One thing to note is that you are not alone with this feeling, in fact when I read your post it really remindend me of the song ‘I am Machine’ from Breaking Benjamin if you like Rock/Metal music.

Also if you do not want another cosmic scale existential crisis, please do not look up the meaning behind my username ;)

I have my home server behind a wireguard vpn access.

While I am no security expert, or precisely because of that, I still try to follow security best practices for the internal setup if I can.

Of course you propably do not have to be as vigilant as if your services were publicly exposed. But I believe it is still a good idea to have some “defence in depth” and not assume only one possible attack vector, e.g. what if there already is a bad actor on your home network maybe via a trusted device that has some virus. Also a plus is i guss if you ever decide to expose something later on you wont have as many issues.

This is what I love about the fedverse. People directly calling out such crappy articles that just spread misleading information for the sake of whatever.

So their models have trouble opening a dropdwn menu and their best solution is to implement mass surveillance of the employees?

Seems a bit overkill tbh aside from being qustionable in general.

I wonder though if pressing “skip” is a good idea in terms of privacy / not giving them what they want. I don’t think this was implemented for our “convienience” and rather as yet another manipulation technique.

Just some ideas what I assume they achieve by this:

• By pressing it you have to divert your attention towards the ad, even if it is just for a short time.

• You might unintentionally signal your preferences which could be used for profile enrichment

• You also provide information, that you are still actively at the device an watching (I assume ad providers have more interest on having more/longer ads on content that is actively watched)

They like to annoy future programmers by letting them do binary tree insertion steps manually on paper. They also like to destroy your self confidence by telling you if you ever come up with an algorithm it is likely trash and someone else invented a better one 50 years ago.