How to Protect your Privacy -- Personal, Financial, Digital

I think it’s beyond turning over the pics to the cops. It’s closer to telling every store in your town to not sell you food, close your bank account, and fire you from your job. I guess not all of them would, but it could be closer to a digital exile especially as the tech monopolies get more and more integrated into essential services.

yes, but I think he may not have much of a case since he’s likely not a paying customer of Google, so he may have a hard time asserting damages for loss of free services and information storage that he hadn’t been paying for in the first place.

I would think that owning an Android phone would be sufficient, i.e. you’ve paid for it, though indirectly (unless you own a Google phone, then directly). An account is required to get apps and updates from the Play Store. While it’s possible to use another app store, it’s not trivial, and most people buying an Android phone expect access to the Google ecosystem – it’s probably one of the main selling points.

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Or, don’t use the same cloud service for important docs/email and photos. For instance, I use google for the former, and Apple for everything else.

Can’t use Apple cloud without an Apple device, because there’s no Apple software on Android, right?. Also Apple could just as easily kick you off and shut down your account. There was a news piece recently about them scanning all Apple devices for child porn.

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In practical terms, is there anything preventing you from just creating a new account? Or using multiple Google accounts from day one - one for core functionality like the Play Store and maps, the other for email and photos (or subdivide it even further).

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You can probably create a new account (assuming they don’t blacklist your device somehow), but you won’t get back your data from the closed account.

You can use multiple Google accounts, but I actually don’t know if it’s practical to switch between them for each app. I know you can switch accounts, I just don’t know if the switch is app-specific (practical) or if it affects everything (not practical, cause you’d have to switch back and forth all the time). This may be the way to go (and avoid having to pay for extra storage once you’ve exceeded the account limit).

Also assumes Google doesn’t just block all your accounts, since they know they’re related.

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Without getting into the fact that everyone pays for Google’s services, just not with cash money, he was an actual paying customer of Google FI. They cut him off too. He also presumably paid for his Android phone, which is essentially worthless.

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Apple will definitely cut you off as well, for much less nefarious actions. My friend bought apple itunes gift cards off a legit giftcard reseller site for years with no problems. A few months ago, he activated over a dozen in one month and that caused Apple to lock his account. He had all his receipts showing the gift cards were legit. It took him over a month to get to a person even remotely willing to consider reinstating his account. They finally said “we’ll make a one time exception” with no apology whatsoever. During the process, he could still use his devices, but the apple store didn’t work, so he couldn’t update a single app or download anything new. He had no access to content he had purchased and no access to iclould. When everything was restored, his playlists that included items not purchased through apple never came back.

The thing that worries me most about this story is this line:

To avoid flagging photos of babies in the bath or children running unclothed through sprinklers, Google’s AI for recognizing abuse was trained with images of potentially illegal material found by Google in user accounts in the past and with images that were not indicative of abuse, to give it a more precise understanding of what to flag.

Do I really want to rely on this “training” of google’s AI for everything I have in the google ecosystem?

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And how much do you enjoy Google/Apple/China viewing your images to “train” their AI spies? I presume that you’re getting paid for the privilege - oh wait - let me guess that you’re payment is having the privilege of the service with no more expense than the cost of phone.

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Worse. I have google one. I’m paying them to comb though the photos of my kids in the bath.

I remember that when I was a child, I was embarrassed to see my own butt-naked baby photos, even though they were few and harmless. And that was before a photo could be shared by millions of computers in an instance. So I never take “compromising” pictures of my child (and asked my wife the same). And while I can sympathize with the subject of this story, I don’t think I would have done this if my kid had a rash.

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An article discussing TikTok’s pixel trackers spread across many websites, in the same way Google and others have done.

One comment on a response to these tracking efforts -

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  1. Use Waterfox

  2. Copy many of the options from the Tor Browser config for privacy. They have a page that explains their config really well.

  3. Install extensions like NoScript, uBlock, Trace, LocalCDN, Leakuidator, CookieAutoDelete, ReferrerControl, etc

  4. Spoof/randomize as much as you can, but do so carefully. Doing so incorrectly will make you easier to trace.

An additional pro-tip would be to setup a script to create a ramdrive and copy your waterfox install to it and run it from there, intermittently copying back extension settings, history, whatever else you want to persist. This had an amazing performance impact as Waterfox now never writes to disk, and it doesn’t take any additional memory since all the files it needs are already in memory, and the OS is smart enough to realize that.

There is of course MUCH much more you can do, but even with those basic steps you’re going to be resistant to 90% of tracking.

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I see you pulled that from a /. comment, but I’m not sure it’s universally true. Generally the executable is loaded into RAM and then executed from RAM. I think Windows locks the files mapped to memory, but on other OSes the original file on disk can be modified or deleted from disk without affecting the already executing application (because it is executing the copy in memory). Ramdrive is just a disk simulator, so one could run and then try to delete/modify the executable, and It would not be good if there wasn’t another copy of the executable in memory.

That’s probably safer than your average user’s setup. When I want to go incognito from all tracking, I use one of these two …

The Power of the Puppy

It’s Easy

The latter is faster to boot, and easier, but I don’t consider it as tracker/hijacker proof as PuppyLinux.

Bottom line is their devices collect incredible amount of data about you and your family

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I skimmed the article and didn’t see any mention of any specific data. But I think the main point is that these devices are always on and they’re basically always recording and phoning home that recording, even if they don’t tell you. We’ve already seen proof that Amazon cannot be trusted with this data – they can share it with law enforcement (which can help or hurt) AND they have employees in this and other countries who can access your recordings.

Anyone who values privacy must either not allow such devices into their home, or at the very least do their best to disable the always-on functionality. For example, Alexa can be turned off on the TV dongle and Fire tablet, and “OK Google” voice activation can be disabled on the phones (can be activated by button). This probably doesn’t exist on the speakers, but I wouldn’t know since I don’t have any.

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I continue to be demoralized by the implications of what types of conversations occur in your homes. I couldnt care less about anything listening, because the most interesting and incriminating conversation it’ll overhear is the arguments over having mac and cheese or pizza for dinner.

I almost long for the day our Google speaker will spontaneously inject itself in the discussion and start bitching about how the alarm saying it’s time to leave went off 5 minutes ago and it sounds like people still arent heading to the door. Or to [not so] gently remind certain children that yes, they did promise to clean up their toys before going to do whatever it is they’re desperately waiting to do.

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How about personal finances? Health issues? Sexy time?

And it’s not just about conversations. In theory it can figure out what TV channels and shows you watch, what radio or music you listen to, and create a detailed profile of everyone in the home. Probably even better than what can be done using browser tracking.

This thread is about protecting your privacy. If you don’t care who’s listening, then you don’t care about your privacy.

This actually sounds useful. Lucky for us, it is possible to roll your own personal voice assistant speaker box using open source software. It’s not quite as good as the big ones, but at least it doesn’t send your data anywhere.

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I’ll start being concerned when it can read my mind. And while there are things that I wouldnt openly share with the neighbors, the neighbors arent ever going to be the ones listening to whatever archived recordings Google might have. Any sensative or embarrassing details are not going to become the subject of rumors or gossip attributable to myself. So why should I care if some anonymous nobody on the other side of the country happens to hear a recording of my anonymous ass discussing the water bill? And the only reason I would care if someone knows what I watch on TV is if I’m embarrassed about what I watch - which again, no one who’s opinion I remotely care about will ever get anywhere near such information. Even if such conversations or data is part of a public data dump, it’s a pine-needle-in-an-entire-forest-of-pine-trees chances that anyone I care about will ever be able to attribute it to me.

So you are simply wrong - it isnt about “not caring about your privacy”, it’s about having a different definition of what’s private and what is worthy of protecting. Your definition, I consider to be more baseless paranoia than anything practical and grounded… And yes, I know you are instead going to characterize my definition to be oblivious and willfully ignorant, but that perception is mostly a result of your paranoia… :wink:

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I’m not going to comment beyond to say that this is an extremely stupid thing for anyone to claim “matters” in any way, shape, or form. Not you for bringing it up, just the situation itself. Might as well start claiming that the black ink those articles were printed with must mean those authors are clearly racist, too.