As much as I’m careful about Google keeping my data, I have to recognize that this has helped a friend tremendously. He was separated from his ex, she had left with their daughter, and he was trying to get split custody. She testified he was a deadbeat dad, and she put it in writing that he had never been to pick up their daughter at school, never taken her to her regular weekend club activities, etc.

He reached out to me asking if his location history could help prove she was full of shit. It took me an hour or so to figure out the right way to process the data, but then I was able to give him a detailed list of dates and times he had been to his daughter’s school, poney club, etc. His lawyer attached that to their rebuttal. I like to think it made a significant difference. He did get joint custody in the end.

How should people refer to you in the third person? It’s okay to use one’s name as the preferred pronoun.

Many, many data brokers don’t “sell” user data the way you seem to imply. If you collected user data, you’re in one or more of three categories:

1. You have a business model based on user data, like advertising, so your goal is to collect as much data, of as high quality as possible, to make your business more effective;
2. You have a completely different core business model but it enables you to collect data and you might as well monetize it;
3. You’re a broker, an intermediary who’s acquiring data from (2) and selling it to (1).

Brokers may be able to sell you data about you, but they typically don’t care much about making sure it’s you. It’s not their core business, and they may have partial data that is about you, but they’re not able to tell it’s about you. A lot of data just doesn’t have a neat name/address/phone number. Maybe it has your IP address, and companies in (1) will make that connection immediately, but brokers have little reason to care.

Data producers (2) maaayyyybe could, but they really won’t want because (a) you’re too small and they only negotiate data in bulk (b) they’d rather not tell the public what they collect exactly.

Data consumers (1) have zero reason to sell the data. They’re in the business of augmenting that data and classifying it to know what’s junk and what’s reliable. If their competitors can get their hands on this precious secret sauce, they’ll eat them alive. So they keep this data jealously.

There is vertical integration, especially 1+3 - that’s what e.g. Google is all about, use a data-generating vertical (search, web analytics, email) to inform their data-using vertical (ads). Those are simultaneously the data hoarders with probably the most data about you, and the ones least likely to want to share that data with you. It costs them an entire free service to collect the data, and they’re the only company in the world with it, there’s very little reason for them to give up that advantage.

So yeah, it’s unlikely you’ll get anything of value. You’re not relevant enough in their economics, sorry.

Paragliding is an unforgiving sport: you’re gliding, hoping to find updrafts to give you some more altitude so you can reach high enough to cross to another spot that hopefully also has an updraft, etc.

At a guess, this guy was hoping that he’d find a last-resort updraft in this area. OP, do you live maybe in a small-ish built area surrounded by fields or forest? Those tend to get hotter than their surroundings and are great for updrafts. But generally you don’t want to land in residential areas, there full of obstacles which make for unpleasant landing conditions.

Maybe https://tailscale.com/blog/ssh-console/ could help - they run a tailscale client in webassembly in the browser, plus a ssh client also in webasm, so you can get ssh to the tailnet without installing anything.

Because this works over DERP it probably even works on very locked down computers behind very strict firewalls, e.g. that only allow TCP 80/443 :)

I think it’s a little more complicated than this: Reddit needs power users to make its ecosystem work. Mods of course, but also content creators and content, hem, reposters, who keep large communities active and interesting. If a significant enough fraction of these people give up on Reddit, the users who want funny memes will go get them from 9gag or wherever is most convenient for them.