I'm not minimizing the dangers of someone else recording you. I don't think Schmidt was even thinking about that, probably because smartphones weren't so ubiquitous then.

However, you CAN control what you do yourself. Your to-do list can quite easily be on a paper notebook, as can your journal. Another thread here talks about self-hosting your location history -- why TF would you even want that? You can leave your phone at home when you go places where you don't need it. You can talk to people instead of texting them. All these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for some of your friends. But you'll survive it.

Maybe you can't shut off the flow of data about you, but you can at least refrain from adding to it.

> All these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for some of your friends. But you'll survive it.

The entire point of such self-hosting is to achieve a similar level of convenience provided by the megacorps' products without them being able to profit off of your usage of them. People who will consider 'not tracking location' and 'only talking to people face to face' aren't the ones considering self-hosting their location data (unless their only reason for doing so was the megacorps' profit model).

I'm more talking about your own devices recording and spying on you, without your consent.

> Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.

I predict an increase in the number of golfers and boat enthusiasts in my lifetime.

>boat enthusiasts

Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile internet is good enough to make this viable and things like Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years.

I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and turn everything off you can hide from the world pretty effectively.

I hate to break it to you all, but there are computers in the sky now, too.

I'm fairly sure you'd have to piss off an intelligence service for them to bother spying on you personally with a satellite though, which isn't exactly part of the threat model for people who simply want to avoid "casual" privacy invasions from things like mobile networks.

Yeah sure, that was some great intel from computers in the sky during our last drone strike in Kabul that killed a humanitarian NGO and his family. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/us/politics/pentagon-dron...

Cheers! And when you come to port for a round of 18 it's perfectly normal to just leave your phone in the car or on the cart. Easy to have a great one on one conversation away from everything while standing around on the putting green.

Makes sense why so many business and political deals are made on the golf course when you start thinking about the meta aspects of having no paper trail or being vulnerable to eavesdropping secretarial eyes & ears or some all-listening tech-panoptican.

> I predict an increase in the number of golfers

You mean people who think they're safe because they don't realize they're in the earshot of another player's/random jogger's smartphone?

(I'm totally thinking of a scene from Person of Interest, 4x12, when a character hides in a park and makes a call over satellite phone, to talk out of earshot of a malicious AI surveilling everyone, only to be spotted by it through a smartphone of a passing cyclist. Can't find any video clip of to link here, though.)

Boats are increasingly tracked by satellites.

How do I turn off my existence?

Psychedelics?

You just suggested what could be an interesting idea: what if we could give "the google database/engine" the equivalent of a psychedelic? What would that even look like? What could the results be?

telepathic critterdrug?