Quote:
Originally Posted by salamanderjuice
When was the last time you powered off your phone, tablet, or laptop for an extended period of time? Even defining "off" is pretty hard. Modern apple laptops for example use a haptic trackpad. They have no buttons but instead use a vibration motor to fake the feel of a click. This works when it's been shut down from the menu so you can turn it back on by clicking. Is it really off then if it's keeping the vibration motor alive? If they can keep a motor alive, why not a mic? With a phone or tablet detecting "off" is even more difficult. Most these days don't have a user removable battery so how can you really be sure it's off?
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For me personally, all the time, if I'm not using my desktop it's physically unplugged from the power outlet (and is running Linux Mint), my laptop still uses a physical button to switch it off (plus it also runs Linux Mint, I had an Android tablet but when I decided to stop using Google because of privacy I 'decommissioned' it using a hammer* ) and my phone is not a smart phone so has no apps and no affiliation to any big tech, just my phone operator (and if I wished I could remove the battery as well) It may seem a bit over the top to some the precautions I take (and maybe it is) but I feel for my usage and my believes around big tech etc it's not much hassle for me, and I hope it adds a bit more security for me. Obviously because of my feelings around smart speakers I don't have one, couldn't anyway as I dont have a Google, Amazon or Apple account. But this is just the route I've decided to take, which makes me happy.
* Android tablets have this stupid thing whereas if you delete your Google account
before wiping your data from your tablet you then can't do a factory re-set, or at least I couldn't on the Samsung one I had, it asks for your Google password to re-set which you can't provide if you've already deleted your account - my fault really I should have double checked that
