not bad too, i will not edit the body with that because i think it can be against the ToS of Google, and if not and that’s become a popular solution, that will be for sure in it then.
You can loose your account so easily with them, so its better to be “reliable” ^^
If it’s not open source and self hosted, I think it will probably turn out just the same as Dropbox. It’s the power dynamic. Closed SaaS, on someone else’s computers, is a very weak position. Not surprising when the relationship turns abusive.
There is pCloud which is based in Switzerland which has mostly the same regulation as the EU. They specifically state that they won’t use your data for commercial purposes. Until the company merges or gets bought I guess.
Ofc if it’s not end-to-end encrypted and all open source and self hosted, you can’t really be sure.
They specifically state that they won’t use your data for commercial purposes. Until the company merges or gets bought I guess.
Which you won't hear about until after all the existing data has been scraped off the servers. The company, if bought, will be bought for the value of their data stores and whatever corporation purchases them will specifically want to keep the news quiet until after they've gotten their value out of the data store. Therefore this is a non-starter as you may as well just hand the info to Dropbox today.
I'm totally in favor with your post, but not everyone is willing to self-host or is capable of doing it. So I recommendation would be and one that I'm currently using, is when uploading a file to these cloud services encrypt your files. I'm using #cryptomator, but I'm sure there are other alternatives, like #rclone. There is also #veracrypt, but to my understanding, is not great for cloud sync.
Cryptomator is open source and free, but only on desktop. To use the mobile version, you will have to pay. Here is a list of alternatives to cryptomator, if you are familiar with one, please share your knowledge.
GrapheneOS for phone. Multiple user accounts to further isolate apps.
Pi-hole as a recursive dns server with dnssec also using unbound for DoT for home network and IoT devices.
AirVPN for my daily driver devices and windscribe for other devices that may need a vpn.
Proton for E2EE mail and storage. SimpleLogin for alias emails.
Try to use FOSS apps and block trackers where I can. Feeder (RSS), Squawker (Twitter frontend), and Eternity (Lemmy app) have replaced all the more popular social media apps.
Bitwarden for password manager.
For browsers I use Firefox with some settings tweaked or Mullvad (if I’m concerned about fingerprinting).
Question: how do you deal with the fact that ProtonMail can theoretically track you? (At least from the last time i checked) For that reason i prefer countermail
Another question: which phone model would you reccomend for grapheneOS?
Yeah as another said, any email provider can track you. If your threat model has that as a concern then you should always be logging into your email with a vpn on.
As for GrapheneOS I think the Pixel 8 series is most recommended. MTE was a huge security boost. The staff also says do not get anything lower then a pixel 6 as they are to close to end of life.
Local Kiwix.org server for most research, local LLMs through huggingface.co to play with new tech, FOSS & hardened OS, openwrt router, lots of physical books, e2e encryption and mail for a good amount of correspondence
I wouldn’t say it’s hiding, since my finger print is unique and everything is tracked, logged and will be broken some day if attacked long enough. More, just a bit of relief from the observer effect since I’m just a human trying to breathe
I didn’t mean the message to sound the way it did. You already have the Spot messenger and it is a cool product. I just wanted to present another useful way to signal for emergency help in remote areas.
In the end, I don’t think it matters. People care about accessing what’s used most and if they have to watch ads to do so, they will. If “no ads” starts to have a competitive advantage because people are sick and tired of them, then maybe ads will start to die. We’re a long way from that though.
Gotta wait till augmented reality becomes a common thing like smartphones so you can use an adblocker software to hide ads to your eyes in public, haha.
That’s for the courts to decide. It’s difficult to escape modern life though. Also, banning ads completely is a near impossible task IMO. It would be like banning messaging. Nailing down the definition of an ad would always lead to people finding ways around that.
“An ad is a message aiming to sell a product or service” --> define selling, define product, define service. Once those are defined then there’ll be a way around that too. “I’m not aiming to sell a product or service, I’m just informing the public that it exists”. Where would you go from there? You can’t make the act of informing a person of a product’s existence a crime: “Hey bro, I bought this new product and -” “OMG, you’re such a criminal for telling me about a product”.
Being completely honest, I can deal with ads for free tier level things. I would also be okay with ads on sites for articles, social media, etc… The main problems just keep coming down to gross levels of tracking, adverts that are formatted to look exactly like real articles/posts and presented as such, and the just overwhelming level/length of them. If I can’t read a an article because there are so many auto-play/overlay/massive ads all hitting me. Then I both can’t take the site/outlet serious and refuse to bother. It is wild how dramatically different sites look with all or most ads removed. I am normally prepared for more adult sites to just go nuts with ads and shit. But all the mainstream sites are making the pr0n sites seem somehow restrained by comparison.
The streaming services have learned all the wrong lessons from cable/satellite providers. Shows and content are always just some added bonus after the adds even when paying. YT is its own special Hell for both the channels and the viewers. The big win for the internet was that things could be much less filtered and even real compared to TV/radio. But now channels are scared to go seemingly 5mins without bleeping out or blurring things that are the whole point of the upload done. Even if they are being 110% tasteful or telling facts, they have to cheapen the message as if they are trying to sell a CD with “bad words” to Wal-Mart or scared of the FCC fining them.
I usually wear the tin foil hat in these debates, but I must concede in this case: the eavesdropping phone theory in particular is difficult to substantiate, from a technical standpoint.
For one, a user can check this themselves today with basic local network traffic monitors or packet sniffing tools. Even heavily compressed audio data will stand out in the log, no matter how it’s encrypted, streamed, batched or what have you.
To get a sense of what I mean, run wireshark and give a wake phrase command to see what that looks like. Now imagine trying to obfuscate that type of transmission for audio longer than 2 seconds, and repeatedly throughout a day.
Even assuming local audio inference and processing on a completely compromised device (rooted/jailbroken, disabled sandboxing/SIP, unrestricted platform access, the works) most phones will just struggle to do that recording and processing indeterminately without a noticeable impact on energy and data use.
I’m sure advertising companies would love to collect that much raw candid data. It would seem quite a challenge to do so quietly, however, and given the apparent lack of evidence, is thus unlikely to have been implemented at any kind of scale.
Yeah they’d have to it seems, but real time transcription isn’t free. Even late model devices with better inference hardware have limited battery and energy monitoring. I imagine it’d be hard to conceal that behavior especially for an app recording in the background.
WetBeardHairs@lemmy.ml mentioned that mobile devices use the same hardware coprocessing used for wake word behavior to target specific key phrases. I don’t know anything about that, but it’s one way they could work around the technical limitations.
Of course, that’s a relatively bespoke hardware solution that might also be difficult to fully conceal, and it would come with its own limitations. Like in that case, there’s a preset list of high value key words that you can tally, in order to send company servers a small “score card” rather than a heavy audio clip. But the data would be far less rich than what people usually think of with these flashy headlines (your private conversations, your bowel movements, your penchant for musical theater, whatever).
My own theory is that they tokenize key words and phrases with an AI so that they’re not sending the actual audio data. Then it’s stored in a form some AI can parse but isn’t technically user data so they can skirt legislation around that.
A tokenized collection of key phrases omitting delimiters in text format is going be much, much less than audio, or a transcript.
Can it be implemented on pc? They often turned on and people speak around them too. Cpu activity much harder to trace when there are a lot of different processes. Someone can blame their phone, while it listening pc near by.
Yeah outside mobile devices I imagine there’s a lot more leeway technically speaking. I’d be far more inclined to suspect a smart TV or a home assistant appliance like Amazon Echo, for example. And certainly there are plenty of PCs out there that are 100% compromised.
But it’s the phone that people often think of as eavesdropping on their conversations. The idea is stickier perhaps because it’s a more personal violation. And I wouldn’t put it past data brokers by any means. They would if they could. I’ve just yet to hear a feasible explanation of how they can without being caught. Hence my doubt.
What if its not streaming? What if its just cached for future access, e.g. next time the user opens the app (and network traffic spikes anyways) maybe?
That’s possible too, and in general I’d think a foreground application currently in use alleviates most of the technical restrictions mentioned (read: why we never install FB).
But again we must assume some uncommon device privileges and we still haven’t solved the problem of background energy usage required to record and/or process a real time feed.
as someone who has played around with offline speech recognition before - there is a reason why ai assistants only use it for the wake word, and the rest is processed in the cloud: it sucks. it’s quite unreliable, you’d have to pronounce things exactly as expected. so you need to “train” it for different accents and ways to pronounce something if you want to capture it properly, so the info they could siphon this way is imho limited to a couple thousand words. which is considerable already, and would allow for proper profiling, but couldn’t capture your interest in something more specific like a mazda 323f.
but offline speech recognition also requires a fair amount of compute power. at least on our phones, it would inevitably drain the battery
most phones will just struggle to record and process audio indeterminately without a noticeable impact on energy and data use.
I mean, it’s still a valid concern for a commoner. Why my phone has twice the ram and twice the cores and is as slow as my previous one? I’d love to fuel this conspiracy into OS, app makers to do their fucking job.
There’s no reason an app can weight more than 50mb on clean install*, and many socials, messengers fail to fit in. A client I use to write this is only 30+, and that’s one person doing that for donations.
If there could be a raging theory that apps are selling your data to, like, China, there would be a push to decline it and optimize apps to fit that image.
I obviously exclude games, synths, editors of any kind with their textures and templates.
The filesize of most binaries is dominated by text strings and images. Modern applications are loaded with them. Lemmy is atypical in that it doesn’t need tons of built in images or text.
I get it. It’s just I don’t see any dev-put images in many big apps, besides a logo and a welcome screen. Updating them with dozens of megabytes doesn’t feel okay. It seems like there’s some bloat, or a vault management problems. Like in some seasonally updated games that put dupes to speed up load of a map or easily add new content on top of them instead of redownloading a brand new db. Some I followed shawed off tens of gigabytes by rearranging stuff.
Like, messengers. I don’t get it how Viber wants more than 40+ mb per update having nothing but stickers, emoji already installed and probably don’t change them much. Cheap wireless connection could allow them to ignore that for some reason and start to get heavier in order to offload some from their servers, for many images are localized. Is that probably what their updates are? Or they consequentially add beta patches after an approval, so you download a couple of them in a close succession after they get into public?
What could be possible, would be maybe send tiny bits. For example, a device could categorize some places or times, detect out of pattern behaviours and just record a couple of seconds here and there, then send it to the server when requesting something else to avoid being suspicious. Or just pretend it’s a “false positive” or whatever and say “sorry, I didn’t get that.”
I don’t think they’re listening to everything, but they could technically get something if they wanted to target you.
Right, I suppose cybersecurity isn’t so different than physical security in that way. Someone who really wants to get to you always can (read: why there are so many burner phones at def con).
But for the average person, who uses consumer grade deadbolts in their home and doesn’t hire a private detail when they travel, does an iPhone fit within their acceptable risk threshold? Probably.
There's also a totally plausible and far more insidious answer to what's going on with the experiences people have of the ads matching their conversations.
That explanation is advertising works. And worse, it works subconsciously. That you're seeing the ads and don't even notice you're seeing them and then they're worming their way into your conversations at which point you become more aware of them and then start noticing the ads.
Which does comport with the billions of dollars spent on advertising every year. It would be very weird if an entire ad industry that's at least a century old was all a complete nonsense waste of money this whole time.
To me, this whole narrative is just another parable about why we need to do everything possible to limit our own exposure to ads to avoid being manipulated.
Damn, I hadn’t thought of that. The chicken egg question of spooky ad relevance. Insidious indeed.
I feel like the idea of some person or group having enough info to psychologically manipulate or predict should be way scarier than the black helicopter stuff, especially given that it’s one of the few conspiracy theories we actually have a bunch of high quality evidence for, just in marketing and statistics textbooks alone.
But here we are. Government surveillance is the hot button, not the fact that marketers would happily sock puppet you given the chance.
Smartphones by definition are Spyware, at least if you use the OS as is, because in them all aspects are controlled and logged, either by Google on Android or by Apple on iOS. Adding the default apps that cannot be uninstalled on a mobile that is not rooted. As COX alleges, they also use third-party logs and therefore can track and profile the user very well, even without using this technology that they claim to have.
Although they feel authorized by the user’s consent to the TOS and PP, the legality depends directly on the legislation of each country. TOS and PP itself, to be a legal contract, must comply in all its points with local legislation to be applicable to the user. For this reason, I think that these practices are very different in the EU from those in the US, where legislation regarding privacy is conspicuous by its absence, that is, that US users should take these COX statements very seriously in their devices, although in the EU they must also be clear that Google and Apple know exactly what they do and where users live, although they are limited from selling this data to third parties.
Basics:
– READ ALWAYS TOS AND PP
Review the permissions of each app, leaving only the most essential ones
Desactivate GPS if not used
Review in Android every app with Exodus Privacy, maybe Lookout or MyCyberHome in iOS (Freemium apps !!!)
Use as less possible apps from the store
Be aware of discount apps from the Supermarket or Malls
Don’t store important data in the Phone (Banking, Medical…)
Agreed, though I think it’s possible to use smart devices safely. For Android it can be difficult outside custom roms. The OEM flavors tend to have spyware baked in that takes time and root to fully undo, and even then I’m never sure I got it all. These are the most common phones, however, especially in economy price brackets, which is why I’d agree that for the average user most phones are spyware.
Flashing is not useful advice to most. “Just root it bro” doesn’t help your nontechnical relatives who can’t stop downloading toolbars and VPN installers. But with OEM variants undermining privacy at the system level, it feels like a losing battle.
I’d give credit to Apple for their privacy enablement, especially with E2EE, device lockdown, granular access permission control and audits. Unfortunately their devices are not as affordable and I’m not sure how to advise the average Android user beyond general opt-out vigilance.
Yeah those push token systems need an overhaul. IIRC tokens are specific to app-device combinations, so invalidation that isn’t automatic should be push-button revocation. Users should have control of it like any other API on their device, if only to get apps to stop spamming coupons or whatever.
It’s funny though: when I first saw those headlines, my first reaction was that it was a positive sign, since this was apparently news worthy even though the magnitude of impact for this sort of systemic breach is demonstrably low. (In particular, it pertains to (1) incidental high-noise data (2) associated with devices and (3) available only by request to (4) governments, who are weak compared to even the smallest data brokers WRT capacity for data mining inference and redistribution, to put it mildly.)
That is glossing over how they process the data and transmit it to the cloud. The assistant wake word for “Hey Google” invokes an audio stream to an off site audio processor in order to handle the query. So that is easy to identify via traffic because it is immediate and large.
The advertising-wake words do not get processed that way. They are limited in scope and are handled by the low power hardware audio processor used for listening for the assistant wake word. The wake word processor is an FPGA or ASIC - specifically because it allows the integration of customizable words to listen for in an extremely low power raw form. When an advertising wake word is identified, it sends an interrupt to the CPU along with an enumerated value of which word was heard. The OS then stores that value and transmits a batch of them to a server at a later time. An entire day’s worth of advertising wake word data may be less than 1 kb in size and it is sent along with other information.
Hmm, that’s outside my wheelhouse. So you’re saying phone hardware is designed to listen for not just one but multiple predefined or reprogrammable bank of wake words? I hadn’t read about that yet but it sounds more feasible than the constant livestream idea.
The echo had the capacity for multiple wake words IIRC, but I hadn’t heard of that for mobile devices. I’m curious how many of these key words can they fit?
Does it though when they control both ends. It is encrypted between each end which I guess secures against things like a man in the middle attack from outside parties but their app encrypts it on one end and decrypts it on the other. I have a very hard time believing that they don’t “read” your messages at some point in that process.
i’ve seen the bullet points from that article riffed in different ways, but i think that’s the most important part:
They know you rang a phone sex line at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don't know what you talked about.
They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.
They know you got an email from an HIV testing service, then called your doctor, then visited an HIV support group website in the same hour. But they don't know what was in the email or what you talked about on the phone.
They know you received an email from a digital rights activist group with the subject line “Let’s Tell Congress: Stop SESTA/FOSTA” and then called your elected representative immediately after. But the content of those communications remains safe from government intrusion.
They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local abortion clinic’s number later that day.
I’ve wondered if they don’t know the data. They can perfectly read the convo on your device, assign a category what you’re talking about and keeping that category. They don’t store, read, know the conversation, they only ‘analyze’ it. F.e. if you talk about planes they may assign a category travel and sell your profile to holiday companies?
I don’t know about this, I’m just thinking that’s how I’d do it if I ran an evil corp.
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