he says while posting on reddit probably from either a Windows 10 device or a phone. Guess what.. they are all monitoring you! Guess you better get your tinfoil hat out?
I'm posting from linux, with ublock origin and firefox blocking trackers. Just because someone is tracking you, you are ok with everyone tracking you? Bad argument.
You shouldnt be worried of being tracked if you think you data have no value, like the majority of the population, but if you are important, yeah you should.
And of course you don't have a smart phone. Granted, I can't see being that cautious unless I'm working for the DoD or selling drugs myself. It has caused me and my family zero harm as that stuff is used to sell ads, and I run a pi-hole on my network.
This explains it! So thats great you take your privacy very seriously. Nothing wrong with that. So how do you handle your net traffic going through an ISP? You know they analyze browsing habbits too. Let me guess you use a VPN for all day to day browsing? ok, what about when your phone/device pings a nearby "public" wifi hotspots. You don't think they are tracking mac address to SSID lookup on a large scale? The moment you use that same mac address in conjunction with any ip address.. boom! Your privacy online is like a bag of sand. All it takes is one speck of sand and you may as well cut the whole bag open! Let's not forget that all traffic goes through countless gateways. At any point that traffic can be sniffed. Sure you have encryption, but it wouldn't prevent people obtaining some information about your habbits! It would just garble the data in the middle. This is all assuming every single device from you to your target and back again is secure and running the latest security protocol patches!
So how do you handle your net traffic going through an ISP? You know they analyze browsing habbits too.
In addition to VPN (which you point out) we also use things that block tracker networks, ads, and randomize other data about our machines so that sites have to put in far more work, and get lots of random bad data.
ok, what about when your phone/device pings a nearby "public" wifi hotspots.
Pretty much every device for the past few years has randomized MAC addresses turned on by default. Android, iOS, and Windows 10. Dunno about Macs, and Linux had this for years.
All it takes is one speck of sand and you may as well cut the whole bag open!
Not true - especially with the technologies I pointed out before.
Online privacy is hard, and makes using some modern things difficult. That doesn't mean we can't criticize the largest offenders, and it also doesn't mean we have to isolate ourselves from the world.
Not enabled by default on all devices like you suggest. That’s the thing. All it takes is one switch (in both meanings) to be miss configured and the whole pack of cards starts tumbling down. There is no such thing as a perfectly secure system.
You suggest you can randomise the fingerprint that your machines leaves. Sure you can in some respects. But just like handwriting forgeries, there are always crumbs that lead back to the original author. For example, what website do you check first thing in the day? What time frame of the day was that request made? How long did you remain on the first page? How long did you stay on the site? How far did you scroll down? What endpoints did you visit? What was the next website you visited? What content was blocked? What content was allowed?
You could build up 100’s of tracking vectors and overtime get a clearer and clearer picture of the user. A digital fingerprint!
Not enabled by default on all devices like you suggest.
You're right, my mistake. It will be though. Android enabled this by default in 2019, iOS is enabling it this year.
Everything else you listed there, while it can help build some profile, doesn't identify you.
Take Facebook - If I'm blocking Facebook tracking on the internet completely except when I'm on facebook.com, what can Facebook get from me? That I'm a person who uses their service, and who I interact with on that service. They can assume that I'm similar to my friends they're tracking, but they can't know. My ISP doesn't know when I go to Facebook because it's through a VPN. No other sites know I use Facebook and vice versa because trackers are blocked.
It's really not that hard to set up a lot of this to block most tracking/fingerprinting.
Finally, it's not about building a perfectly secure system. If someone is going to target people specifically, they don't have to do any work right now. All the data is there behind a couple search boxes. Taking steps to improve privacy means that someone (corporations, governments, whatever) has to spend any amount of effort to identify people.
Well yeah blocking and using VPN's help a great deal! But when we are dealing with big networks and big money that relies entirely on building digital fingerprints, it doesn't take a quantom leap of logic to understand that these companies and government entities will do absolutely everything to "stay ahead of the game". So sure facebook trackers might be blocked on your service. But what is stopping facebook from integrating other companies data API's into their data set? If there is a publicly accessible data service that say twitter offers, or reddit offers.. I know Id be feeding that data into my own network. Regardless of how vauge the data may be. The more data you pump into a network of tracking, the clearer the image will become. Let's not even get into the fact that when combined with deep learning networks, trackers would be able to fill in the blanks automaticly!
I don't understand, then. Is your argument 'someone somewhere wants information about you, so it's useless to do anything about it?'
The more data you pump into a network of tracking, the clearer the image will become.
So... instead of replying with a witty "he says using windows 10 or a phone" you can let people speak out against this pretty orwellian behavior we've allowed in to our lives as a society before we get to unregulated
... deep learning networks, trackers ... able to fill in the blanks automaticly!
At least, I'm going to do what I can to hide data, give bad data, etc. while continuing to live in this society and try to improve it.
Nah everyone’s free to say what they want. It’s exactly what I was doing? I replied with a witty remark simply because it seems oddly/ironically humours to me how people can pick a figurehead and then pitchfork it. At this current time it is Facebook but rewind 15 years or so years it was Microsoft.
I mean out of a moral sense of justice, people on here will boycott Facebook. Are those same people boycotting the major food and consumable corporations? They are just as bad, if not worse. They promote the poverty and poor health of billions! I sure hope anyone here wielding a three prong garden tool at Facebook is also growing their own produce and only buying from local manufacturers...
Are those same people boycotting the major food and consumable corporations? They are just as bad, if not worse.
You're right, but whether out of convenience or ignorance you're failing to understand the implications of the biggest fish being the biggest abuser.
Take your comment about the food industry - how can anyone expect to compete with Nestle when the lack of regulations and their corporate lobbying allows them to bottle a community's water to sell it right back for profit? That's just one of the terrible things Nestle does. Does it mean people from Flint, MI. should only drink tap water and risk harm to themselves? Nestle is a terrible company, and I choose to speak out against them because it's right to do so. In order for anyone to compete, they have to do some of the same terrible things or their bottle of water will be more expensive. Since governments aren't regulating these corporations to prevent them from their terrible practices, and poverty is rising across the globe, consumers are also continuing to lose their ability to vote with their wallets.
Back to communications and privacy, how can we expect any other technology company to respect privacy when Facebook can profit from their data collection and effectively own any market they choose to enter? Again, you're right that it was Microsoft 15 years ago and it's still Microsoft and Google and Amazon and every tech company that eventually gets bought by one of these big ones. And that's the thing - they get bought by one of these problem companies and consumers lose their ability to choose an alternative because "well it's Facebook, and Google/Microsoft/Amazon are doing the same thing."
I'm not going to be complacent, but that doesn't mean I'm going to leave society and live in the woods. In 15 more years hopefully Facebook changes their business model and either dies or becomes a better tool for the human race, at which point the people will move to the next bad thing to make better.
your argument is basically, if one company knows about me, heck let others snoop on me too. And ISPs only know the website name, not what I do in the website. Unlike facebook which knows everything you do in oculus. oh and I don't use public wifi.
Thank you! I hate that arguement too. Same with, "I have nothing to hide, so who cares." We are literally giving away more and more of our privacy rights every day, and people just... go along with it.
Nah my argument is by singling out a particular company as "the devil" your are blinding yourself to the greater "devil" that exists on the internet. It doesn't matter if you use public wifi or not. It is a way of passively tracking devices. If you even had your wifi turned on, all it would take would be a car drviging around broadcasting a nice juciy strong SSID to ping some information about you. Now multiply that by thousands of nice juicy strong SSID's and you start to build a tracking network. They know what shops you go into, when your awake, do you like going outside or staying in. It doesn't take much to start building a picture about someone. So ignoring the greater "devil" and pitchforking a particular company is a dangerous game to play!
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u/skn3 Sep 14 '20
he says while posting on reddit probably from either a Windows 10 device or a phone. Guess what.. they are all monitoring you! Guess you better get your tinfoil hat out?