With MS you never know. They are pretty arrogant and aggressive about assuming you want things running in the background. Something you can try: Install ShutUp10 and look for things like Office Telemetry being turned on. You can switch these things off (permanently or temporarily, your choice) and see if that stops the traffic.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
(There are other ways to do the same thing but I’ve been using ShutUp10 for years and love it)
Never underestimate how far they will go to track your movements, habits, etc. It’s not even about “the gubment spyin’ on me”. It’s about how valuable that data is to corporate assholes who like to target you with customized advertising, and resell your data, etc. (And yes, as a side-effect, the police can also sometimes take advantage of this ubiquitous data capture).
We live in a time when even our stupid cars spy on us:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/podcasts/the-daily/car-gm-insurance-spying.html
It’s why they push the internet of shit so hard. Nobody needs a “smart fridge” but by god, they really want us all to have one.
I really hope it becomes the new normal to stop posting everything about ourselves non-anonymously online in general. But especially photos and information about kids. I am hopeful that in the near future, we’ll all look back and say “What the fuck were we thinking? We all looked like narcissists exploiting our kids for likes!”
Pitcher’s mounds. When you watch a baseball game on TV, they often super-impose an ad on the damned dirt. Also graphics at the bottom of the screen will often have an ad box.
Every available inch of visible space must be covered in an ad. It makes me resent those brands.
In particular, I stew over insurance companies spending millions on celebrities in commercials and prime time slots. That’s money that could have gone to pay claims that were denied, or lowered their ridiculous premiums.
And I’ll never understand people who purchase expensive t-shirts or caps with some corporate brand’s logo splashed across it. They are paying more to be a human billboard. Are we supposed to be impressed with their taste in something millions of others have bought?
Those dumb people are confusing privacy with secrecy.
A good example of privacy is a bathroom. Everyone knows what goes on in bathrooms. It’s not a secret. But you still close the door. Do those people with “nothing to hide” want the government recording and storing video of them every time they use the bathroom or have sex? If they answer “no”, then they value their privacy. (If they answer “yes” they should probably seek therapy).
An example of secrecy is laundering money to avoid paying taxes on it. That’s not privacy, that’s hiding something illegal.
Replying to myself to add: if you use a VPN to hide your surfing habits from your boss, the security team can tell you are using a VPN. They may or may not care, it largely depends on where you work and if you’re using your device or a company device and the “corporate culture” of the place you work. Just have a cover story / explanation ready to go if you roll the dice on this one. If you work for a large corporate bank or something like that, I wouldn’t even try it.
Depends on the context. If you are at home on a wired / non public connection…HTTPS by itself is probably good enough for protecting your password / credentials from your general “web goblin” type of hacker.
However, if your device is compromised with malware (keylogger or whatever) then neither HTTPS nor a VPN can protect you.
HTTPS uses a special key sharing algorithm to safely encrypt your data so that it’s relatively secure to transmit across the internet. Even if a man-in-the-middle intercepts it, they can’t decrypt the data.
A VPN is an extra layer of security that hides your session from your internet service provider, or your boss, or random people on the WiFi at your local coffee place, that sort of thing. Using VPN is a good idea, but it’s not a magic solution, and it’s not always necessary. The VPN helps hide things like the websites you are visiting, your IP address, stuff like that. It also encrypts your traffic in a “tunnel” which is nice, but HTTPs packets are already encrypted. So HTTPS over a VPN is doubly encrypted.
Security-wise, you do no harm using both. However, using a VPN can be a little bit slower and some services (like the Google platform and major video content streamers) really don’t like it when you use a VPN. You can sometimes get around this by purchasing a dedicated IP address from your VPN service provider, but that usually costs extra (on top of whatever you may be paying for the VPN service itself).
And…a dedicated IP may or may not fool those picky content streamers. They have gotten pretty aggressive about blocking VPNs because they know people use them to get around regional content lockouts and restrictions.
Good advice already replied. Definitely have a business-only phone and a personal-only phone. I’d consider two different phone OS’s if you can. Keep crossover data as minimal as possible.
Would love to read a follow-up post from you 6-12 months down the line. Best of luck. It’s absurd how difficult this is in 2024.