Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what’s done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their lives are made worse, they don’t care, and can’t be made to care.
For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can’t or doesn’t, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can’t argue with that, even though it’s provably false.
I 100% agree with you about Clearview and Palantir. Really, 1,000%.
Putin, on the other hand, has passed his peak unless he’s gong to get the nukes out. His potential at this point is simply how much longer he is around to keep perpetuating his “3 day war.” Which is not nothing. The guy needs to go the fuck away, and the US justification for using nukes in Japan was that forcing a surrender via attack against civilian targets prevented a years-long slog and invasion. Well, here we are again. Justify whatever is needed to ensure he falls out a window one day this week. The power vacuum without Prighozin around is just going to revert to 1992 style robber barons anyway. It always would. There’s never been an alternative to that.
What do they mean by “neighborhood”? The domain? Or the top level .LA?
Is your email something like myemail@subdomain.njal.la?
Seems harsh, but it’s hard to unblock a subdomain while blocking the rest of a domain.
Let’s say you use a VPN, and all your internet traffic comes from an IP in London. 178.238.10.1.
It doesn’t matter if you have a VPN, if you log in to anything with any account tied to your real name (yourname@gmail.com), your email and anything done on that London IP are all linked. Google builds a profile on you based on the activity on that IP. AND your browser profile. Private/incognito window or not, if there’s a Google tracker on the site, they connect it all. Google doesn’t care about private windows. If you go to reddit in a private window on the same IP as your gmail, Google sees that and tracks every page you look at.
So let’s say that you log into your email from work. Google now has a treasure trove of new info about you and people you know. Same for FB, who uses the fact that you and someone else were logged on from the same IP range to suggest new friends.
Let’s pretend that you live in China and still have access to a VPN and want to learn about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. But the government can ask Google about you. What do you need?
- an IP never ever used with an account associated with an account with your real name.
- a no-log VPN that won’t tattle on you if asked what sites did you access on a specific date.
- a browser fingerprint never ever associated with an account tied to your real name.
Since January Google has been using browser fingerprinting and IP triangulation to track across incognito windows.
Meta wants in the game as well. Nothing done on a phone with Meta apps is done in isolation.
Edit: seems like only vanilla mobile browsers affected. Brave was not vulnerable, DDG minimally so, and I expect Iron/Waterfox with uBlock would also not have allowed tracking.
https://securityonline.info/androids-secret-tracking-meta-yandex-abused-localhost-for-user-data/
No, you use one as the backup. That’s why I said use JShelter, but if a site breaks beyond use, switch IPs and then reload with NoScript instead to be more selective of what is blocked and what’s not. That way I can still block Cloudflare and Google and Apple and still let the actual site load. And JScreep seems (for me, YMMV) to treat each as distinct fingerprints.
IMO if you know you can have multiple fingerprint profiles anyway based on which combo of extensions you use that do roughly the same job, that’s a net benefit.
The why is browser fingerprinting. Which Google started using as of January to track everyone.
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
So if you go to ANY page with Google trackers, even in private mode, Google knows.
This 100%.
Wealthy people essentially pay staff to do make things happen for them, and those staff don’t sign up for IG or FB stressing abou making sure to use their ONE email like RichieRich1975@hotmail.com for everything.
PA staff are both IT staff and human password managers, creating and curating massive sets of logins that are functionally disposable. With enough clout and money, if you DO have a problem with a social media platform, or your phone number, a PA calls an Executive CSR and sorts out the problem.
So it’s that their “privacy” is masked by the haphazard way they interact with things that track them. For them, tracking them is security to ensure you know who they are so that have a frictionless experience. If they want a dummy account to creep on people or be a perv, they get that easily, too.
I do like this a lot.
Since you sort of need to be there with the hat, it makes me wonder of you might get more response and/or geographic spread if you has some sort of leave behind. A sticker, or a card that you can slot in places.
I do think that leaving it as the gpg key is better, not a QR code. It helps ID this for nerds like you and me. I would never scan a wild QR.
There’s 2 separate universes here.
Devs and tech companies care only for UX, convenience, and reduced friction to use any service. They would put their granny’s home address and SSN in the headers if it made a page load 10ms faster. Their incentives are all short-sighted to hit the next goal to outcompete other devs/companies and ship their end of history killer app that will solve all problems - and that will still get bloated and enshittified within 18 months.
Then there’s us, a subset of rational people educated about how much data gets transmitted, who are horrified by the general state of being online, and are hard to impress when it comes to more than just saying “privacy!” when promoting anything at all.
IMO, we have to DIY and cobble together so much of our own protection, we’re closer to artists that live a strange life that few people understand, seems weird from the outside, but we love for the peace of mind. Which is not enough to be any appreciable segment of the market to move the needle on any product worth real money.
It can look professional when you aren’t posting a gmail address and the domain isn’t poopypants.net
Pick something neutral that isn’t your name. Try a band name generator. JupiterEvolition.net or IdealMachine.XYZ,.which sound better than herpderp common gutter trash Gmail.com
Having a custom domain means you get things like me@IdealMachine.XYZ and also chosen.one@… And bestcandidate@… Etc. So you can make something for professional stuff, and then chocolate.starfish@IdealMachine.xyz to be funny.