you may be right, i’ll have to find out more before doing anything else

thanks for being the first person or one of the few to understand the concern

i could do that. i still hate how many apps contain things like firebase and other analytics code baked into the compiled apk probably are trying to collect hardware identifiers. even if they are only collecting vm identifiers, those VM identifiers are now linked to me.

we live in a strange and rapidly changing world. look at the “ice” goons with face masks going around abducting people and some random white people emulating ice people to rob latinos. i am not latino, but i am LGBT, and i’m not so naive as to think this couldn’t impact me. i may be in wave 2 of whatever “this” is.

what if i want to run an LGBT dating app in an android VM to try to meet someone new WITHOUT it being linked to my name in some databroker database? the identifiers will be the same in that, even if i reinstall it (perhaps there would be a new media id and advertiser id, but the emulated hardware identifiers are persistent, like a hash of the underlying hardware identifiers). my strength is not in coding so if this is wrong, please let me know.

i was fine with just using the tablet for this app and having the hardware identifiers of the tablet linked to the app. the problem is it’s sucking up data of everything nearby.

the strange thing about privacy awareness is that it’s all paranoia and conspiracy theories until suddenly there’s some unexpected radical movement or change in power that persecutes some minority group and demands compliance from data brokers, who only care about money. i’m sure many people apprehended by ICE never thought about data privacy prior to being disappeared.

they actually didn’t say it was a loan. i think i remember the webpage they sent me to said free tablet and yoga mat, but i didn’t know. i wasn’t thinking about it because i figured i could root or disable all permissions.

it may be that it’s free, they wouldn’t have a problem with me rooting it and putting the app on it, and i just need to ask

So even if I call them and try to keep the tablet, I have no idea if they meant to give me the tablet as a gift or not

if it’s a gift, i could try to use win or plug the tablet into linux and then attach it to the VM. i could possibly get it rooted that way. ew windows.

i am also pretty sure the Esper App blocks developer mode. I should just tap 5 times to try to find out.

I probably need to ask them.

it feels invasive in principle. If they had said it was a managed device, I never would have accepted it.

data brokers do not know which devices are nearby me. i use linux. no one collects anything where i am. and now databrokers are able to know which specific devices are around me, meaning that if I buy a smart device in cash and set it up, data brokers will be able to infer it’s me based on the proximity of nearby devices collected by this health tablet. that actually is invasive, data brokers and smart devices are that good at inferences, and i feel like I was duped into this.