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I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

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Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#51

Post by lazyjones »

mikekchar wrote: post #45
Yizahi wrote: post #23

It is impossible to hide from big corporate. People tried (1). There is no was to block all tracking unless you go full luddite and unless every single person you know or simply met randomly does so too. Otherwise big corps would just create tracking profiles for you based on activity of others. Small recent example - remember that russian spying app FaceApp (iirk) which made aged pics out of your photos? Even if you…

Drives me crazy: My dad takes a picture of me when I visit my parents. My mom uploads it to Facebook. My cousin tags me. Want to know where I was during my vacations to Canada and who I spent time with? It's all there for the taking and I'm not involved at all !

> Want to know where I was during my vacations to Canada and who I spent time with? It's all there for the taking and I'm not involved at all!

Even if this didn't happen, Big Tech would still know since you probably took your smartphone with you...

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#52

Post by ignoramous »

lazyjones wrote: post #51
mikekchar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drives me crazy: My dad takes a picture of me when I visit my parents. My mom uploads it to Facebook. My cousin tags me. Want to know where I was during my vacations to Canada and who I spent time with? It's all there for the taking and I'm not involved at all !

> Want to know where I was during my vacations to Canada and who I spent time with? It's all there for the taking and I'm not involved at all! Even if this didn't happen, Big Tech would still know since you probably took your smartphone with you...

I guess there are two kinds of privacy issues at play here:

1. Privacy denied.

2. Privacy forfeited.

OP, I think, is complaining about the former. Though both forms could either be consentual or not. The latter is usually, in spirit, non-consentual: You agreed to the terms in good faith but wouldn't if you knew the unprecedented scale of the exploit.

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#53

Post by nkrisc »

bauerd wrote: post #24
duncan-donuts wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s on a raspberry pi that is connected to your LAN. It is dns for the LAN and blocks any requests to hosts that are blacklisted

What if ads are hosted on the same origin as the content? I'd still need application adblocking then I guess

If a site is serving ads from their own domain, that's OK. As a pi-hole user I'm trying to block automated ad networks as those are the worst culprits when it comes to tracking and serving malware.

I visit some sites that sell their ad spaces directly to advertisers and create and host all creative themselves. I have no issue with those ads.

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#54

Post by nesadi »

ac29 wrote: post #18
colordrops wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave works. Lots of propaganda on here against Brave for some reason. It's open source based on chromium with all the Google bits taken out, and it has built in ad blocking. So there's an opt-in crypto coin, so what.

> Lots of propaganda on here against Brave for some reason. I think the same reason some people find Google's advertising-based business model problematic, they find Brave's advertising-based business model problematic.

I'd say these people are out of touch. If sites aren't funded by advertising, that means people need to pay to access. See all the efforts to workaround paywalls because nobody wants to pay every single site that they visit $5 a month, and plenty of people simply couldn't afford paying to access the internet in that way. That's enabled by advertising. But somehow nobody here wants to hear it. Advertising is incredibly important to enable open access to, well, the entire internet. We see with the Linux Journal how well subscription-only services work out - they live by the skin of their teeth for a while until they go under. But somehow we're better off because they didn't use advertising for funding? Now we don't have any LJ at all. I don't see how that's better.

Not that I'm advocating for ads that track and profile you and everything that you do. We should be making an effort to create an infrastructure for ads where they can't track and profile us. That's what Brave is trying to do, and I don't understand why people are against it. Like, how do they expect sites to be financed?

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#55

Post by Yizahi »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #44
Yizahi wrote: post #23

It is impossible to hide from big corporate. People tried (1). There is no was to block all tracking unless you go full luddite and unless every single person you know or simply met randomly does so too. Otherwise big corps would just create tracking profiles for you based on activity of others. Small recent example - remember that russian spying app FaceApp (iirk) which made aged pics out of your photos? Even if you…

> that russian spying app FaceApp Not that I've used it myself but has this been established as fact now?

It is established that it is russian and hypothesized that it is a spyware. Personally I include in spyware all apps that "only collect metadata" or only do "personalized ads" because for me it is equal with spying almost by definition. And people like Bruce Schneier have the same opinion (2).

(2) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/metadata_surv...

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#56

Post by mxuribe »

Whoa, i had never heard of Reflectacles[0]. Beyond apps, these are the kinds of physical gadgets that we need nowadays to help protect our privacy! Certainly, more growth in this area will evolve these products to be more...subdued and subtle. Nevertheless, I'm encouraged to see that this type of thing exists.

Beyond rfid wallets, these glasses, and the clothing/jacket the author mentioned in the article, are there any other cool apparel-related gadgets out there, which a privacy-conscious person could look into (without spending the equivalent of a 3-letter agency budget)???

[0] = https://www.reflectacles.com

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#57

Post by nesadi »

ignoramous wrote: post #37
speedplane wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do a pretty good job of hiding from everyone. ... it's just multiple VMs, nested VPN chains, and Tor. This condescension is so common and petty. It's like a real-estate broker laughing at someone for overpaying for a property, or a lawyer laughing that someone missed a court deadline they didn't know about. Experts of complex systems generally know how to get what they want out of those systems. Finding ways for…

> Experts of complex systems generally know how to get what they want out of those systems. Finding ways for non-experts to do the same should not be sneered at. There's a product/market/founder fit in there somewhere.

I'm not so sure. Seeing how popular and endemic Facebook, Google et al. are, I'd say consumers price privacy way too low for any significant amount of money to be made.

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#58

Post by ch »

mirimir wrote: post #35
pferde wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that only works if you compartmentalize from the very beginning, which regular people never do.

Not at all. Only from the beginning of a particular persona. Mirimir is about eight years old.[0] But I had numerous personas before Mirimir. Some you could maybe track back to, if you worked at it, and knew where to look. But some are just too old, and unconnected. I was lots sloppier, when I started going dark, in the late 90s. I even talked about it in meatspace. But gradually, I compartmentalized more and more. A…

But do you also segregate the devices and networks you connect to for this identity, or can a sufficiently advanced adversary connect the dots where you link up with the rest of the internet?

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#59

Post by Thriptic »

mirimir wrote: post #33
LilBytes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really, really not _that simple_. The majority wouldn't know what VirtualBox and Whonix is, and that's before we start discussing what the benefits of privacy even are. This is the disconnect we have with our peers who don't work in software/IT and why the right to privacy is being lost to jargon and technical expertise. Privacy now is only a right to those who know how to employ it.

Well, TFA is loaded with "gadgets" that I've never heard of. It could just as easily pointed to VirtualBox and Whonix. Or even running VPNs in host and VM to give a simple VPN chain. The AirVPN and IVPN clients for Windows are pretty much leak free. And dead simple. Buy account, download client, install, and run. And for Whonix, it's just download and install VirtualBox. And then download Whonix, import into VirtualB…

This is not realistic. Your conception of an average user is actually a power user. If I tried to imagine my mom doing this (who is highly intelligent but non-technical and not a power user), I would see her getting tripped up on:

Whonix / VM:

* Figuring out which version of virtual box is appropriate for her setup. The download page is not at all noob-friendly and there is no big "click this button to download for this OS" button. What does windows host mean? Does that mean windows? What's an SDK? Do I need the extension pack?

* Figuring out which version of Whonix is appropriate for the same reason. Download securely without verification? Is that ok? What's a signing key? Open pgp? What if she downloads the wrong one? Will it fuck something up?

* Feeling comfortable employing a VM. She has never used a VM and would have no idea what was going on when a different OS appeared within her OS. This could be very unnerving because it seems incorrect. The idea of importing an image would be so foreign that she might not be able to figure out how to do it using the virtualbox interface.

* Trivial tasks on whonix. She wouldn't know how to do trivial things on Whonix because it is has a totally different UI than Mac or Windows. Most non-technical people memorize what they have to do to accomplish tasks without actually understanding what they are doing so they can't port that knowledge to another platform.

* Troubleshootong. She would not be able to use Google for help because she can't form the queries correctly to ask what she wants.

VPN:

* Determining which VPN(s) to use and signing up. There are about 100 options and she has no way to evaluate the quality.

* Determining whether the VPN was set up correctly. Leak tests? Checking external IP? What's an IP?

* Understanding why certain things don't work anymore. Why can't she print documents anymore? Why are certain sites going to the Canadian page instead of the regular .com page? Why isn't Netflix working anymore? Why is she constantly dealing with captcha?

* Understanding why everything is so slow

She would quickly realize she is in over her head, get frustrated, and then feel embarrassed because she would have to call me for help with what you described as a "trivial task". She would probably just not do it to save herself from the embarrassment / "wasting my time".

Re: I Tried Hiding from Big Tech in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets

#60

Post by Circuits »

I think I was freaked out for the first time just a few months ago. I realized they were keeping tabs on me but to what extent I wasn't sure. It wasn't until the videos my roommate watches on YouTube ended up on my suggested list that I realized the extent. YouTube is, in some way another, in cahoots with my ISP? Perhaps, they traced my IP and saw that it matched my roommates IP? I am not sure how but they did it somehow.
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