Have you tried them for privacy purposes? What are your experiences?

Here is mine. I've used the Visa prepaid cards. Where I live (USA) you can buy them "anonymously". Scare quotes because sure, nothing is 100% anonymous now. But you can buy them with cash and activate them without giving a phone #. Not quite as anonymous as cash, but close. It avoids the heavy data trail of a normal CC. And you can use them sometimes where you can't use cash.

But there's the prob. It's hit and miss if they work. Unfortunately, these are HUGE among scammers, so those scammer fucks poisoned the well. Some stores will flat out deny them. Other times, they work fine.

I've had probs at some point of sale terminals, others work OK. Ditto gas pumps. Seems to be no way to know which way it'll go without trying. Which means you gotta have another way to pay lined up.

I haven't tried them for online shopping yet.

Hey you beautiful privacy scoundrels! You magnificently private rascals and scamps!

I used this tool for a long time. Well I found something new and wanted to share.

Firejail is an easy single shot sandboxer. It's easier than spinning up a whole ass VM. You can read about it if you wanna. What I wanted to share is, the network part of it. Which I never knew about before today!

There's an option called netlock. What it does is, it tracks any outgoing network IP the sandboxed app connects to for 60s. Then everything after that is blocked. That will print the block list it uses. You can edit it if you want, as a base. Adding or removing addresses, w/e. When you are happy, you can save and use it with the netfilter option.

It's great for let's say a podcast app, that will connect to one or a few IPs, but should not send anything to anywhere else. Or even apps that should be 100% local, and you want to keep honest apps honest.

You can do all that with a VM too, by using firewalls and w/e. But this is handy for one off uses. Cases you don't want a whole ass VM. If you trust an app to not be a trojan, but you don't totally trust where it might phone home to. You can make sure it of what it's doing. Like block analytics, but allowing a legit network endpoint for functionality.

Full docs here.

The promise of technology was to expand our horizons. In many ways, it kinda did. We got a lot of awesome shit. But we also got {waves hands vaguely at everything} this dystopia.

I love tech! But I hate techno-surveilance. There are things I don't do b/c of it. Or things I do less now.

For example. I wanted to volunteer on a trail maintaining crew. But they're all TF over FB and Tiktok. They put everyone's photos on there. Vids of ppl working. They coordinate on FB groups.

I give up conveniences like google maps. Esp when those conveniences come with baked in surveilance. My friends mock my paper map. But w/e.

I take less road trips than I want. I hate having all my travel logged by ALPR. Even driving an old ass car without onboard GPS.

Are there things you would do, but you don't, b/c of techno-dystopia? Or you do them less?

Lawsuit in California, plaintiffs vs the Mouse, about facial recogmition in theme parks.

“When American families and their children visit a theme park, let alone a brand that’s as ubiquitous as Disney, they shouldn’t sacrifice their privacy rights when they enter,” Yagman said in a statement. “And as facial recognition becomes more common, and it proliferates in public places, especially, it’s more important than ever that we protect people’s privacy rights, because there are civil rights implications and privacy implications to collecting someone’s biometric information, especially without adequate consent, which is what we’ve alleged.

Seems to be.. the Mouse provides a way to bypass those lines. But that way is obscure and unclear to guests. So most ppl don't even know it is hapepning. Let alone which lines can bypass it.

the park has small signs at some security checkpoints notifying guests of the facial recognition policy, “but the sign is adorned with red, green, yellow, and blue Mickey Mouse silhouettes and is very easy to miss.”

This tech is also common, maybe unavoidable? at many sporting events in the US now. Major stadiums, that sort of thing.

Linked article about a lawsuit in California. AI was used to transcribe conversations between patients and drs. Audio is sent to the cloud for processing. This is becoming very common in healthcare now. Some sources say 80% of physicians in the US and Canada use these.

They aren't suing under HIPAA. Rather, under some California state laws.

Company says it is HIPAA compliant. That's prob true. They prob also make a good faith effort to protect the data. But it is impossible.

This event happened in Ontario. An AI transcriber breached confidental pt data, inc diagnoses, treatment notes, etc.

AI bot sends confidential info to Ontario hospital patients after recording doctors’ meeting

Even with the best intentions, there are endless breaches from electronic health data systems.

Also. Merely knowing your convo between you and your dr is recorded can change how honest ppl will be with their dr. You prob trust your dr. But when everything you say them is recorded, you may not trust what happens after that.

Fortunately most drs will let pts opt out of these, if you ask.

From the Beeb.

Law-abiding citizens have "nothing to fear"

The guy falsely stopped said he will appeal the ruling.

I don't live in London or even UK but I hate that these systems are becoming unavoidable. At least if you ever leave your house, lol. As London, so eventually Chicago. As Chicago, so eventually every one horse town. We're building out a world of complete, unavoidable surveilence. Even where you WALK, now.

I hate it. I hate it, and it won't end well.

I'm glad poor Orwell didn't live to see his nightmare come true.

So years ago I made an account on an online shopping platform. I took pains to do it as privately as I could. Shipping address as PO box. Didn't use real name to sign up. Masked credit card for payment. Etc.

I had it for IDK like 6 years? 7 years? I didn't use it a LOT, but let's say once a month avg. Over those years I had 100% the best feedback rating. I never caused any prob to anyone. I acted in good faith.

Suddenly one day... account canceled. Contacted company. They said send us copy of your gov photo ID. I said how about no?

I know it was b/c my account triggered some predictive anti abuse system. Scammers do a lot of what I did. Diff is, I was not a scammer. I just wanted some privacy. Wasn't even buying anything embarrasing. Just normal shit.

I thought since I got 6+ yrs of history, spend like mid 4 digits of $$ total, zero probs, perfect feedback for 6 years, I figured hey maybe I wouldn't be lumped in. But fuck me sideways.

Funny thing is. I had an older acct under my real name. It had LESS total purcahse history. By a lot. I never submitted any ID to create it. It's still there. It still works. Diff is, it's tied to my home addy and real name. It didn't trigger anti-abuse prediction. ANd it is prediction! I never abused anything, and never would.

More and more, I can't participate in the world, if I try to protect myself from data brokers that collect every fucking thing I do.

I'm sorry. I just had to rant lol. What is your experience with online shopping, if you try to set it up not tied directly to your name, phone, & home addy?

I found this, it's about the data broker loophole. The problem is, in the US we have 4th Amendment protection against warantless searches. Many other nations, have a similar right, by another name. Canada has Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

These are more and more bypassed by data brokers. The government purchases data from data brokers. Data it could not get without a warant in the past.

Maybe this is not as much a problem yet in Canada as in the US? I'm not sure, hope some Canadians can say how it is? But here in the US, it's a massive prob now.

Related: We Built a Surveillance State: What Now?

Paper by,

Simon Lermen, Daniel Paleka, Joshua Swanson, Michael Aerni, Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramèr

It talks about deanonymizing those who writes under a pseudonym. Sites like reddit, lemmy would be that type.

From the paper,

Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives.

Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.

They can match writing styles, interests, details to infer a job or city, or other unstructured information. That allows to match unrelated pseudonyms to the same person. Like, FooFighterGroupie and Yolanda43905 are the same human, despite they never said it. It can allow also, to match a pseudonym to a real identity across sites. Like someone posted on LinkedIn with a real name. It takes less info than most people expect, to figure out Julia Greenberg of Cedarville, NH is FooFighterGroupie.

You can protect yourself by never giving away much info. But ofc sometimes that's the whole point! Think talking about specific hobbies or w/e, gives away info. Also change up writing styles + vocab use, b/c it is a unique fingerprint.

I doubt this technique is used in a dragnet way... YET! But no reason it can't scale, if the cost of resources goes low eonugh. We could eventually see it become standard, analysis to link people across sites and identities.

I'm sorry, this topic is kinda USA centric. At least the details. Maybe not the core idea though. For the non-USA readers, KYC = know your customer.

I am soon to move to a new home for a job xfer. I wish I could do it privately. I had a stalker who broke into my home. I am still apprehensive and tense even though it was years ago. It feels impossible to move privately 😠

I know about Michael Bazzel's Privacy books, and I have read over them. They are good and I follow his advize for some things. I still feel overwhelmed and don't think I can manage it by myself. One problem is, the last edition of the Privacy book was years ago. KYC is in many more places now. Like utilities and services you need when moving to a new home. I run into more things that demand a copy of a gov photo ID or they will not give you a service. This data makes toward the credit bureaus, they always learn. It used to be you could pay for utilities from an LLC, but that often triggers a KYC check now and sometimes they want to copy your ID.

I already try to fight my addy appearing in people search sites but that is hard. There are so many of them. Some outside the USA and do not follow takedown requests.

There must be ways to do this! Maybe they are only available to the rich and famous? I am not rich or famous, lol. But I am middle class and would spend a moderate sum for a service to handle this. I do not feel I can do it on my own. Maybe I could years ago before so many attacks on privacy, but no more.

Has anyone successfully moved AND kept a new home addy private from data brokers? Did you use a service or company to help?

I'm new to Lemmy, days not weeks. Liking it so far and I'm trying to contribute in a positive way to the instance.

I have one usability issue, trying to figure out which replies in a post are new since I last read it. I see the number like (4 New) telling me how many, but not which.

Sorting by "New" hardly helps because of the threaded display. Threading is a good thing, IMO, since it preserves the flow of the conversation. But new replies to older replies get buried with a "New" sort. When the post has only a few replies total, I can keep up simply by re-scanning the whole thread. On more popular posts that becomes infeasible.

Please don't beat me up too bad if I'm missing an obvious thing! I saw the user settings, "Show Read Posts", but that seems to be post level, not reply level.

Editing because I am an idiot: I use the web interface through https://sh.itjust.works/.

Many of us know how bad modern cars are for privacy. Yet many of our friends and neighbors do not realize how intrusive it really is. I linked a blog entry from Mozilla's investigation about car privacy. In that blog is a link to their make-by-make analysis. The amount of very intimate information a modern car collects is honestly appalling. It includes health data, real time mood information, weight gain or loss, and so on. And it does so even for passengers.

The web has many resources talking about this problem, but almost no resources on what to do about it. I know the simple thing is to say, "just drive an old car bro!" That's fine if you can, but not everyone can. Also it has drawbacks like more maintenance. Sometimes less safety if it's older than certain safety features. For the purpose of this thread, it is more interesting to focus on newer, surveillance enabled cars which are the majority of what people drive on the road today.

Some people have figured out how to bypass the surveillance package on some cars. One way is to uncouple the antenna it uses to phone home. Other times you can bypass the telematics module or remove a fuse that powers it. I feel like we really need a central model by model repository of information.

Past that, how do we prove it has worked, if we do it? Has anyone reading this tried to use an RF detector to see if their car is still trying to phone home, after they have bypassed telematics? What are your experiences? I want to buy one and use it to test my own car, but the info on the web seems sketch.

Has anyone read any of her Lieutenant Bak series? "Right Hand of Amon", "A Face Turned Backwards", and those?

She sets them circa 1500 BC in ancient Egypt. I am interested in this era and culture, so I am predisposed to trying these out, but if people think they are terrible I'll probably find another series haha.