Digital privacy.
It was very recently revealed in unsealed court documents from I believe 2013 that the Facebook app pushed a certificate to mobile devices that funneled all of everyone’s decrypted traffic through their servers. That means every webpage visited, every file sent and received, every word typed passed through and was stored on a computer at Facebook HQ. One engineer was quoted as saying that Zuckerberg had a particular interest in looking at people’s Snapchats. It was also revealed that Facebook had a data exchange partnership with Netflix where Netflix had open ended access to user’s private messages.
Now you don’t have to be a Snapchat or Facebook user to see how wrong and downright creepy that is, but if you bring it up with the average person you can see their eyes immediately glaze over. It’s hard to blame them, it feels like a hopeless situation and it’s much more convenient to pretend it’s not happening. People have been completely indoctrinated into abandoning their right to privacy. It’s a real shame because if we were paid as individuals what our data is apparently worth I’m sure that perspective would quickly change.
*Formatting
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
Also, what do you think we can do as a society to change the status quo? How do we get more people to see that this is a significant problem?
Step one: Disconnect
Ack! I wrote out a whole reply to you and then a pipe burst in my yard and the reply has been wiped! I do have to go deal with that but I’ll be back.
I’m curious what steps we can take as individuals to further protect our privacy online.
A few to consider:
- Ditch Facebook and Whatsapp.
- Invest in a VPN
- Switch to Firefox for web browsing
- Install GrapheneOS on your phone
- Pay with cash where possible
- Switch to XMPP with OMEMO encryption for messaging with your favorite people
Couldn’t agree more. I was having this conversation with friends back in 08/09. No one took me seriously, but the red flags were all there for everyone to see. Facebook was caught using their platform to run sociological experiments on their users without consent, for example. That alone would get an academic or real researcher in serious trouble. But for an evil-corp like Facebook? Nothing but skepticism or disbelief from most people. It happened, people were harmed. Oh, and remember Myanmar?
The general publics’ overall sense of helplessness, apathy, and/or disbelief that the tech industry is doing anything untoward is their biggest victory. People are happily falling for it all over again with LLMs.
My eyes don’t glaze over. I’m FURIOUS that they even exist, and have been since they killed myspace.
I knew back in 2008 something wasn’t right about facebook. I had no idea what, but I knew they were sketchy.
By 2010, I knew they were invading peoples privacy. I’ve never had a facebook. And yet, they have my phone number. My mom has facebook, and she stores my phone number in her contacts list.
Thing is, what can I do?
I was into Geocaching for a while and was always amazed at the things out in plain sight that people casually walked by and never noticed every day
Very true! And once you’ve done it for a while, you start to notice other cachers by the way they are awkwardly standing in unusual places trying to look inconspicuous.
Heh, that’s why we refer to other people who don’t geocache as “muggles”.
What’s on random screens in the background of movies / TV shows. People hate watching stuff with me because I’m always pausing it to look at that stuff.
Great comment! I never noticed this until I took MDMA and ever since I’ve been absolutely fascinated by the bizarre things that are placed behind actors.
Birds. Even in urban areas you wouldn’t believe how many birds there are. Not just pigeons and sparrows, but hawks and falcons will readily live in many urban areas too. Herons and egrets are particularly adaptable to urban areas and easy to find along rivers and ponds. In the spring and fall warblers will pass through as well, and I even see them on busy urban streets sometimes if there’s a few bushes or trees along the path. I’ve even had a few lucky owl sightings while walking in the suburbs at night.
Delightfully since I live in the southwest and grew up on the east coast, where they’re incredibly shy of people, we also have tons of bold urban ravens. In the late spring and early summer sometimes I see big flocks (recently independent juveniles?) just soaring and diving for the fun of it.
I love birds! I can feel people’s annoyance at me pointing them out and I simply don’t care. Not having an interest in that ruby throated hummingbird or even the red shouldered hawks and house finches is your
distinctiondisfunction and I will make you aware of the life going on outside your ego.Shameless plug for c/wildlifephotography
Civil asset forfeiture in the U.S.
We’re supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty” but they get around this by saying that they’re essentially accusing the money (or car/home or whatever) of being used for crime. Then they confiscate it and the only way to get it back is to go to court and prove that your money is innocent.
The fact that cash/possessions can be taken away from you at anytime by federal agents (or by police in almost every State) without having to follow it up with any sort of case to prove that a crime occurred is ridiculous. And on top of that you can’t get the money back that you spent on attorney fees, so it’s pointless to spend money on an attorney if what was taken was less than a few thousand dollars.
Most people don’t know that this can happen or don’t seem to care enough because, “it would never happen to me, right?”
You know when people are in a group and they are all chattering all joyously and stuff and you see a person of the group trying to say something and raise a bit their voice and then they recoil and then don’t say anything?
Or when you are walking around in a Group and everyone is talking about stuff and one of them just sort of swaddles a bit out and little by little tries as if running away from the group?
Yeah I witnessed you
Can you stop witnessing me, please. It’s embarrassing.
No way, I am the Noticer, not the Ignorer haha
Whether or not people say “yes,” or “no” when responding to others or if they say “yeah,” or “nah”. And whether or not they say please or thank you.
“Is this so-called news credible?”
Wow I literally just had this discussion with someone. “Does a billionaire own it? Then no you can’t trust the reporting on that same billionaire to be even remotely accurate.”
- Downvote if you implicitly trust the news I guess
It goes deeper than that. EVERY news agency has a bias/agenda. They may accurately report the facts of an event that happened, but slant the context as to why.
By reading multiple, even oppositional news sources, you can get an idea of what is happening.
Nobody has a news cast that goes:
Good evening and welcome to the news. 3 teenagers are dead after a drive-by shooting on Rainer Street at 3pm. No suspect has been charged or identified. NEXT STORY. A man attemped to rob the Alvins Jewelers on Swanson Rd late last night after hours. The would-be-theif then became trapped in the stores security system, and arrested when police arrived. NEXT STORY.
Nobody does that. It’s 20% facts 80% filler.
The fact that “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire has someone playing the bongos in the background. Once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.
So you’re just sending me a link to the song?
Thanks. This will be pretty useful for those who don’t feel like having to deal with YouTube’s terrible search function. But please, indicate what the link links to next time.
I have to listen to the song now
Fun fact, I learned this from DankPods.
I’m an artist, and I’ll gaze at seemingly trivial things like reflections of a cup on a semi glossy surface, and then do an analysis of it in my head along the lines of “hmm…the reflection is at maybe 30-40% opacity, and the reflection falls off at more of an oblique angle, falling off completely by the time the reflection gets to half the cup’s height…the glossier the surface the less falloff there is and the sharper the reflection is!”
The lab equipment in television “science labs”, no your fid detector didn’t get the mass spectrum of that “unknown sample”, past the question of how much information you’d hope to get from that test, why are you using a gc on organic samples? you want to be using an LC you maroon.
I can’t watch murder porn for many reasons, this is the least of them, but I like to poke holes in my in-laws immersion when they watch it and I’m around.
I read the terms of service everywhere I go.
Hey me too…banks fucking hate me because of it too. 10 minute meeting in their eyes turns into 2 hours with me constaly telling them I’m reading the ways they are going to fuck me so be patient.
Same. But I’ve never made it through Google’s TOS. It felt like thousands of pages, and it felt like most of them invoke all the others.
When websites could theoretically track me.
I keep my browser on “delete all my cookies/cache/local storage/history/everything (except bookmarks and addons, basically) every time I exit” mode. And I never log into anything without closing out of my browser entirely first to get rid of anything they could use to correlate “you visited this blog” with my specific Google (or whatever) account. When I’m done with whatever I logged in for, I close my browser entirely again.
My phone browser doesn’t have a “delete everything on close” feature, so I just use the “delete all data on this app” feature liberally.
I have some bad news for you, Toot :(
Eh I don’t feel like giving bad news, just please see my response to this question and extrapolate.
Extra things you can do:
Firefox browser has built in protection against tracking and you can use container tabs to isolate each site you go to further.
Ublock Origin browser extension will increase that protection. Make sure it is Ublock Origin and not any of the clones and lookalikes.
DNS level protection. I use what’s called a Pi Hole, a raspberry Pi on my network acting as a home DNS server.
Here are my top blocked URLS for the month of May. I utilize all the above protections and as you can see the Pi Hole is still doing the majority of the heavy lifting. And it’s a constant game of whack-a-mole as they change a single digit to bypass the blocks in place.
123 THOUSAND requests from Roku, all blocked without a single detriment to our media watching experience. No one in my household even uses Netflix. It’s honestly sickening. People love to talk about how much energy crypto uses, but no one questions this at all.
…welp. I guess I’m getting a pihole.
Does ram matter? The pi4 comes in 1, 2, 4, or 8 gigs of ram. Each priced accordingly, and maybe I need the 8 gig? Or can I save some money and get the 1 gig?
I believe Pihole can be run from a docker container so if you have any hardware lying around that will do. The hardware requirements are extremely light, I believe the minimum RAM requirement is like 512 MB so any one of those should do. Personally, mine is running on a 4 with 8 Gigs of RAM and I have literally never experienced a single issue other than needing to power cycle it once or twice a year.
I feel so sad for you because your feelings come from a good place but unfortunately you just haven’t paid attention enough ☹️
Looking for things on the ground or the side of the road. Some notable items I have found:
- Unmarked envelope with ~$400 in it.
- Change purse filled with random international coins
- Pair of knipex channel lock pliers that have dog bite marks on the handles
- Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket i727
- Ticket for a festival which I then attended
- Many sunglasses
- Many cool rocks and sticks
I take the time to find the original owner whenever I find something but it’s pretty rare. These are only the things that I have kept because the original owner couldn’t be found.
Original owner of the envelope probably can’t be found because you jacked the money he left for his drug guy! Man’s at the bottom of a river!
They need to upgrade their dead drop locations then. 🤣
I notice lefties. Im right-handed and when I was little and much dumber I wanted to be left-handed. So I did a bunch of weird shit to force it. Stuff like wrapping my right hand up for whole day, trying reverse controls for video games, wearing my watch on my right hand, etc. Some stuff did take, like the watch on my right hand, which ironically made my right hand more dominant. Being a lefty is the club that I was never able to join but think about subconsciously all the time I guess.
