Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

> RF dead chambers are bloody expensive for a reason: you can't emulate them by pasting some paint on a wall.

Couldn't you just stick yourself in a metal box (with a metal door that is careful to get a good seal)?

That's not very accurate. It's more like:

Your accountant prepares your tax return for free. They also have a lot of boxes of flyers provided to them by people who want to sell things. After preparing your tax return, they use their knowledge of your return to choose which flyer to put into the envelope. They then send that envelope back to you, and when you open it to read your tax return, there's a flyer for something else paperclipped to the front with a note saying "Thought you might find this interesting."

(In particular, the accountant is only one who sees the information in your tax return.)

> Your profile IS your personal identity, and can be associated trivially.

I'm hardly new to his stuff and to say it's trivial is nonsense. Most people make it trivial but it's not trivial to associate identities of people who put basic effort into obscuring them.

Merely disconnecting your primary profiles from your online activity is enough to throw most mass-surveillance/drag-net stuff off, aka 99.9% of advertising firms and most government programs.

If you're an activist or someone interested in keeping your internet activity private then the bar is far higher (and the targets of which are ever expanding as governments and private organizations get better at this stuff). FBI agents, or likewise in your country of residence, have plenty of forensic tools at their disposal to connect disparate identities. It takes some real time investment and requires being super careful to evade these measures. But I'm not talking about that here. I mean the average person in 2017.

I've personally done the total anonymity stuff as an experiment so I know what that takes.

Having studied many documents from the various global national security organizations and being fortunate to have dated a defense attorney in the past who engaged with police surveillance reports on a daily basis for their work I'm convinced that even basic privacy measures such as never using your real identity when using internet services, creating full legitimate sounding backstories (and subsequent online profiles) for your fake identity, and changing the ID you use often enough will throw off most basic surveillance measures.

I'm not doing anything to get people really invested in uncovering my online identities, as most people aren't, which is what I'm talking about.

The simple fact is the vast, vast majority of people reuse the same username (and passwords) across the internet and use their real name and emails everywhere. So it's really not hard to track people online from an LEO or 4chan doxxing perspective.

But I'm not convinced you have to be isolated from the utility of most online (cloud) services. You just have to invest in using them intelligently to not associate your actual identity with the services.

Ad companies aren't interested in deanonymizing people anyway. They are looking for low hanging fruit and there are more than enough people to fill databases who fit this profile. So I'm not that concerned about those who don't.

Right, I read it. But it's still not actually clear to me whether they are ceasing ALL mining of email data for business accounts, or are just not funneling it to a specific set of ad programs. To me, at least, that seems an important point of clarification.

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