The rail+hooks make a decent quality curtain mechanism:

The top nylon hanger bars seemed to be good enough adapters to curtain hooks, as a “temporary” solution.

I prefer browser(web)-based banking apps which work well on a phone UI without the info-access creep.

UBank (NAB subsidary) and Wise (not a bank) both support passkeys for login in the browser. Most other banks here seem to have regressed from hardware tokens to SMS codes or proprietary apps for their MFA.

Passkeys are only as secure as your passkeys – I use Bitwarden with master password re-prompt checked for bank credentials, but I should probably switch to a hardware based passkey (at least for unlocking Bitwarden itself).

The phone apps are sometimes required to do some things (like managing passkeys for UBank, verifying ID in Wise). They work on LineageOS without the google stuff, but might be worth installing only temporarily in a separate profile or phone.

Retail payments – just use a physical card if you’re not using cash.

Archive link without paywall: https://archive.md/TY4oT

One prominent example in Australia is via one of the two biggest nationwide supermarket chains, Coles: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/coles-to-run-palantir-analytics-suite-across-its-supermarkets-604698

https://tosdr.org/ for summaries.

A railway station isn’t restored until all the passenger rail lines and services are restored.

Sure, an individual can prevent their own devices collecting data about them, but the paper is about all the devices surrounding a person in other people’s pockets/homes/workplaces: collecting data on – recording – that individual.

[…] The researchers discovered that even if individual users turned off data tracking and didn’t share their own information, their mobility patterns could still be predicted with surprising accuracy based on data collected from their acquaintances.

“Worse,” says Ghoshal, “almost as much latent information can be extracted from perfect strangers that the individual tends to co-locate with.”

In many (most?) jurisdictions it is illegal to make a recording of a conversation either which you are not party to, or without consent of all parties involved; sometimes with consideration towards whether there was reasonable expectation that the conversation be private. Even when legal, there are often restrictions on how that recording can be used.

The laws aren’t always written specific to audio/video recording (not that always-recording by google/apple/amazon/etc isn’t a problem already…) – how does such surveillance figure in to existing legislation around the world?