Aren't there laws in place about consent and recording phone calls specifically?

Why is it so hard for some people to just say "ok" and move on because it's important to the other person. ESPECIALLY if "it's no big deal" then just do it and see how much more your NB and trans friends feel comfortable

Okami

Sorry to break it to you bruh, but if Facebook owns the IP, they're harvesting and monetizing the account data, end of.

This includes all of the subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp as well.

Let's also not forget that illegal activity exposes user data in addition to greed, and just the fact that your data is in yet another pot increases your risk. Also yes all corporations are greedy and evil but they're definitely not all equal in how bad they are, and FB is one of the worst

Are you willing to compromise on all of these intrusions into your life? Many people are, but I'm not one.

Late stage capitalism. You can't expect year over year growth for eternity without running into a resource cap. Profit growth is all the shareholders care about because it's literally written into United States economics laws that investors get paid first. All these dirty tricks and bad decisions are coming from CEO's with limited understanding of the effects of their policies, trying to push for an extra 2% on top of their already obscene margins

Is there anything a mildly competent electronics enthusiast could do to disable any outbound data?

This sounds like a perfectly workable solution!

I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task? I'm imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?

Customizing a base distro sounds like a good place to start 👍🏽

Hijacking for my own idea: what if I wanted to make my own updated version of say, hiren's Linux environment that included tools for data recovery and drive administration among other things. I would love to basically build my own custom recovery environment preloaded with all my favorite tools.

Tbf, with a few hours of googling, I could probably figure this out for myself so don't go through a bunch of trouble unless you want to document for others. I'm mainly posting because I saw OP and wondered if something easy already existed?

Think you might be a little lost my friend....

Lol so he put even less effort into it than we thought

👏⏱️👏

Get yourself a decent router capable of running OpenWRT, which will allow you to set up vlan's for your lab, and (I would also recommend) another separate vlan for your IoT and other "smart" devices.

The TP-Link Archer C7 is old but reliable and has a lot of open source support.

If you're feeling more adventurous You could also build your own router with any computer that's got two or more Ethernet ports using PFSense, Firewall-NG, or IPFire