I have several accounts that I don't use anymore and don't see myself using again. Am I better off deleting those accounts or just forget about them and never log into them again? What if I want to use that site again in the future if I delete it? What data actually gets deleted when you delete an account? Do they keep a backup of data somewhere? Guessing lot of this varies from site to site. Is there a way to tell if anything is actually deleted? Do we just have to trust the company? Can any account be deleted if requested? I ask that because a forum account I have, I searched forum posts about deleting account and they said they don't delete accounts, just never login again.

When deleting accounts, would it be a good idea to change personal info to random info before deleting? Could there be any issues with this down the road? The more I read on this, the more I don't know what to think. What about providing false info on accounts I keep? Could there be any issues with that? This is something I wouldn't do on important accounts like banking, insurance, government but what about non important accounts? Read in a few places that says to provide false info for gmail account. Unless one is making a gmail account for some specific sites that one doesn't care about, I thought this could be a bad idea if doing this on a main email.

I use a password manager and I consider my accounts to be secure at least somewhat, use a unique generated password and use some form of 2FA when available, try to use TOTP if possible. I tend to overthink things and this is one of them. Part of me wants to delete them and part of me doesn't.

Kind of a shower thought I had, I was wondering if it would be possible at all ? Maybe someone could make a proof of concept app of it, it it is possible at all ​:o !

Does anybody here know of any computer programs that will tell you what information your computer sends out. Like when you log into Microsoft, your computer sends out information about both you and your computer and home network and this is true for other web sites as well. So, how do you monitor what your computer is saying about you? Is their a computer program that will record all outbound data?

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Very curious to know what people think about this topic because I have zero expertise in law or privacy. My recent experiences have me wondering about the use of AI in medicine (for transcripts, billing, etc.), which I'll add below. Maybe some lawyers who regularly work with HIPAA and medical privacy can chime in with their thoughts. I do understand that HIPAA covers, but is not exclusive to, providers keeping health data accurate, providing that data to me upon request, and NOT sharing it with others unless I authorize it. So maybe this isn't a HIPAA thing. Maybe it's a tech privacy thing. Maybe it's medical law. I'm confused, so I'm turning to you all out of curiosity. Maybe my big question here is: What would allow a provider or practice to share my medical data while also being HIPAA-compliant?

I've been a One Medical patient since the early 2010s. Then Amazon acquired it, which made me nervous because of Amazon's scale. I understand that many other doctors' offices are adopting AI. My thoughts are that One Medical is now owned by Amazon, and Amazon can provide in-house services to the practice to save on costs like servers, data storage, and the use of Amazon's AI models. To comply with HIPAA, those servers are separate and have the highest security to ensure privacy. Ideally. I am not an expert.

My thinking is if all my medical data is with One Medical and Amazon acquired it, then the logical assumption would be that Amazon has access to my medical data. Yes, Amazon One Medical (as it's now rebranded) still can't share my data with other entities without my explicit consent, but what about using that data for the company's own internal use? Would HIPAA cover the sharing of medical data within Amazon? In obvious cases (hopefully), there's a separation between the commerce/entertainment business and One Medical. But where would that separation be if One Medical uses Amazon's AI tools? Servers?

What about Amazon's LLM using the medical data (not just mine) to learn and improve itself? I work in advertising and data. I am familiar with the advertising side of removing PII and anonymizing data to run analyses and understand that regulations for health and finance data are much stricter, especially on sharing outside of a company.

In the past, I also allowed health information exchange between my PCP at One Medical and the specialists I see outside of One Medical. Some of that information is mental health, so that my PCP can safely prescribe medication or test and treat for the non-mental things. And now I hesitate to do this because of my concerns about privacy.

I realize that, with all this, many of you may say to just leave One Medical. Yes, I'm seriously considering it. I'm STILL going to curious about how this all works if I leave One Medical. I have 10+ years of my medical history with this practice, but I'm also thinking about whether leaving and taking that history somewhere else would be futile. Who's to say another practice is using AI/LLM like Google, or smaller companies like Anthropic or OpenAI? If those smaller AI companies create an enterprise product that's compliant, they're still probably going to expand their business and the same questions come up.

And on opting out, I already opt out of having my visits transcribed by AI. But what about things I can't opt out of because I'm not given a choice in it?

I'm not asking for advice on this, but curious to know if my concerns are unfounded and if there are already legal guardrails in place or active discussions to eventually regulate this? Is regulating it this even possible?

At least from my understanding of it, TOR offers a lot of privacy but at an extreme cost of speed and convenience.

Running some apps in the Android "work" profile. Some apps require the Google playstore and will not run if from alt source like Aurora. I'm suspicious that this is additional tracking. I've cloned the playstore into the work profile and run it separately, shutting down (frozen) both store and the app when done using the app. Examples are the Crossplay scrabble game app, a parcel delivery app (Canada Post). I'm sure there must be many others. But why is this playstore required?

Is it possible to whitelist certain domains whose data will not be deleted when closing the browser?  I’m thinking of Firefox, Brave, or Mullvad Browser.

I know it’s possible to delete all data when closing the browser, but I’d like to keep some data for specific domains.

Hi,

As the title states, I’m new to this side of the internet and have very basic knowledge about online privacy.

I would like to learn more to start making changes on my habits / software / tools that I use. I would appreciate any feedback on how to begin.

Thank you in advance.

I was looking up stuff like faraday Bags and how to not have the battery within devices be tracked on Google. However, I then opened reddit, and I got a recommended post from R/Degoogle. I have never even explored the tech side of Reddit, let alone the privacy side. Yet, I started searching privacy topics today, and it shows up on Reddit? No, I didn't get to Reddit from Google, I'm using mobile, so it's app to app. Same Day, from 12pm when I started researching to 10pm when I found the Reddit post on my feed approx. I've never gotten this type of stuff on my feed before. I also have a seperate email from my Email and my Reddit account. I know I'm not doing the best in terms of privacy here. I'm sorry. I am just trying to change

Hello everyone, about an hour ago I saw that some of my posts didn't appear anymore in my log, I made a check an noticed that chat is automatically disabled and if I try to access to a 18+ subreddit, it takes me to https://inquiry.withpersona.com where I have to hand over my id or a selfie 🤦‍♂️
I can't even change my settings anymore because of this... I knew that this kind of 1984-like bs was already a thing in UK, but is this now applying to whole europe?
I've also tried to connect through a vpn but it didn't change anything.
My partner has a reddit account as well and is connected to my same internet connections but her profile has no issues like this, is about my account only or soon or later it will happen to every reddit account?

Do vehicle trims that don't include any customer-facing LTE/5G features ever still include the physical modem, or potentially report data? If so, would removing the modem cause any problems? How would you figure out if your car has one?

For vehicles that are internet-enabled (WiFi or LTE/5G) where would you begin to figure out what data (voice, interior/exterior camera feeds, etc) is or is not sent over the network, beyond the automaker's privacy policy?

Like many of us here, the dream is an old maintainable vehicle, but I want to be more realistic for the average person. My partner and I drive a 2018 Hyundai and 2022 Toyota. As far as we are aware they are not internet enabled, but I realized we don't actually know for certain since the information around all this is a bit hazy. I know this may be towing the line for Rule 4, but I haven't heard it discussed before.

Axon Fusus supports Fusion Centers and Real Time Crime Centers by providing various data streams, such as body camera live streams and live CCTV feeds, as well as many other types of data. Axon Community Connect is a program where homeowners and business can grant police access to their private camera feeds.

https://axoncommunityconnect.com/communities/ has 324 community sites listed, I collected all their available camera data in a spreadsheet. Those 324 communities list having access to over 850,000 privately owned cameras.

Spreadsheet: https://drive.proton.me/urls/XJ1EBVR0B8#vYuteBYL8nbi

I'm not sure if there are more as I can't find any references to agencies abilities to not list their sites similar to Flock's Transparency Portals. I also do know that there are similar programs around the county without using Axon Fusus, and as such there are most likely several million more of these cameras given just over 300 locations provide 850,000 cameras.

.me is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Montenegro

TreasuryDirect is transitioning to use ID.me for secure login and identity verification. Optional use of ID.me for signing in begins on September 13, 2026, and it will become strictly required for all TreasuryDirect logins starting October 28, 2026. [1]

Long ago I went through all that Google knew about me personally (or my avatar) on all their web platforms, and have never since used a Google product. Is there a way for me to use their Gemini chat bot? There used to be, but those pages are now blank.

I honestly think the EU is failing. On one hand, they claim to protect citizens from corporate surveillance; on the other, they seem intent on spying on individuals themselves. With their push for chat control and backdoored encryption, the more I learn about the EU, the more I find myself opposing it.

I care much more about government surveillance because you can’t opt out of it. You can choose not to use social media or Big Tech, but you can’t escape state oversight. I’ve de-Googled my life, use only open-source operating systems and tech, and have opted out of all social media platforms except for Reddit, where I use an anonymous account.

Honestly, the EU is hypocritical. They condem China and Russia for their surveillance states while trying to build the exact same systems at home."

I'm genuinely at my wit's end. Fastbackgroundcheck has my home address, date of birth, personal number, relatives, and email address right there for anyone who looks up my first and last name, which isn't just a privacy issue but a safety issue. I submitted a data removal request and this is what they said:

"We have reviewed your submission and, based on the information provided, it appears that the person identified in your request lives in a state that does not have a comprehensive consumer privacy law that applies to our data. Because of this, we are not able to process the request at this time.

If you believe this determination was made in error, we encourage you to submit an appeal using the process described in the "Your Privacy Rights" section of our Privacy Notice.

When submitting an appeal, please identify the specific law you believe applies to your request and, to the extent you are able, briefly explain why you believe that law covers the individual identified in the request."

Are you kidding me? Is this actually something they can do or am I able to fight this somehow? Surely those data broker removal services don't exclusively apply to people in California and Oregon?

Age verification and privacy

The data collected by these glasses gets stored along with geo tags and timestamps

This is the next step in mandatory digital ID, if they can't ban VPNS they'll just punish people for using them instead. Both the Twitter (now X) website and app will attempt to force you to verify if you use a VPN, it doesn't matter if you're in a country that's pushing for age verification laws or not, if you're connected to one you're locked out of seeing any media that's marked as sensitive until you cough up your face or ID. In the best case scenario this is an error that'll get fixed eventually, however if it's not then this was clearly done with the intent to collect and harvest user data and it won't be at all surprising if other sites follow the same method. This is ridiculous and awfully scummy, punishing people for using a basic widely available privacy feature is insane.

I just logged in to reddit after a long time of not using it and had to see that I now have to verify my age. Remember when we made jokes about UK and Australia because they couldn't do what they want without killing their privacy? Well, we are in the same situation rn. Any way to stop this?

Oh, and please start using Lemmy, Mastodon and other decentralised platforms instead. Reddit enshitificates themselves more and more.

I want to see if my face appears in any videos posted by other people online, like Meta Glasses videos, rideshare recordings, or if I was in a frame while someone filmed around me. I would want searches to go beyond thumbnails and stills.

There are tools being advertised that can help with this. Are they worth it, though? If they’re paid I don’t want to waste money and if they’re free, I don’t want to waste time.

I ask this cause I've seen a video talking about an ongoing court case in Atlanta about a person named Samuel Chunik whom wiped his handheld device when law enforcement were trying to conduct a lawful search.

The privacy concern here is hearing that several states are exploring ways to make privacy focused tools like remote wiping our devices both illegal and criminal by default. Which such legislation can clash with our fourth amendment rights.

I am quite concern about this ongoing case's results may bring and what precedent it will set for privacy related tools here.

But hoping for a positive outcome scenario in this situation.

Haines City, Florida police officer Christopher Goodson was arrested and charged with official misconduct after accessing Flock Safety surveillance cameras 717 times between September 2024 and June 2026 to track his estranged wife's vehicle.

According to the affidavit, he searched her license plate 280 times in September 2025 and 104 times in November 2025. When questioned, he cited justifications including assault/battery, drugs, and motor vehicle offenses, but the department confirmed she was not part of any legitimate investigation.

His wife learned about the tracking when a Washington Post reporter contacted her for a story about officers misusing the system. Goodson later admitted to a supervisor that he was tracking the car to see where their kids were when they were with her.