thanks!

Huh, I thought IMEI was something only useful to government and insurance and not possible for apps to read? I wasn’t worried about it if that’s the case, it’s on Android yes so probably SSAID (not sure about the Advertising ID, also can or is it common for apps to read MAC Address of devices to tie it to people?)

Can I force it to change or spoof it? VPN may sometimes break connection out of nowhere, I hardly have this experience on PC but on mobile it just seems to occur a lot more often

I don’t know if my Device ID with my real location would end up in the hands of a Data Broker(s) that would start profiling other data linked to my location to then sell it to other Data Broker(s), that’s my only worry

Thanks I’ll check it out

Oh, wow! Thanks so much, sorry for late reply I am deeply grateful for you giving this help*___*

is it possible to downgrade? —

thanks, i heard and tried it already many times but:

• I need to self-host (fine for doing it locally but im wary of opening it to access outside the network and be open to external threats since i wouldnt know how to properly handle that so i went for trying to selfhost 4get for being more lightweight)
• find a trustworthy instance (don’t know how, i dont mind much on what instance i choose for YouTube frontend proxies but for searches i want to be more careful, maybe if there was a search extension to randomize instance between EU-based instances i’d feel more comfortable since its what made me pivot to Startpage years ago as it was purely a EU-based company)

phew and thats how i accidentally discovered just now about Startpage being owned by a marketing company, somehow i missed that news

From Wikipedia

In October 2019, Startpage received a significant investment from Privacy One Group, a subsidiary of System1.

i guess now i will have to pivot search to somewhere else, i went from DuckDuckGo to Startpage years ago now i will look around for something else

theres PDFDing but its not as actively maintained as StirlingPDF

Maybe they could improve this in the future but this and formatting not maintaining on opening PDFs is why many resort to other tools, StirlingPDF is opensource so I guess they could try finding similar solutions to opening PDF as is with all the formatting. You can force open with LibreOffice Writer but the formatting will be all messed up

its not as effective as StirlingPDF, people using iLovePDF usually need it because they have to edit a PDF with customized footer/upper part of the page and just opening with LibreOffice Writer definitely will not maintain that. keeping the content and format are two different things, so if you are just opening a simple PDF without much formatting then yes maybe you dont need something like StirlingPDF and just directly opening with LibreOffice Writer will suffice