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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

#61

Post by ignoramous »

nesadi wrote: post #57
ignoramous wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm starting up a privacy oriented product for non-rooted Android devices. Hope to launch it soon.

Like you say, most people I spoke to said they wouldn't pay. The folks who were serious abt privacy are happy to root their phones and use XPrivacyMod and Adguard, which are as comprehensive a solution you can get on Android short of flashing a ROM like GrapheneOS.

We do plan to charge however, a nominal fee, as low as 50¢ a year. Haven't figured out that yet, but a long way to go. The product needs to be built first.

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

#63

Post by pixelbath »

I found myself wondering, "but why?" more than once reading this.

>I realized that Signal is located in Mountain View, Calif. So I downloaded Burner...

So, Signal is compromised because it's physically near Google? Okay.

>and went to Amazon.com

A company you can't shop at without leaving a digital trail? Okay.

>seeing the 7-Eleven location listed there along with almost everywhere else I’d been in the last seven years

You didn't turn off location services before trying a Faraday bag? You're still using your Android smartphone?

I guess I can give the author credit for looking around and trying, but most of the privacy benefits likely come from things like: using Signal (or similar end-to-end encryption), using privacy-focused email (or a private email server), not logging into social media, turning off location services, using a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo or StartPage, and blocking ads (and possibly JS if you're that bold).

If it's still not enough for the non-technically-minded, then I'd suggest doing some more research into more advanced techniques like network adblocking, Tor, VPN, or virtual machines.

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

#64

Post by neilv »

I've been working on this since the early Web sites (starting with publishing a popular blocker ruleset), and also ongoing exercises with all kinds of measures, including compartmentalizing with a dumbphone when all the smartphone options turned out to be travesties.

One thing I've found is that it's already clearly impossible to do perfectly, and looks like it will be getting even more difficult and limited in what privacy one can have.

(Obviously, were my own privacy the biggest concern, I wouldn't be talking online in places where creepy companies scrape. I mainly dabble in privacy exercises out of a vague sense of public-interest obligation as a techie.)

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

#65

Post by inetknght »

swebs wrote: post #62

Funny how they don't mention uMatrix. Or maybe the editor just removed that part seeing how this page loads 36 different scripts from 9 different domains and sets 16 cookies.

I wonder how well uMatrix stacks against Firefox's reader mode? You can prepend `about:reader?url=` to most URLs and they'll load fine, fast, and have very clean UI elements. It's a lot less of a hassle than using uMatrix.

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

#66

Post by methou »

I'm tired of hiding from the big techs in a pile of privacy gadgets.

How so?

They fight back, with dark patterns. Ruleset works today may not work on the next; you can update the rules; they can make your update break things. I can see that on some major Chinese e-commerce sites, blocking tracking scripts may cause search function to stop working, or you cannot comment because the submit button failed to load.

It's difficult to know, I use uMatrix, and often run into questions like what is this domain doing? Sometimes it's almost 'first-party'; sometimes it can be something else.

Domain names are too broad because I don't see why a site owner can not add trackers under the domain, or some related domain names that were 'trusted'.

There's an option to do this as those anti-virus software do, have a database of hashes of the scripts and css, and audit them. But you know rapid things are changing on the web, it is next to impossible to keep track of those. Eventually, we'll run out of passion and energy, just unplug it already.

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

#67

Post by leppr »

pferde wrote: post #47
mirimir wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, I actually can see where you're going with this, since my HN account is completely disconnected from almost anything else I do online, or even offline. Apart from the privacy benefits, however, I feel that it is a net negative, because it prevents me from sharing here a lot of interesting stuff that happens in FOSS projects I am a part of, or at work.

This is why granular voluntary information disclosure will be super important in the future.

A good social network should allow you to post under a different identity, while still tying-in some attributes of your other identity to the new one.

For instance you could easily share your real life experience under another name, while still proving you have between 1000 and 1500 karma on another account. This fixes the problems of traditional throwaway accounts (lack of credibility).

The only places I see this idea explored is in crypto(currency) projets. This is great because it will be robust and reliable, but the patterns could already easily be applied to today's centralized social networks.

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

#68

Post by neogodless »

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 !

I haven't been on Facebook much lately, and I know that the default settings are not friendly to privacy, but I thought there was an option that was not too hard to find that made everything that involved you go through your own review before it was visible to other people, including photo tags. Has that option gone away?

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

#69

Post by judge2020 »

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 know this is against the general sentiment but I don't care much what these corporations know about me; we all know we're just ad clickers and numbers in their big data machines. I'm more afraid of who can see the data that's peronally about me, whether it be due to mishap (data brach) or lack of control (see: IG, Facebook tagging). Should any of that get out, it would be devastating if it were put up on shady websites that allow you to look up the data of breached inviduals via only a name or username.

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

#70

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #10
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

How does this differ from the traditional hosts file that blocks requests to blacklisted hosts?

Mobile phones. You can't modify the hosts file on an Android phone without rooting the phone. I'm not even sure how you would do it on an iPhone.

Both of them, however, allow you to manually specify the IP of a DNS server in advanced network settings.

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