Because then the authorities can get a warrant to access that information if they believe you are guilty of something.
In the case where a law is unjust or puts peoples’ lives at risk, say like abortion laws in some US states, the government can use this against you as proof in a court of law.
Edit: here’s another post about how this information is used against people:
To add to this: Many people shrug this off saying they don’t have anything to hide. Even assuming that is true, they usually mean they don’t have anything to hide right now from their current authorities. Ask yourself the question: Is there absolutely no form of government/regime you might want to hide something from? Are you absolutely certain these authorities might not get access to your data? Doesn’t even have to be a possible future government in your own country, it could be in some other country you might want to visit. Or maybe some terrorist organisation who for some reason targets people like you. Is there really absolutely no one you would mind having access to all the data collected about you?
The thing is, the data isn’t going to be uncollected again. The way things are drifting the number of countries not in some way endangered by antidemocratic movements is constantly decreasing. Call me paranoid but I just don’t want to risk it.
Good counter to people saying they have nothing to hide is the guy that lost his apple or google acct because he sent a photo of his child’s rash to his doctor and it got flagged as CSA.
You don’t need to have anything to hide to get fucked over by a lack of privacy.
Yep, one could imagine scenarios in Texas where women could in theory be arrested if their messaging app snitches on them and tells authorities about their planned abortion (since it’s very easy for AI now to understand your conversations so it should be easy to automate in theory) or Google Maps reports them for having detected that they went to an abortion clinic.
I'm sure there is a LOT of additional information about "what you can do", but here are some very simple starting points. You can do these today if you want.
Only use Firefox with uBlock Origin installed/active for web browsing.
Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). https://protonvpn.com is considered one of the best.
Turn off location services on your phone (this will probably be controversial but I think it makes a lot of sense).
For more, subscribe to @privacy and read and support eff.org
Besides what other people are saying, big data is a thing, sometimes there are correlations no one is aware of, but an unbiased algorithm finds. Let me give you two facts:
Insurance companies analyse personal history as well as general statistics when determining if they’ll accept you and how much they’ll charge you. e.g. a White middle aged man with some family history of heart problems will have a much higher price than a Black young woman without family history. This does not limit to insurance companies, banks can choose to not give you a loan based on any factors they choose, in fact any private business can do it.
Some of the companies that do big data can predict that you’re pregnant even before you know it, just basing on random factors like search queries and email contents. Think about this for a moment, you don’t know that you’re pregnant, but because you searched certain terms (even if they’re completely unrelated to pregnancy) a company can know it. This is also true of other stuff, but because currently this is used for ads there’s not much reason to specialise this to find things like health or financial conditions.
It’s not unlikely that in the future insurance companies could buy that data and use it as an extra point of data to give you a quote or to deny you entirely. And this would be something like In average, 90% of people living in NY who search for the price of a flight to Rome within a couple of days of sending an email with the words “cigarette” and “help” suffer a heart attack within 5 years, so because you’re trying to help a friend quit his cigarette addiction and are planning to visit Rome your insurance just went up, because there is a 90% chance you’ll have a heart attack within some years based on big data analysis.
Personally, I find American candy way too sweet. As in one full-sized bar of any chocolate candy is disgustingly sweet, and makes me feel unwell if I get anywhere close to finishing a bar
I am American btw, and I grew up eating this stuff for a few weeks after Halloween, but then my tastebuds developed and my answer to that question is to “just eat a couple of pieces a day”
If you want an actual answer, I’d consider trying to remove willpower from the equation and donate or throw away a majority of the candy you have. If you still want to keep candy, then putting it in inconvenient places might make it easier to eat less. Think like keeping it on the opposite side of your residence where you would usually lounge/mindlessly snack and only eating it in a designated area.
You can also try to buy one of those kSafes to prevent yourself from eating it all too. The idea isn’t to depend on your current willpower to decide for you, but rather the rational thought of your past self to allot yourself a certain amount.
It’s like a cheat day, if you designate a day where you can pig out, it’s easier to maintain a well-balanced diet outside of the chest day
The biggest concern is that even if you are innocent, your data can and likely will at some point be used against you. This was proven by the Snowden Leaks. There are more than enough of these unfortunate cases, here are some examples:
There’s no one-liner that will make the importance of privacy “click” for most people, since it requires a bit of abstract thought, but this site is the closest I’ve seen to it: www.socialcooling.com
If you want to do something about it, check out privacyguides.org, or the lemmy community (and instance) run by its owner, !privacyguides
It’s not for your personal privacy, or to spare you personal embarrassment. But rather because large-scale demographic data collection is dangerous.
The Nazis used such collections to locate Jews. America used such collections to locate Japanese-Americans. The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal affiliation being printed on ID cards. In none of these cases were the data collected for the nefarious purposes it was eventually used for.
Information is a form of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power in the wrong hands is dangerous.
Personally I feel more easy minded because I know that whatever I do online leaves as little trace as usual. If I go out by myself say for a drive and I get back home I expect no one to ever know that I went away and where unless I decide to say so. Same goes for online activity. I would expect nothing to be tied to me and whatever I do to go unnoticed unless for some reason I agree with sharing such data. It’s often said though that with privacy comes less convenience and that is true: not having app features ready before you even ask or easily paying or doing other things online so I see how wanting convenience over privacy can be preferable. For me though, the point I made in the beginning is stronger and motivates me.
Also on a side note I watched a video from Louis Rossman where he talked about some kind of police radio going stolen and the authorities went ask google for people in that area that searched that specific model online to help track that person down so… yeah, I’m already not a fan of leaving traces I don’t want to leave. Let alone those that might make the authorities mistake me for a criminal.
Personally I’m trying to be as offline and anonimous as possible. I’m moving away from cloud storage and if a service can be used with a client without an account where I can locally save and back up things I like then I’m using that. The biggest challenge right now is youtube as a platform with that huge of a content and a decent algorithm for suggestions is yet to be created.
It’s not so much about you as an individual, it’s about catalogueing and manipulating trends in our societies that can be used to make profit, for example Meta spends a lot of money and time manipulating election outcomes in favour candidates that will keep their taxes low through manipulating their content algorythm in favour of their desired candidates.
asklemmy
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.