It’s an interesting discussion to witness in these posts: convenience vs privacy and control.

The convenience and integration you get with commercial products like IOS or Android comes at a price. Everything that matters to you on a daily basis bundled together in one convenient package means that all things which define you as a person are conveniently interconnected for corporations to sell out your data for everyone who wants it.

GPS: your current whereabouts at any moment in time and a complete history of where you have been in the past

Payment functions: what you are buying and where you have bought it

Communication (Messengers, Phone): Who you communicate with and what you are talking about

Photos and Videos: Real life evidence from all the stuff mentioned above.

Web Browsing: Interests and Needs which will be used against you in a totalitarian surveillance state, at a glance

If you in 2025 still think this convenience is there to please you as a consumer I have bad news for you.

Convenience and interconnection of services look nice and useful but at the same time they’re a privacy nightmare that makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a bedtime story for children.

What this all comes down to: Strictly airgapping the boundaries between the different services is the only way to have a modicum of privacy. Photos do not belong in a cloud controlled by someone you don’t know and should be taken from a separate device. Navigation belongs on a separate device with no internet connection, payment should not be done with a personal identifier at all (if avoidable) etc. Living your life this way might seem terribly inconvenient, but as someone who was alive at a time where all this convenience didn’t exist I can tell you it has its advantages too. You’ll rediscover what really matters.

Always has been. “We cannot afford x any more” has been their standard argument for dismantling social security and lining up their own pockets for decades now.

They sort of do. “Alligator Alcatraz” comes to mind

The US sets the pace, and the EU has no choice but to react at that pace. In Trumps world view there are no allies, only exploitable resources and enemies. International relations erode quickly when souvereign countries are threatened to either bend the knee or be treated as an enemy.