Tell me you’re a novice without telling me you’re a novice.

Use Tor.

Do you mean Tor Browser? Because using Tor alone won’t stop fingerprinting.

Related: A very similar question posted by the same person yesterday.

Obviously you need someone joining the room for the room metadata to be shared between homeservers.

Well then, your assertion that Matrix gives it freely is false.

Not so with Matrix, where a joining homeserver get full retroactive access to all the room metadata since the room’s creation.

This is false, too. Historical event visibility is controlled by a room setting. (And if you don’t trust admins of a sensitive room to configure for privacy, then you’re going to have bigger problems, no matter what platform it’s on.)

Edit: I suppose you might argue that you can bypass this by running your own homeserver and attempting to join the room from it, thereby granting visibility not through joining (as you wrote), but instead through federation with the server you control. The thing is, you can’t do it without permission. Room admins can simply deny your join request when they see what server you’re on. This might make sense in a particularly sensitive room, for example, just as it would to restrict history visibility.

you really need to stop privacy LARPing

LARPing? I’m not the one stirring up drama with falsehoods and patronizing snark, am I? Farewell.

Matrix stores all this info and gives it freely to other servers retroactively(!)

Can you show me the part of the spec that allows a server with no room members to get private room info from another server? I’m skeptical, but if true, I believe that would be worth reporting as a bug.

network layer sniffing (which is anyway much harder to do)

You’re funny.

The network layer of all internet servers reveals almost everything you listed. Signal has the same problem, and there’s nothing they can do about that. The only way to avoid it is to use a completely peer-to-peer model (Matrix has started work on this, btw) and avoid communicating across network routes that can be monitored.

There might be one exception, depending on what you mean by “Accounts”: The user IDs participating in a room can be seen by server operators and room members. But then again, server operators can already see their users’ IP addresses (which is arguably more sensitive than a user ID), and I believe room members have to be allowed into the room in order to see them. For most of us, that’s fine. Far from a disaster.

Human behavior is funny, isn’t it? No matter what the topic, there are always people around who like to repeat criticism they heard from someone else, even if it’s so vague as to be useless (“metadata disaster”) or they don’t understand the details at all.

It’s not a disaster. A few minor bits of metadata (avatars and reactions, IIRC) haven’t been moved into the encrypted part of the protocol yet. If that’s a problem for your use case, then you might want to choose a platform with different flaws, or simply avoid those features. It’s already good enough for the needs of many privacy-minded folks, though, and it continues to get better.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch more than half of this.

tl;dr: This video is a misleading, sensationalist, bad-fath, hit piece. It’s constructed upon faulty logic, fear of things used or supported by governments, and a single anonymous person’s poorly-reasoned conclusions.

It’s a time-honored tradition among dictionary publishers.

Not a Google fan, huh?

Maybe a pool of big corp captive portal / connectivity test servers? For example:

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-devices/warp/deployment/firewall/#captive-portal

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/tags/android-9.0.0_r49/services/core/java/com/android/server/connectivity/NetworkMonitor.java#101

6 ≠ 16
v ≠ o

I imagine the reasons include convenience (for the ISP) and the possibility of upselling.

There is at least one advantage to customers: address rotation makes it harder for third parties to track you.

Because it’s the foundation of a lot of cross-platform code, from the standard libraries in various programming languages to innumerable shell scripts.

Unless all the computing devices you use run Windows, you probably depend on POSIX, whether you have direct contact with it or not.

I don’t like closed systems, vendor lock-in, overpriced tools, or buying equipment that I’ll never truly own.

Yes.

Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg

Sadly, many motherboards don’t have POST code displays.

In principle, one could probably do this to a rooted phone by removing all the Google apps, and all the Google services, and giving up the other apps and services that depend on them. It would be a nontrivial task, and the steps would likely be different for each phone model (and possibly each OS version). I don’t know of a project that does this successfully. You might try searching xdaforums.com for someone who has done it.

However, I wouldn’t depend on Google services staying disabled when Google still controls the OS.

IMHO, it’s safer and easier to replace the entire OS.

The Xperia phones are often horrendously locked down

Not really, at least when compared to most other brands. I’ve had three or four different Xperia models, and unlocked the bootloader on every one of them using official Sony tools. They even have official open-source software archives, which are very helpful to people who build de-googled “ROMs”.

The one thing that has been especially locked down is the TA partition, which contains DRM keys used for Sony’s proprietary apps. It’s not needed for an open-source OS like LineageOS.

For this phone specifically, it looks like official LineageOS support is already underway, despite it being a fairly new model:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/pdx234/

I would definitely recommend a Pixel device if you’re going to go De-Googling.

Pixels do have unusually good support for user-installed OS, but the irony here is that you can’t truly de-google them, because no OS will change the fact that Google controls the hardware and firmware.