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Excellent! I am glad there is someone who understands what is going on...
By washing brains and feeding media content consisting of only trivialities and garbage you institute the most effective control of mind and distract people from thinking about issues that are important.
There is no such thing as 'Public Opinion'. There is only 'Published Opinion'... People are told what to think and what to do.
However this is away from the original spirit of this post...

An old topic But I also dislike the shameless datacollection by some companies. People don't seem to care anymore about their privacy. Probably because datacollecting the digital way, is pretty abstract to most people. Nevertheless skype is what a lot of your friends and relatives might use.

Why not freeload a bit and use skype anyway without giving them your private data.

Yes, you can use skype without giving away your browser history.

Create an extra user just for skype.

type (as yourself)
# xhost +local:all
to give local users access to the xserver that is being used by you (else you won't be able to run skype as a different user and still have the application on your desktop)

in the console: login as that user. Download skype in the users homedir and extract it. run it, and voila, you're using skype, and it has no access to your homedir.

You can do that with other apps as well.

Thing is, avoiding all this takes a lot of energy. Not using google the regular way, not using whatsapp on your mobile, etc etc. But watching South Park S15E2 might help

deNiros wrote:Why not freeload a bit and use skype anyway without giving them your private data.

Why use Skype at all?

thenktor wrote:

deNiros wrote:Why not freeload a bit and use skype anyway without giving them your private data.

Why use Skype at all?

Well, to call my mommie abroad. She is using skype on windows.

I do not wish to be a prophet of doom, but Microsoft owns Skype since ca. 3 weeks and perhaps Linux/Android versions will disappear or get a bad support

Yeah i heard about it. MS paid 8.something billion. That's a lot of skype credit.

An alternative is google voice, but http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructur ... 202835NWNT

Though, your phonecompany keeps records to. So that's not an issue. An issue might be the complete combination of data being collected. Email, IM, phone, google search engine data, = your complete brain.

quoted from that article

One of the most obvious ways is via targeted advertising, particularly because the company recently announced that it's going to figure out new ways to target ads based on your interests. It already does this with Gmail. So don't be surprised to see ad targeted based on who calls you.

Doing that means that Google will be mining data from your calls, possibly including what is being said on the calls themselves. It already does the equivalent of this in Gmail, looking for key words, and then displaying ads based on those words.

Best alternative is using the sip protocol. But that's not always that straightforward to configure for family members that don't even know how to change the wallpaper on their winxp machines.

Well, all of the above may be a common concern... unless. of course, one knows how to remain fully invisible. Not as hard as most would think. (Not a slam-dunk either but far from impossible.)
All one needs is some advanced routing know-how plus some fast texture switching hardware and some high(er)-wattage transmitters/receivers... and bam, there is your 30Mbps, broadband Wifi, truly annonymous (IP and all) with multi-layer encryption.
One world, no borders, no limits, no bullshit. (4100+ IPs at last count.)
Call it the-price-of-doing-business. (Otherwise why bother??...)

Here is what most should remember; "Collecting data" is much like fighting (writing) viruses... the "bad guys" - E.g. the ones who actually care about their data/info and hence, wont let anyone near it - will always win. If "they" can learn about you, it's because you let them and hence, you deserve it.

The actual point being here (and Yes, there actually is one ; Why use Linux/Slackware/derivatives in the first place if one does not take advantage of the immense power and protection these tools "can" provide?!