Checking the router is probably the only way to see if someone is active on your network.

Can anybody hack your computer? No. Most people only know how to run scripts that are known and patched in most operating systems.

There are skilled people who may be able to create an exploit or find a vulnerability in your computer, but they will mostly target businesses or people they know will be worth it to hack, so most likely they won’t bother you.

Generally if your on your own WiFi, having a WPA-2+ personal password is enough, but the more paranoid may have an IDS/IPS on their home network.

If your out and about, I’d personally use a VPN. I don’t like public ones and like to recommend setting one up on your home WiFi instead.

If you think you’ve been hacked… change your passwords and run virus scans. If you still don’t feel safe, backup your data and reinstall your operating system.

That doesn’t make any sense… If the URLs are server side that means there is no e2ee at any time because the server has to know when to shown the preview…

If that’s true disabling preview generation doesn’t really matter because the vulnerability would be elsewhere

I never used matrix, but do clients own the keys or are they stored on the server?

I use all of them, at once, with searx.

Coming from a company the preaches about privacy and rates privacy respecting businesses, while collecting telemetry and accepting 500M/ year to from google to promote their search engine… I’ll take this as the puff up piece that is is.

Unless there’s a super hacker or NSA agent in the class that can figure out your password in real time… You should be fine doing that.

Tails isn’t really designed for daily driving. I’d go for a user friendly distro like Ubuntu if you an on switching from windows.

It is possible to make windows a little more private if you didn’t want to switch. Here’s a pretty good guide in modifying the the iso before installing: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/create-custom-windows-11-install-disk

Modifying window does help users gain more control and privacy, but windows is proprietary so a person can only do so much. Be careful on what you remove if you GI this route, windows relies on weird apps to function.

Another note, I wouldn’t be afraid of torrenting. The inky person that would care that your getting free movies and such is your ISP, and you can just flip on a VPN to clear their radar.

Since its for school you’ll want it to be reliable and to work 100% of the time. I’d just get a big brand and not connect it to the internet if you don’t want your data collected.

Other than that you can try to block the telemetry at the DNS level by VPN to your home with a pihole instance or using a private DNS.

If you really don’t wanna use apple or google OS, then best bet is to buy the tablet for the hardware and try to flash a different OS. But then you’ll risk it not working very well or having app compatibility issues.

Brother… apple couldn’t find my airtag when it was dropped somewhere in my yard… How would apple find a submarine 5 miles below sea level in a faradayed submarine?

This is straight from their privacy policy:

We do not sell your personal information in a way that most people would think of as a sale. However, we do participate in online targeted advertising and use analytics which allows tech companies, in exchange for our use of their services, to use user information collected from our App to improve their own products and to improve the services they provide to others. Under some laws, this is considered our “sale” of your user data to third parties. You can opt-out of this as provided in the “How to Submit a Request” section below.

I created an account while in the store with an email of fuckyou@thisisstupid.com and a basic password and surprisingly didn’t have to verify the email. Then turned on a VPN to my house.

I plan on just creating a new account every time I go in just to fill up their database with nonsense.