This is infuriating, at this point I get several notifications a year about someone hacking my data. But every time I dont have a choice but to keep give data to the same companies . fucking hell
Its a hell of a thing reading this and finding out this way. They knew in October. They knew more in November. They finally say something in December, but I have yet to receive any communication from them acknowledging the breach. Thanks Comcast. You somehow suck and blow at the same time.
I wouldn’t doubt that it is, and we just don’t know about it.
The NSA (CIA?, well Fed assholes) installed surveillance gear in Verizon data centers in the 90’s so they could listen to any phone call or read any text message. It was reported about 1996ish.
Never heard that it was removed, or if they were in other telecom systems.
So yea, my guess is it’s already there. Even worse, people in the right positions are probably controllable (again, good old CIA/NSA at work, thanks Hoover, ya jackass). Don’t need a law or specialized gear when the right people are already compromised.
Just read up on why Bill Gates even got an audience with IBM…
If you don’t protect yourself they will easily find you because of the information you leave everywhere, if you go full privacy mode you will stick out like a sore thumb and they will find you too but at least they don’t have much info.
Well it is not that easy obviously. WhatsApp isn’t a chat-with-friends app anymore. For me it has become a part of my work life and I hate it. That’s why I said I need to take steps incrementally.
Yes, that is an overreaction. In my opinion, you should take your privacy precautions as far as you wish without significantly affecting your everyday life. Refusing to use your smartphone/not enjoying the experience because you are anxious about the data it is leaking suggests to me that you’ve gone too far down the rabbit hole and need to pull back a bit. There are measures you can take to increase the privacy of your smartphone, even if you can’t install an alternative operating system on it and need to use default Android. No it won’t be as private, but if the alternative is selling/returning this new gift then perhaps sacrificing some of your privacy is worth it (that’s something for you to decide).
The reality is that most people around the world have absolutely zero concern for their privacy and security and get by in life without any issues at all. It’s good to be informed and take precautions where necessary but it is statistically extremely unlikely that you will notice any negative change to your life because you choose to use a regular smartphone. Making choices about your privacy should come from a place of empowerment - you should feel good about them. If you are making choices because you are scared/paranoid, you probably need to take a step back from online communities such as this one. They can be useful sources of information but you can also get easily overwhelmed with information and/or try to change too much, too quickly and end up living and extremely paranoid and limited life. People who do this often then burn out and just give up entirely on their privacy, when a more moderate approach would have actually benefited them more long-term.
How about this perspective? You are being tracked regardless. Do you have friends? Do they have your number? You have a tracking ID. Have you ever used the Internet at home not on a VPN and not on a fingerprint-preventing browser (i.e. JavaScript off)? You have a tracking ID.
This tracking ID is surrounded by data it gathers from your interactions with others, regardless of whether you want it to or not. Your lack of presence here is far more telling than actually existing. Unless you literally live off the grid no contact, there’s no getting away from it.
On the bright side, guess what? These tracking IDs are practically solely for advertising metrics. The chances of any of this data being meaningful beyond “vestmoria likes vintage cheeses after” is pretty much nil. I would even go so far as to say by having a presence in this space you are likely to be less targeted by prying eyes that actually matter, as opposed to right now where you are a clearly visible dark spot in a sea of lit beacons.
To put it another way - privacy now is through obfuscation, not lack of existence. Google solved the dumb-phone problem in 2013 and they have had advertising IDs on these from the moment they get used. They have had your data already for a long, long time now. Your advertising ID is better used clicking on every ad you come across using AdNauseam than it is trying to de-google a smartphone or avoid carrier data. Make the data on you inaccurate and worthless.
If you really want to avoid using tracking aspects of a smartphone, your best bet is convincing your people to download signal or matrix and use them exclusively, with notifications turned off on the phone. You’ll want to run a VPN you trust. Others suggested custom ROMs to get away from Google, though I’m personally no fan of MicroG either.
I think it’s worth considering accepting that unless you are very specific in how you use it, there is no real feasible way to not be tracked. Even if you take all precautions, even then, you are still being tracked by other peoples phones. With that in mind, your mental health should be put at ease knowing that rather than trying to avoid it, there are ways of feeding it dirty data to make you look like everyone else.
Using Linux you probably already are aware of quite a bit of this, but I’ve always felt that being off the grid or off the radar of adver-govs is a false hope and while there may be measures against it there’s nothing that actually prevents it in full and it’s so much more effort than allowing it to happen but lying about yourself. So what if they have data on you if it’s irrelevant! On top of that, what does it matter if your calls have data on them (date/length). The content of the calls is a different story of course, I don’t have a solution for that.
Maybe you can fake phone calls by spoofing phone models and locations and having their conversations spoken via AI.
I think this is a sound way of doing it. Rather than trying to force people to switch and potentially alienating them from using an app like signal and moving away from their usual apps. The people who really want to continue chatting with you will come along for the ride.
We’re entitled to a reasonable amount of privacy, such as locks on our doors and curtains on our windows, why shouldn’t reasonable privacy also apply to our lives online?
Great and what if a dictatorship takes over and starts looking through historical data. This is a depressingly high possibility in my country.
But even going less extreme than that, what about just draconian surveillance laws. In my country they’ve already tried to ban VPNs fortunately they’re technologically illiterate so they’ve been massively unsuccessful at that one. But what if they grow a collective brain?
Even though you’re completely right, there are 2 issues.
Most people are status quo adherents. The threat, even a real threat, of a totalitarian dictatorship take over of their country won’t ever be perceived as credible because in their mind “it’s just not possible” (at least in western nations). Second issue is that most people don’t understand, even in a post-Snowden world, what surveillance is actively being performed on them. A percent of a percent of smart phone users are even aware of what PRISM is, and most people don’t understand how that information can be weaponized against them.
Getting people to care about privacy means educating people on how computers work. But we’re about 40 to 50 years too late for that.
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