Shoot the cameras down

They’ll never stop trying until it gets passed

I had a skim through the proposal and it sounds pretty solid. I do wonder though if the targeted advertising ban on under 17’s would push websites to do age verification like so many other places are doing

Not stupid, just uninformed. A lot of people are confused by how things like targeted ads work and because of that they just accept it as inevitable. They think “This website knows what I searched for on another website because it’s all linked. That’s how the internet works” and once you break down how the tracking is actually done, they realise it’s not infallible

It’s the same thing as people not knowing how planes stay in the air or what makes a car engine work. Nobody can be an expert on everything. I don’t mean to give you a lecture btw, I just think it’s counterproductive to dismiss people. But of course there are exceptions and some people just don’t want to know

How did you get into it? Any resources you’d recommend for a noob who wants to get into setting up servers?

I was talking to a friend the other day and she mentioned she’d searched for a product online and then started getting ads for it, and asked how often it’d happened to me. She was very surprised when I said never and I explained that I’d been using an ad blocker for the last 15 years. And by the end of our conversation I’d walked her through setting it up on her devices and now she’s one step closer to regaining her privacy

I often find people really aren’t happy with their privacy being undermined but they don’t realise there are things they can do about it. They’ll say things like “well it’s happening to everyone else too” as a coping mechanism but it’s not something they want. More education is critical

A lot of people really can’t grasp the concept of the status quo changing. Once tools are created and laws are passed they can be used for anything. It’s never going to just be the one purpose

I have a local network for sharing files between my devices but I don’t open anything up to remote access. I might change my mind once I’m more skilled at networking but right now I don’t trust myself to be able to set up something secure. If I’m on the road I just plan what I’ll need and manually sync it across before I go

We do not disclose or publicize the specific capabilities of our technology. This practice is central to our security strategy, as revealing such details could provide potential criminals or malicious actors with an unintended advantage

Lmao fuck them 😂 the grapheneOS forum is exactly where this info belongs so the devs can patch any vulnerabilities. As if companies like cellebrite care if (other) malicious actors get their hands on the exploits. They just don’t want the the vulnerabilities to be fixed so they can keep using them

One thing that’s worth keeping in mind: physical retailers may have cameras, but they (in general) rotate their recordings and don’t provide an API for law enforcement.

They may not give law enforcement direct access but they absolutely upload and share their recordings with third party companies and other retailers. I don’t know how long they keep it for but storage space is incredibly cheap these days

IRL : I’d argue most security cameras are, AFAIK, on closed circuits. I don’t think they can upload the data somewhere nor keep it for a long time

It does depend. Most big retailers share CCTV footage with each other through a central company to build a profile on shoplifters (though I wouldn’t trust them to use it only for that)

Most online shop I know do NOT require a mobile phone number.

This definitely hasn’t been my experience though. I can’t remember the last time I saw an online retailer that didn’t require one, or at least require that the field be filled out. I suppose you could just enter a dummy number but then if there’s a problem with the delivery they’ll always try to contact you by phone first

I am sick of my contact details and my spending ability being considered fair game. You give them your money and that’s not enough they always want more.

Agreed. There was a time when only shitty free services did this (if you’re not paying, you’re the product!) but now every company under the sun wants to sell your data. If I ever buy something digital I always use a fake name/address/phone number and a gift card for payment. But with physical purchases it becomes tougher

Apologies I must’ve replied to your comment accidentally, I was meaning to post it as a general comment in the thread. It’s interesting though, there’s a middle ground somewhere but people shouldn’t need to take extreme steps to not be recorded everywhere they go. The only thing we can be certain of is that the government and companies aren’t going to give us privacy back. We have to be proactive ourselves. I just wish it didn’t have to be this way

inb4 the wEll yOu hAvE nO eXpEcTaTiOn oF pRiVaCy iN pUbLiC comments

I hate this argument that people use. Technology has fundamentally redefined what it means to be observed. Someone casually glancing at you in public is a completely different thing to having your movement tracked, permanently stored, and linked to you wherever you go. People absolutely have a right to expect a degree of privacy even in public settings

Sure, i’m more paranoid but I don’t believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.

I mean things are dire but it’s not as if nothing has improved. Even just 10-15 years ago most websites weren’t using any encryption (or if they did it was only for login pages). Anything you read or sent could be seen by your ISP or someone snooping on the network. Encrypted messaging basically didn’t exist or was very niche. VPNs weren’t nearly as widespread either. Go back another decade and Tor Browser didn’t yet exist (publicly) so there was no easy way to hide your location or stay anonymous online. Governments and companies have clamped down, yes, but our arsenal of privacy tools has never been bigger.

The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape

You can block a lot of this dynamic tracking with NoScript. This will break some websites but it’s worth the inconvenience of a messed up page or needing to find an alternate site

Gone back to paying for nearly everything in cash (good for budgeting I find too, can’t make impulse purchases if I only have enough money to buy what I came to the shops for). I also got a couple more friends to switch to Signal and make some other privacy-related changes. Slowly getting there

Depends where you live. I’m in Australia and phone companies aren’t allowed to activate a number without tying it to an ID. So criminals just use stolen IDs and regular people don’t get privacy. Also YMMV but virtually every service that needs phone verification won’t accept VoIP numbers anymore

Tutamail is the only service I know of that still doesn’t need anything but I don’t expect it to last. Email providers that don’t make you verify anything end up being used for spam and then websites just start blocking their domain from being used for account creation

It’s just a bullshit game of political pride at this point. Anti-privacy pundits criticised the UK gov for “caving to the US” after they dropped the previous order so now they’re doubling down on trying to take away their citizens privacy in the name of standing up to the US. How brave. Not that the US gov gives a shit about privacy either

Friendly reminder police in the US are legally allowed to steal money and possessions from you