How do you preserve your privacy when everything nowadays track you? When things like WhatsApp—which in some places is as obligatory as having a cellphone— and Discord (if you're like me, the few friends you have use it) track everything you do in them? Simply not using Facebook and Twitter and employing adblocking software aren't cutting it anymore.
Should one just love the bomb and focus on covering the little tracks you still can? Sometimes it just feels so insignificant.
Eventually, you will have no choice but to alienate yourself from society if you want to preserve your privacy because everything will have a wifi chip right down to the pebble on the street. It was once possible to be botnet free by avoiding cellphones and computers/laptops but now more and more things can track you.
Embrace the botnet and enjoy the convenience. The fight is lost
>When things like WhatsApp—which in some places is as obligatory as having a cellphone
Sorry I don't know a whatsapp is or does.
>discord
Use IRC ffs.
>but none of my "friends" will switch"
Neither will you apparently. You are the problem.
>just give up goy
The Almighty has never helped a lazy man. He does not help the coward. He does not help a people that cannot help itself. The principle applies here, help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance. -- Adolf Hitler
>Sorry I don't know a whatsapp is or does.
Chat app widely known where I live. If you want to be active in society and work, it's pretty much obligatory. It's this place's Kik.
>Neither will you apparently. You are the problem.
My friends are comformists. They probably would put their bank info and any precious info in Discord without questioning it.
I don't know, man. There must be something I can do.
What is your advice on the regards of the topic?
>What is your advice on the regards of the topic?
Remember the 14 words. Participate only when it helps your people much more than it helps them. Encryption is your friend. Communicate over botnets like discord only for turning normies away from it. Read Siege.
convenience or anonymity, chose one.
if you wanted pizza, you could have it delivered and risk a stranger knowing your address, or you could go to place and pick it up yourself.
a practical sense of the worth of your privacy is needed, if you're a relative nobody then overprioritizing your privacy is just wasting your time, whereas if you're a celebrity, it isn't worth the risk, and better to spend more time making sure your information is safe.
/thread
Cucks.
It isn't about mere ''convenience''. I'm having to choose between being able to talk to friends of having all my all info being tracked everywhere. I'm asking if there's a mid way.
>Encryption is your friend
How can i learn more of what can I encrypt?
>Communicate over botnets like discord only for turning normies away from it.
Thats what I just said. It's my only way of communicating with friends. Close ones and internet friends.
But, I'm not a nobody user. I am the Zodiac.
Something just occurred to me;
What about high ranking (not outright elite/leaders) officers deal with that? As in, NAVY Seals, Spetsnaz high-ranking officials and many others. Do those concerns also happen to them?
Prove it faggot
>As in, NAVY Seals
Kek go read about how Fitbit literally tracked their movements in Syria for the whole world to see, to the point that you could find their bases since they went for runs around them and the app recorded it all.
It's simple,
don't have any friends,
don't use any messaging or social apps.
emails works just fine for your work and everyone has an email and uses it.
there
wtf
How come they weren't fucking destroyed? With that kind of info you could just bomb their shit, and anticipate all their attacks,.
>How can i learn more of what can I encrypt?
Leaen gnupg.
>It's my only way of communicating with friends
No it isn't. If you've known them long enough to consider them friends and haven't converted them then you're not there to convert them. Move on. Quit lying to yourself. You're the one who won't change platforms. These are NPCs. If they won't communicate with you in a way that doesn't require running malware, are they really friends?
cash everything
only buy things online if they are cheaper, or cannot be found in your are
limit your online purchases to only a handful of sites
do not browse electronic commerce sites while logged in, do all browsing separately, then copy and paste specific links once you are logged in
when out in public, start looking around rapidly in every direction while running with a thinkpad
>When things like WhatsApp—which in some places is as obligatory as having a cellphone
Don't be a beta faggot and tell your friends they should use something else to contact you.
Fair point, but what about the discord groups with people you enjoy talking? What do you use to talk to your friends online?
This seems good. But don't they build profiles based on your IP/Guessing from your visits from multiple devices?
> But don't they build profiles based on your IP/Guessing from your visits from multiple devices?
they absolutely do. some steps are better than no steps though.
>What do you use to talk to your friends online?
IRC and email.
Doesn't any of them find it weird that you do it? They transitioned no problem?
I guess so, then. It's like what i said; you can work on covering the little tracks you do. Damn shame though.
better a cuck than an incel.
you see, most people overconcerened about privacy have no friends, and hide behind "but muh information"
most 'mild' steps you can generally take are worse than taking no steps at all, free VPN and proxy services log all your data, more so than your ISP or sites you visit.
i'm not saying it isn't a problem, its the biggest problem in our generation, but our relationship with technology has become symbiotic to the point where you can't really be a functioning member of society without it.
>Doesn't any of them find it weird that you do it? They transitioned no problem?
I met them there. My irl friends are irl only. I have no interest in meeting new
>if you wanted pizza, you could have it delivered and risk a stranger knowing your address, or you could go to place and pick it up yourself.
Pizza places are botnet.
>most people overconcerened about privacy have no friends
NPCs aren't friends. They aren't even sentient. Get a dog. It is smarter and more capable of pair bonding than the friends you make by compromising your integrity.
>better a cuck than an incel.
Only a cuck would think this.
you'd give away your identity to the first fugly chick that'd look at you.
kek
>implying everyone in the middle east isn't in on the charade save a few savages that routinely get wrecked before they even see a us base
It's all fake, user.
But what about contact with strangers? As in Discord groups you enjoy? You just forget about them?
bump
We need a Xprivacy for windows/linux
I imagine how shit things will be once Windows 11 launches.
>using discord
>at all
>ever
even if it wasn't spyware I'd still avoid it, just to avoid the kind of people that hang out on discord.
Is NordVPN a good choice for ligitimate privacy? I was using windscribe for a while because I didn't know it was based in Canada, and now that my subscription has run out i want to switch to a non-14 eyes option and Nord is based in Panama. Combining this with things like tor, i2p, proxies and the like, what do I need to do to go as dark as possible? I have a Heads USB that I use and a dummy windows 10 install to remove suspicion, what else can I do?
Just control it as much as you can.
The doomsday that people are worried about probably wont be that impactful to you as it is to some people.
Its also not worth giving up convenience and decent products and services because of some policy the company has.
Both systems would need reinventing then. Linux does have the ability to restrict camera and some other permissions for snaps.
privacytools.io says it's fine.
>Heads USB
You should use Cubes or Tails.
Yeah I was thinking of moving to tails anyway. Thanks for the input
>cubes
Qubes*
CENTER THE FUCKING EMOJI
IT'S OFFSET TO THE LEFT
>mass produce a billion tiny drones resembling flies
>fly them to any location with a human presence not within range of a smartphone
this is like ten years away tops. What are your plans then?
Kill flies. Tiny shit is also less immune to electromagnetic fields, so it's very easy to just destroy those.
What exactly Discord knows about me, besides the games I play and everything I say in it?
Software on your computer and location
Does it meddle with anything cookie-related on my browsers?
what would they do with your info anyways
It's not that clear for me. Considering it keeps track of my software, it could very well keep track of shit like my cookies since i'm using ''the Services''.
Depends how much info you're talking about. Some insignificant detail about your life is meaningless, but collecting these tidbits of information is virtually free for them, and disk space is no longer an issue, so little by little they can collect your whole damn life. It works by accretion; no detail is wasted, and the gaps of information can be more or less guessed by deduction, especially with machine learning. Speaking of which, it is closer and closer to be able to fully parse human speech, so every inconsequential detail of your life you mention of FB or Discord helps them. "Shit I'm late for works, later fags", and they know the time you go to work. You login again when you arrive at the job, and they know your commute time. "Yeah bro I work in fart-huffing", and they know your profession. Add these up with your IP, and they know where and when you live and work. Four insignificant tidbits about your life become a significant fact.
For now, they "just" use all this information to further turn us into consumerist brainlets with scientific precision, or to get us to vote for this or that politico. But the second some police agency so much as look at them, you bet they will hand every single thing they know about you without blinking.
They register every voicecall as well? Wouldn't that be unpractical?
They're a not-so-big company. I don't think they could afford to have every thing on file.
How could someone access their virtual ad profile? Is it possible?
Well the text-to-speech recognition available to the pubic is already very good, so odds are that there's some corporate solution that has it perfected. So parsing an audio file ends up being the same as parsing text.
Anyway, storage space is dead cheap nowadays thanks to both cheap hardware and the cloud. But even if a smaller company can't process or store everything, they can just trade people's private information like it's a commodity. It's how the Zuccer built his Fortune, after all. Whatever data they can't mine themselves, they can just as well sell to whomever. In fact, just collecting data and not mining anything is a viable business model, it's the basic idea behind "site analytics" and the like.
There isn't one single ad profile, eah company has their own. But I think that some European or maybe British law allows people to demand that a corporation hand over all data they have on you or something like that.
What other programs/apps are a must to be deleted? I know of WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Slack. What else fucks over your info?
>There isn't one single ad profile, eah company has their own. But I think that some European or maybe British law allows people to demand that a corporation hand over all data they have on you or something like that.
So in theory i could go off the grind in three years (for example) If i just suddenly stopped using shit like Discord (and other known trackers), or at least get a new profile not linked to the old one?
>
Anyway, storage space is dead cheap nowadays thanks to both cheap hardware and the cloud. But even if a smaller company can't process or store everything, they can just trade people's private information like it's a commodity.
Storage space is indeed cheap, but we're talking about billions of files of millions of users. It doesn't sound too practical to store everything like that. But maybe they sell what they can get, like you said.
Bump.
>So in theory i could go off the grind in three years (for example) If i just suddenly stopped using shit like Discord (and other known trackers), or at least get a new profile not linked to the old one?
I doubt it. I mean, it's certainly possible to create a new online persona completely separate from the old one, but a few slip-ups and the data-mining algorhitms could connect both personas to your real self.
I fear we're past the point we can even stop giving them information, what with so damn many softwares -- especially for mobile -- leaking our data everywhere, and there's also the matter of your friends giving indirect information about you. Even if it's just a photo of you smiling for the camera together, it's enough for them to know you're part of the same circle. I think only serious government action could revert this trend, which I doubt will happen because all that information would be very useful for the government as well.
>What other programs/apps are a must to be deleted? I know of WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Slack. What else fucks over your info?
These days, it's probably worth googling the name of whatever you want to install before you install it.
Microsoft's VSCode IDE is a particularly telling case. It's open source and on Github, which MS won't stop announcing, but they don't inform you that downloading the binary from the site has a whole different EULA and telemetry policy from a user-compiled binary. The version on their site is fucking loaded with telemetry, it reaches at least 5 different domains, even if you set the options for it to off. The Github source is probably less offending, but not free of telemetry either.
The paid version of Avast has a handy sandbox utility that lets you isolate any executable and generate a report of its activities, including attempts to communicate online. Just keep in mind that auxiliary exes, plugins etc. might send data too.
Can I, in theory, use Avast/Malwarebytes to stop Discord/Microsoft shenanigans?
Also, does that mean that everyone now, at some point, is elligible to just go to jail? Everyone does or did something illegal. If a government (or even a powerful company) takes interest in fucking you over legally, can they jst do it any time forever? Do all those info storage ever run out/are discarded?
Discord, in theory, but it's unlikely. Especially since AV companies want to collect """telemetry""" from you too, they're reluctant to block things like that. Microsoft? No, that shit's baked into the operating system, which MS can update at any time anyway. You could try to maintain a list of MS IP addresses and block them on your router, but you're fighting a losing battle. (MS can tunnel their communications through other addresses, get new addresses, etc.) The only way to defend against MS is to not use Windows.
>Also, does that mean that everyone now, at some point, is elligible to just go to jail?
Yep. One widely-quoted estimate is that the average person commits at least one felony per day, by the strict letter of the law.
>Do all those info storage ever run out/are discarded?
We have no way to know for sure, but given how cheap storage is, most of it is probably retained indefinitely unless there's some powerful reason to get rid of it, probably meaning a legal requirement to. That's an important thing to bear in mind, once you give someone else information on you, you have no way to stop them from recording it and keeping it forever, and no way to ensure that it's ever deleted. The only thing you can do is not let the information out in the first place.
why do you care if someone has your insignificant personal data
There are a couple of supposed solutions, haven't tried any tho, so caveat emptor.
github.com
github.com
Windows 7 isn't that bad, but 10 is a no-go if you're serious about privacy.
privacytools.io
This list is a good start, but it's far from perfect. For starters, they still list EFF's Privacy Badger despite noting that it doesn't block fucking Google Analytics. Oh yeah, guess which megacorporation is a big EFF donor? That organization has been compromised for at least a few years now -- they're bbfs with a certain scam artist who petitioned the fucking UN for more internet censorship -- and I'm staying away from anything they touch.
Also Firefox is showing signs of becoming another data miner. I'd say FF 52 ESR would be your best bet if you want to keep with it, but soon it won't receive updates anymore. Consider FF's forks. I use Pale Moon because it has much better RAM usage optimization, and so far there have been no privacy scares. Waterfox has been accused tho: reddit 880z4b
> Can I, in theory, use Avast/Malwarebytes to stop Discord/Microsoft shenanigans?
I guess you can completely block a common software from accessing the internet, but online applications are trickier. You could look into the technical details and block all ports except the ones explicitly used for video/message/whatever. Still tho, Discord has the problem that they're logging everything you say, so there's no way around it. Come to think of it, a Discord clone with encryption would be very welcome these days.
>Discord explicitly confirms in its privacy policy (discordapp.com
> · IP Address
> · Device UUID
> · User's e-mail address
> · All text messages
> · All images
> · All VOIP data (voice chat)
> · Open rates for e-mail sent by Discord
>Discord does not explictly confirm that it collects this information, but still collects it:
> · All programs that are running on your computer
Librebooted computer, VPN and encrypted email, no smartphone (or at least don't use any apps), no social media, cash purchases when possible.
>my irl friends are irl only
if you don't keep up with your friends outside of when you happen to see them, they're more like aquaintences. how do you talk to your friends?
They don't give a fuck about that, other than using intranets in their workplaces, be those barracks in an american suburb or a base in Afghanistan. They encrypt their work related shit, but not much else.
This thread makes me wonder. Is it possible that we are moving into a world that is so impossible to be privacy-aware, that our best bet is to give up and kind of just let it happen because it would be more suspicious if someone was completely off the grid?
I mean, from what I see the corporations are using that data to push dumb products and marketing, and government does not appear to care for what you do unless it's highly illegal. So apparently no one cares if you are shopping for car parts or masturbating to gay furry porn, but if you don't come up on their systems - now that's suspicious.