161–170 of 217 posts
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Im not sure I understand your point. You can still work to protect your privacy and it will get better slowly over time IMHO. There are services out their that help you with the data that is already out there on you.
You think privacy is getting better over time? Honestly? Is there any credible source that is documenting privacy in the US getting better?
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The Web is utterly unusable without uBlock Origin.
uBlock Origin does not protect you from this, this is a fingerprinting problem. You need to use a fingerprinting resistant browser. And even then, there are new fingerprinting methods emerging frequently and you can't prevent fingerprinting from inside apps on android/iOs.. Most slop mobile applications, that many people have on their phones are basically spyware pretending to be games/whatever. Programatic advertisi…
Another good reason to run Graphene without proprietary apps.
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Yeah I have been doing that for years now. I do most things the hard way. I forgot exactly how it started. I think it started when I decided I wanted to develop my own sense of discipline. I think right after I read the constructive living book by David K. Reynolds. The premise, as I understand it, is that depression is a direct result of not taking full responsibility and immediate action in your life. Looking back,…
> I know it's a cliché, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. "Kindly let me help you, or you will drown, said the monkey as it put the fish safely up a tree" —Alan Watts
I have 26 apps on my phone. Of those, four are Safari extensions, one is a PWA and another I wrote myself. I use a restrictive nextDNS profile that also blocks Apple's native tracking (as best they can) and don't use social media. I feel like that's the best I can realistically do.
And you do realize your cellphone is constantly sharing your location with your cell phone company which is more than willing to give it to the government without a warrant. Whatever you are doing is meaningless privacy theatre
Of course, you can do more, such as running only trusted software (i.e., free software) on your devices, not using Internet-of-Shit devices anywhere in your home, and making sure your car is not snooping on you through it's own cellular modem.
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Beginning to wonder if convenience is the root of all evil, and not money. Money's just a proxy for convenience. More of us should learn to do things the hard way more often, and to be familiar with less-convenient things. There are life-changing advantages to doing things the hard way at least some of the time .
I know it's a cliché, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. People forget, most evil is created by good people trying to do good. The biggest trick the devil played was making us all believe evil is (always) easy to identify. But all the sayings are about how the devil is sly, tricks you, and sneaks up on you. All of that is to remind us how hard it is to do good. You don't have to be an evil person to…
Citation needed.
I have never regretted my decision to aggressively block ads on every device I use, and to shun devices where I can't.
I am not sure that ad blocking is enough now or in the future as fingerprinting is extremely hard to fight while keeping a convenient web experience. Of course, continue blocking for convenience, but for privacy, more robust solutions are needed. Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com
I don’t know, but it seems like it’s overselling its capabilities. I tried with Firefox Focus and it said I’m using incognito (private mode) and assigned a unique visitor ID. Immediately tried with a private tab in Safari on iOS and it said I’m not using incognito (private mode) and assigned a new unique visitor ID. Then I switched networks and tried. One more unique visitor ID.
I’m not claiming that fingerprinting is not possible, but this website is not good at it. Seems like it uses plain cookies.
There is an ethical framework for handling personal data collected and maintained by the US govt called the Fair Information Practice Principles (https://www.fpc.gov/resources/fipps/).
It really is too bad that "any legal purpose" is the stated boundary for our elected govt rather than a more noble appeal to public service.
I work with Ad Data a lot in my job, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what this data that journalists love to propogate: The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is g…
> Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique You'd be surprised what can be done when data from different source is fused together. Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716 Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
Also, people who post under their real name are likely to write with their real voice:
> Any deanonymization setup with ground truth introduces distributional biases. In our cross-platform datasets, the pro-files are likely easier to deanonymize than an average profile: the very fact that ground truth exists implies that the user may not have cared about anonymity in the first place. Similarly, two split-profiles of a single user are inherently alike, whereas two pseudonymous accounts of the same person (e.g., an official and a pseudonymous alt account) might expose more heterogeneous micro-data.
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I think your is statement is inaccurate to the point of being intentionally misleading: Many devices, when running, and in some cases even if turned off but connected to their battery, will ping cell towers (maybe even BLE/Wifi) and get triangulated by the network infrastructure (such as cell towers) without actively broadcasting the GPS location. That's why I don't quite understand why the gubernment needs to have f…
Cell-site location information (CSLI) is not available to apps or adware and is protected by the Fourth Amendment.
If the government wants to tap your phone they need a warrant. If they want to buy it from a willing seller like Verizon they don’t.