall (running vanilla-ish OpenWRT, it is a clean install but I have installed things and modded it to my needs and likings) so I can access all my stuff from outside of my LAN. I wanna say my firewall forces all DNS stuff through port 53 even if it is hard coded to go elsewhere on my IoT vLAN (10.66.6.x), which than goes to my pihole set up.

    I have my own domain that has a wildcard email setup so everything gets it’s own email; when I mapped out my 3 month self hosting journey I had email setup set for a week long project for after I got my 2 static IP’s, I found out that was not a realistic plan. My old host, who I would not suggest (hosthero), did not offer a wild card option fot email so I had to go create a new address each time I wanted to signup for a free trial, as many times as I wanted to, but now with my new host, who I would suggest (easydns), offers a wild card option so I can come up with one on the spot. I was furniture shopping recently and I was asked for an email, I quickly had a thought and gave them their store name my domain.

    • gif8287 ( gif8287@lemmy.ml ) OP
      2·
      10 days ago

      Which elegoo 3d printer are you using?

      Elegoo says they may automatically collect:

      IP address

Device model and OS version

Device serial number and other unique identifiers

Device activation information

Sensor information

Usage data, including feature usage frequency, duration, clicks, searches, settings and update habits

Software/connection performance

Print success rate

Alarm information

Crash logs

Location information, including potentially latitude and longitude

Hardware information from the slicing software, such as CPU/GPU and memory

Software crash and diagnostic information
      • Bev's Dad ( BevsDad@lemmy.ca ) 
        1·
        10 days ago

        Just an ender clone that I shove an SD card into after slicing. I guess the newer ones do all that so I’ll avoid them.

        Maybe a slicing software without tracking would be nice actually.

  • late_pessimistic ( late_pessimistic@slrpnk.net ) English
    2·
    12 days ago

    Robert Braxman is a fraud and so is his Brax Phone.

    https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20165-response-to-dishonest-attacks-on-the-grapheneos-project-by-robert-braxman

    Anyway stop buying or caring about brand new “products”, creating e-waste, and feeding this stupid exponential growth economy and extractive capitalism. You don’t need everything to be the latest version. Engage in the local circular economy, buy used on local marketplaces, reuse and repair old devices. Give second life to old things we already produced.

    You don’t even need to try hard to be private with old, used stuff. Bought an old laptop? Good, it only runs Linux. Bought an old MP3 player? Good, it doesn’t even have Spotify or internet. Bought an old gaming console? Good, you can find any torrent you could ever want, any genre, completely for free, offline.

  • kazerniel ( kazerniel@piefed.world ) English
    1·
    12 days ago

    If you use a robot vacuum, it might help to get one without a camera, only Lidar.

    (I also made a point of buying a smart tv without a microphone, but it was already hard to find one in 2023, I imagine it’s even worse now.)

    E-ink devices: I think you can put all of them in flight mode, at least that’s what I do, and upload books via USB cable. No need for network features.

    Speakers: Just buy a cheap and basic wired one?

    Smartwatch: How would one work without telemetry? It’s kinda the whole point 🤔 I guess you can try to replace the software with Gadgetbridge.

    • gif8287 ( gif8287@lemmy.ml ) OP
      2·
      12 days ago

      Thank you for providing these suggestions. However, for this post, we’re specifically looking for devices that come with no telemetry or ads by default. The goal is to identify products that respect users’ privacy out of the box, so customers don’t have to disable features, replace software, or put in extra effort to make the device private.

  • gif8287 ( gif8287@lemmy.ml ) OP
    1·
    9 days ago

    Last I checked (which, admittedly, was a few years ago) I literally couldn’t find any security cameras that weren’t compromised in some way. The only options are basically:

    Consumer models tied to “cloud” services
Generic Chinese ONVIF cameras that probably phone home to who knows where unless you firewall them off from the Internet
ONVIF cameras that might have a slightly better reputation than the previous category but are only sold through security system installers, not normal retail channels
Analog (not IP) cameras that you hook up via coaxial cable
Building your own goddamn camera from scratch with a Raspberry Pi or something

    It’s ridiculous!

    For TVs, there used to be the option of Sceptre dumb TVs, but even those have disappeared from the market in the last year or so.

    I’ve been looking for a smartwatch/fitness tracker (and a bike computer, which is kind of a similar category) and the pickings seem very slim there, too. There’s the Pebble and the PineTime, which are open but maybe lack some of the sensors one might want in a fitness tracker, and there’s stuff that’s intended to be proprietary but supported by Gadgetbridge (e.g. iGPSPORT bike computers) . There might be others, but I don’t know about them.

    It’s fuckin’ bleak, y’all. I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering building almost all my own tech out of Raspberry Pis and/or ESP32s because that’s easier than searching for needles in the infinite haystack of surveillance capitalist slop!

    @grue@lemmy.world Thanks the post is updated

    https://lemmy.ml/post/52928541 is locked so I replied here

  • Creat ( Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
    1·
    10 days ago

    You can probably add pebble under smartwatch. The new devices have fully open source firmware (and app). There are no ads and the store is to my understanding run by volunteers (rebble, a perfect born after pebbles first attempt at a watch failed many years ago).

    The watches are also fully supported by gadgetbridge.

  • Ananace ( ace@lemmy.ananace.dev ) 
    1·
    8 days ago

    Router-wise, I can throw in a recommendation for the Turris devices by CZ.NIC. (MOX, Omnia, Omni-NG)

    They’re using their own Turris OS, which is built on a clean OpenWrt base, they don’t upload telemetry or display ads of any kind - but they do have a multi-step opt-in if you wish to run honeypots and/or push data to the Sentinel distributed firewall research project.