Certified Raccoon

And body autonomy does include things that you don’t personally like either. I was prompted to write this post after a series of bad takes from progressives, but one of them was re-hashing the Sabrina Carpenter album cover drama with “I don’t think it’s conservative of me to think that the album cover is a bad look when we’ve seen images of women being abused in this way” because I do actually think you’ve failed to understand feminism by projecting your morals onto a woman who was consensually expressing her own autonomy just because she expressed it in a way that you didn’t like or that made you uncomfortable.

Body autonomy also means unhealthy choices. Body autonomy also means regret rates. Body autonomy also means freedom of sexuality. Body autonomy also means mutilation. If you believe body autonomy has limitations and exceptions, then your feminism is most likely surface level.

HOW TO TURN OFF GOOGLE AI in GMAIL:

Open Gmail in your browser

Click on the Gear Icon ⚙️ in the upper right

In the General Tab, scroll down to "Smart Features" and UNCHECK THE BOX. It is about halfway down.

Then, right below that is Google Workspace smart features. Click on the "Manage Workspace Smart Features" and make sure both toggles are OFF

Google cheerfully reads your emails and looks at your photos and watches your videos and it always has and always will.

Don't bother turning off Gemini, for the love of fuck please just stop using Google.

quitting google services as much as possible is great but not everyone is gonna go that far unfortunately, so it's still useful to tell people how to stop certains kinds of privacy breaches that corps like google like to pull. how long does it take to change the apps and services you use for better alternatives? you have to figure out the best choices for yourself, and that takes time normies aren't willing to waste on something they barely care about. doing the extra effort that google saves them isn't what boomers, kids and "regular people" want.

Turning off any of these features *will not* keep Google from collecting and using your data because "we get to collect and use your data" is part of Google's ToS.

The reason I find posts like this frustrating is because you can go through the notes and see thousands of people saying "Google, why would you do this without asking for permission," "Google this is a privacy violation," "i just turned this off #privacy" - people are *completely unaware* of the fact that Docs and Gmail and Chrome are now and always have been ways for Google to take your data. "Harm reduction" doesn't work as an approach here because it gives casual users a false sense of security. They think if they opt out of model training their data isn't going to be collected for marketing. This is very incorrect and it's worth saying loudly and bluntly.

You should stop using Google as much as you possibly can because every free Google product exists *only* to sell your data to advertisers.

Some stuff is inescapable - you're correct, there's not a good alternative to YouTube. But there's a huge difference between "i have a Gmail account because I need one for my android device and to upload videos to a major video platform" and "I'm putting my entire life on google calendar, using Gmail for all my e-commerce logins, and use Chrome as my browser across devices."

Hell, there's a huge difference between using YouTube logged out and in the browser versus using it as an app on your phone.

Uninstall Maps! Turn off location! Use Firefox! Store photos locally!

Ceding privacy for convenience turns out to be inconvenient! Fork found in kitchen!

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.

For the Device Setup

"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:

Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.

Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO

I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f

Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.

Group Policies

You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.

I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this

It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c

Start Recommendations

In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.

Here's what you should set:

Turn off user tracking: enabled

Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled

Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled

Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled

Do not search Internet: enabled

Windows Spotlight

Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content

Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled

Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled

Cortana

In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

Allow Cortana: disabled

Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled

News and Interests

In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.

Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled

Microsoft Account Login Nudges

When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.

Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.

As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech's debloat tool on it.