Privacy? what privacy? just today i was thinking about getting some charcoal for a bbq , didnt say a word about it and facebook started pitching me charcoal ads.
itâs also the country that a service is based in. do they have agreements with the US like 5 eyes or 14 eyes? are they a neutral country like switzerland? for AI i canât tell you squat, as far as i know we donât everything about the algorithms used in AI so that poses a security and privacey risk as well.
Suggestion:
Tell people on Facebook your email address, then delete your account.
(If Marketplace is critical create a new one and use it just for that, or use your partners for Marketplace).
Youâll find almost no one will email you, but those that are the important ones.
Then live your life, and find that Facebook, LinkedIn and friends, it was all just crap that exists purely to make the shareholders lives better, not yours.
But stay signed up to L1 forums 
2 Likes
Let me second this.
Self hosting email is very challenging, and has been very challenging for over 15 years.
It is damn near impossible to keep a small email server off of spamlists. Some legitimate, others borderline protection rackets that want money to not report your domain as the source of email spam.
20 years ago it was mostly still possible to run your own email server, but today? Forget about it.
It is best to assume that email is never secure. It is going to either be data harvested on your end, or on the other end (the other people you are emailing with) and it is damn near impossible to get everyone in your contacts to care about privacy.
The best you can do is sign up for something like Protonmail and try to use that, but understanding that as soon as you email with someone who doesnât use a similar service, everything is being data harvested.
Thatâs unfortunately just the sad reality we live in today.
The battle for privacy was lost a long, long time ago. The time to do something about it was ~20 years ago before these interests got so entrenched, but back then no one would believe you that it would get as bad as it is today, where it is best to assume that absolutely everything that connects to a network in any capacity is somehow spying on you 24/7.
Now these fuckers have so many paid lobbyists that nothing can ever be done to fix it. Best we can do is try to take precautions where we can to minimize the impact.
Itâs really bad in the U.S. and in other countries that have few or no privacy protections, but before citizens of the EU get too uppity, you should know that GDPR is really just a charade to trick you into complacency. You have no privacy either.
These creeps in tech lied by omission for decades, and did the good old âslow rollâ tactic where they change things for the worse just slowly enough that people get used to it over time and donât break out the pitchforks. Because if anything like the current state of things had been known by the public 25 years ago, these big brother tech morons would have been lined up against that proverbial wall.
But now people are just used to it and ignore the absolutely horrifying consequences to life in society and even civil liberties.
We can limit our exposure footprint a bit by taking precautions, but the sad truth is that even if you completely opt out of the internet these days (which is pretty much impossible if you want to lead any kind of normal life) you are being tracked all the time. Through the banking system. By your car. even if you drive a really old car AI mass surveillance camera systems are keeping tabs on your every move.
(Donât believe me? Take a look at this. We may not have government run mass surveillance like they do in the UK, but that doesnât mean it isnât happening)
We live in a world where it is legally OK for your car to - without notifying you or asking for permission, monitor your every move, and even your driving habits and sell them to the highest bidder and even your insurance company to help determine your insurance rates.
A world where AI with facial and vehicle recognition (that can even work if it doesnât see license plates) has the ability to and is tracking your every move. Where people volunteer their home camera systems to link them up to networks âfor safetyâ and AI analysis is constantly done on the feeds, creating vast unlimited networks of mass surveillance controlled by private companies that sell it however they see fit.
Your TV is listening to you and analyzing the things you say and sending it to Samsung/LG/Vizio/whomever, so they can package it and sell it to a data broker, who packages it with other data and sells it on. Even if you disable voice recognition and never use any online streaming services, most new models are constantly scanning what is on screen and analyzing it to learn more about you and sell it.
Every single app on your phone, smart speakers, every single smart device you are ever near, whether it is your or not. Your phone itself. Your laptop. your car. Every service you use online, absolutely everythiung ins constantly watching, analyzing bundling data with other data sources and selling it on.
These are the results of 15 years of inability to get venture capital funding without having a data collection and monetization plan because if you arenât then you are âleaving money on the table, why would I invest in you?â.
It is not an exaggeration when I say that everything that can sell data on you is selling data on you in every way it possibly can.
You might think âwell, I wonât use streaming services, and I wonât connect my TV to the internetâ. Well, thatâ wonât save you.
In the past it was too expensive to put a GSM chip and antenna in every single device to send data on you back home even if not connected to wifi, but thanks to services such as Amazon sidewalk (and many others, the Helium Network, Xfinity hotspots, etc. etc. etc. these devices can very inexpensively get a data connection to send data home via the internet and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it (except line your walls with lead).
The fact that your neighbor across the street has an Amazon Echo device that extends the Amazon Sidewalk network is all that is needed to sell you out.
As these things get cheaper and cheaper, we are in a time period where almost anything could be collecting data on you and selling it over a data-uplink on an inexpensive low power distributed network. Why not an extension cord? or even a damn (non-smart) light bulb.
In the past these things were of limited value. Sure you might be able to collect data, but who is going to clean it, and match it to other data sources so you know that different pieces of data are actually from the same person, etc. etc. There was an element of data overload. The best they could do was to look for keywords, and even that was not always possibleâŚ
âŚbut now with AI? Itâs like having someone in your house, in your phone, in your car, in thousands of cameras you pass by every day as you move around society, in your web browser, listening to everything, reading everything, analyzing it, and putting it together for an astonishingly accurate picture of you.
And your local government is helping with all of their damn public records. Sure, the federal census doesnât make detailed data public for 72 years after it is collected (so historians can use it I guess?) but guess what, your local city and/or town is almost guaranteed to be publishing all of the detailed data in the annual street listing they conduct, and providing data on what properties you own, how much you pay in taxes on it, what you bought it for, how much it is assessed at today, whether you have pulled any permits for home improvement, etc. etc. etc. And most towns have that data just up there on a website for anyone to download.
Data about you is out there. Everything from the innocuous to the embarrassing, to the outright immoral, Even really sensitive stuff, like who you are sleeping with, and whether or not you should be. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
If someone had said this a few years back it would have sounded like some crazy paranoid-schizophrenic rant, but it is now reality, and it keeps getting worse every single day.
The situation is so messed up right now and the perpetrators are so entrenched and have so much political power that short of a violent revolution I donât see how we ever fix things and bring back sanity.
But people (especially the young ones who have now grown up with this) are used to it. They donât even get angry anymore.
So the revolution isnât coming.
Unless something really bad happens to spark public outrage about privacy and drive political change, I fear we are permanently stuck in this dystopian corporate big brother hell-hole.
And let me leave the best for last. The Civil liberties implications.
You know how requiring a warrant protects us to an extent from illegal search and seizure?
Well, just about every prosecutors office in the country at this point has a legal opinion on file stating that they donât need a warrant for any data they can buy on the open marketâŚ
âŚwhich is pretty much anything.
This means you donât have any protection under the law when it comes to civil liberties anymore either. It is all dead.
This is WAY worse than the Soviet Union at its worst, but people just refuse to believe it and continue to be blissfully ignorant, even to the extent of outright ignoring data that is right in front of them.
And that makes me oscillate between furiously angry and downright depressed. I havenât not been either furious, depressed or distraught for more than 5 minutes straight in over a decade now.
Even I am at the point where I am starting to think âwhy do I even even bother anymore?â Why do I take precautions to try to make my phone more private, and my browsing instances more private, when there are thousands of cameras pointed at me AI analyzing my every move, and my car collects my GPS coordinates all the time, as well as my speed, acceleration, deceleration and if I make any sudden turns and sells it to whomever wants it?
Like, why am I wasting my time and dealing with inconveniences (like inability to use many services due to my VPN and tracker blockers) and broken website layouts if so much of my data is out there anyway?
Should I just give up?
We live in a nightmare scenario that only gets worse every single day, and there is no conceivable end in sight. Is it foolish to keep fighting?
3 Likes
Itâs not 2010 anymore.
Opting out no longer works. Your data is leaking no mater what you do, unless you take somewhat extreme steps to stop it, and even then it is only partially effective.
See my little rant above.
1 Like
Hereâs my thinking - if you believe that a right to some privacy from the ad powered corporation megaconglomerate on the Internet should exist you should:
- Make personal choices aligned with that belief
- Support that belief within your community, as well as commercially and politically
Thatâs it. Maybe the belief gains widespread adoption, or not. It doesnât really matter, you made your tiny contribution to your democracy and free market.
Consequently I donât have a Facebook account. It has benefits other than the tiny tiny tiny improvement to privacy too, like not spending time on Facebook.
2 Likes
and a privacy section would be a great places for us all to discuss how to do that!
1 Like