Be dark enough that your impersonators fail due to take/insufficient info on you.
Don't let this happen to you! https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-daniel-blackmon-romance...
Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
91–100 of 139 posts
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#92Author does not mention the major reason I care which is that allowing others to know what we are doing, thinking, saying, where we are going.. either individually or collectively anonymously or not, gives them power over us in many ways to predict, manipulate, dispossess.. which leads to the imbalances we have today of the haves and have nots of data. The people who say big tech already has so much data on them so w…
>either individually or collectively anonymously or not, gives them power over us in many ways to predict, manipulate, dispossess The thing is, is that actually true? What always comes to mind for me is the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved their self-declared 'psychometric targeting', which it turned out, after scientists did some studies had a measurable effect of zero on people's behaviour[1]. People lov…
> It's much more boring and unfashionable to think that people are a little more complex and have more agency and that companies push it because it makes them sound more sophisticated than they are.
I wonder if, when it comes to marketing at least, the opposite is true.
Facebook have x million data points on each person, but at the end of the day everyone fits into a very finite number marketing buckets based on gender, age and location. In terms of selling you a netflix series, razor, theragun or some other gadget people are predictable with just regular data, it just sounds fancier if you call it big data with a twist of AI and a quantum neural network chaser.
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#93There's another option, which few are able to implement. Sign off entirely. Stop using the digital Machine. Humans lived this way for all but the most recent wink of an eye. Many humans still do. Think of the monastics on Mt Athos.
When I first saw the title, I thought the author was going to discuss truly taking the red pill. I was disappointed to read just another '10 things you can do to increase your privacy' piece.
You're not going far enough.
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#94Usually when a question is asked in a headline one would expect the article to at least attempt to answer it. This piece doesn't guide you on how to make trade-off decisions between privacy and usability, it doesn't even give concrete tips on how to improve privacy (apart from a single mention of password managers, where it doesn't even say whether they should be used or avoided). This is as useless for beginners as it is for experts, how did this make it to the front page of HN?
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#95The only real way to ensure your data isn't being collected and sold in the course of every single transaction you engage in (cash transactions being somewhat less trackable, however), is to get data privacy laws passed that forbid this activity by retailers, data brokers, and related entities. The EU has the right idea on this. Ordinary individuals who attempt to use technology to 'go dark' will likely, if they're c…
Zersetsung
[deleted]
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#96Usually when a question is asked in a headline one would expect the article to at least attempt to answer it. This piece doesn't guide you on how to make trade-off decisions between privacy and usability, it doesn't even give concrete tips on how to improve privacy (apart from a single mention of password managers, where it doesn't even say whether they should be used or avoided). This is as useless for beginners as…
Some concrete advises: https://prism-break.org
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#97Author does not mention the major reason I care which is that allowing others to know what we are doing, thinking, saying, where we are going.. either individually or collectively anonymously or not, gives them power over us in many ways to predict, manipulate, dispossess.. which leads to the imbalances we have today of the haves and have nots of data. The people who say big tech already has so much data on them so w…
It also leads to manipulation. People don't want to hear that - they think, as imagine many people reading this are thinking, that they aren't manipulated. People are manipulated on a large scale. States, advertisers, political movements, and others are investing a lot of money in it. They are getting something for their money. That is the most important issue; that is the power in our society. Propaganda was effecti…
This really can't be overstated. Propaganda was highly effective even as words on pieces of paper distributed once a week or infrequent AM radio broadcasts.
I believe the old idea that would hold even more so now is that the only defense against propaganda is essentially to be illiterate. It is really hard to propagandize a person who can't read. The more informed a person believes themselves to be about the world from text, the more propagandized they are. I believe that is from Edward Bernays.
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#98The only real way to ensure your data isn't being collected and sold in the course of every single transaction you engage in (cash transactions being somewhat less trackable, however), is to get data privacy laws passed that forbid this activity by retailers, data brokers, and related entities. The EU has the right idea on this. Ordinary individuals who attempt to use technology to 'go dark' will likely, if they're c…
". This is called mass domestic warrantless surveillance and it is illegal under any reasonable interpretation of the US constitution, and certainly shouldn't be allowed by private parties either." I don't think this is correct. Google etc are private actors so no state action, no constitutional violation plus they get your legal consent whether you like the way they do it or not. Government agencies if they get the…
Mass surveillance has been used against citizens in the US too; it's too tempting a tool not to abuse. The legal system loses its credibility when warrants, proceedings, evidence, etc are all secret in the name of national security. And further there are cases where the government circumvents the law's intent by asking companies to do things the government itself must not do.
Whether a thing is "legal" when it comes to government (ab)use of power is the thinnest of defenses. As the senator from Naboo said: "I will make it legal."
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#99The extent can mean doing basic things like installing and AD blocker, using a password manager, surfing in isolated sessions (incognito mode) to stop cookie tracking and to leave no forensic artefact on your device, always posting with pseudonyms, using privacy-aware operating systems like Linux, etc Then you have the extreme options available like Tor, using Qubes, GrapheneOS on your phone, changing your legal name…
OP Here. I'm interested in the balance you found. Happy to include it in the part 2 and reference you.
By balance I mean I don’t go full LARPer when doing basic stuff like online banking and buying stuff from Amazon. LARPer means Live Action Role Play and refers to someone overly paranoid about every little thing. In other words, their threat model is wrongly applied to basic things. If you’re a journalist you may want to use Qubes and use disposable VMs to open PDF documents, for example. Most people would be fine just opening the PDF in Google Docs. The extreme options I mentioned can be used if you’re a target of harassment, like changing your legal name, or if you’re a prominent activist you may need a burner phone to attend a protest. It’s all about your threat model. Also: disabling Intel Management Engine could be useful for protecting your business secrets and intellectual property, but for most people doing mundane things it’s an extreme step to take.
Re: Online privacy: to what extent should you try to go dark?
#100The only real way to ensure your data isn't being collected and sold in the course of every single transaction you engage in (cash transactions being somewhat less trackable, however), is to get data privacy laws passed that forbid this activity by retailers, data brokers, and related entities. The EU has the right idea on this. Ordinary individuals who attempt to use technology to 'go dark' will likely, if they're c…
Certainly you can ban the sale, but it’s hard to imagine a law that outright bans the collection—there will be exceptions for law enforcement, and it’s not inconceivable those exceptions will be abused. I think technological and social solutions may be a better bet than laws on the books in this case.
If you ban non-consensual data collection & processing then there wouldn’t be a business case for building infrastructure for it.
Law enforcement would have to build it from scratch (and trick users to fall for it or pass laws to force people/companies to use it) where as right now they can just dip into the data companies already collect.
The "attention economy" is the best thing that happened to intelligence agencies worldwide. Where as before they had to build surveillance infrastructure themselves (which requires budget, skills and secrecy, all of which is costly and politically risky), nowadays they get all of that not just for free but much better than anything they could build themselves.