How do you maintain privacy in this modern world?

[Erik_Twice]

I don't think it's possible, sadly.

Anyone who has any of your data will sell it to advertisers. This includes your phone company, restaurant chains and online stores. Usage of any "social media", Youtube, Xbox consoles, Android or Windows 10 will also result in all your data being leaked away. Better not look for a job online, either. It would be easier to list who doesn't sell your data than who does.

It doesn't even matter in the extremely small cases it's illegal, they'll do it anyways because there's no enforcement nor any sort of public conciousness. The most advanced laws in this regard are the poorly implemented "right to be forgotten" and the EU "data that is created on the EU stays on the EU" directive, neither of which are but embrionic slates.

I think it's like living without advertisments. It's impossible and each day it becomes harder and harder. In some decades this will become a new "social justice" topic, a new "bycicle in urbanism" but for us it doesn't matter anymore.

PD: You are not wearing a tin-foil hat at all. People simply aren't aware of how much they are being monitored and we've already seen the response to mass surveillance is.

EDIT: I mean, League of Legends ask for psychological profiles if you do "bad" and stores them. We are in a distopia already.

[samsonlonghair]

Hey J T, aren't you the only guy on the forum who uses a real picture of himself as his avatar? Way to protect your privacy!

[Jmustang1968]

I think it is a bit unrealistic to expect or receive privacy on the internet which is perhaps the largest public forum in the world. I think much of itthe mindset is due to one being physically located in the privacy of one's home, but once you go online, it is a different world.

Bottom line is that if you want true privacy, stay off the net.

[Exhuminator]

I've found certain social media outlets to have a place. Several employees at Wizards of the Coast maintain a tumblr (including Head Designer Mark Rosewater) that they use to communicate with fans and I think it is a really great thing. But basically everything involving Facebook can die in a fire.

Certainly social media can be used in a productive fashion, I'm not saying it can't. I'm just saying that I personally am not into Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, those sorts of things for mere rote sociostatus upkeep.

Bottom line is that if you want true privacy, stay off the net.

And your phone.
And your cards.
And surveillance cameras.
And even going outside due to satellite reconnaissance.
Perhaps hiding in a cardboard box in your closet would work.

In all seriousness; maintaining true privacy as a modern citizen in this digital era? That ship sailed long ago.

[Jmustang1968]

Social media are just tools, and you can get what you want out of them.

Facebook is a nice way to stay in touch with displaced friends or family. If someone is obnoxious or annoying, dont connect with them or unfollow them.

I use twitter for my gaming and sports news and info. I hear about gaming news and stay in touch with some devs for my rpgamer article efforts. I often get valuable information from the service.

You can use these social media outlets for more things than obsessing about likes and followers as is so often portrayed.

[Rydon]

Well my home setup is a Kali linux distro that I use a secure VPN to connect to the Web. Every so often I feel the need to "wipe" and rip my ram and HDD out of the computer. I proceed to micro wave and snap the ram while I take a power drill to the HDD. This keeps me clean so no one else can trace or track what I'm doing. I also just met up with a pretty cool crew that seems to have the same agenda towards society as I do.

[J T]

I use a VPN for the sole reason that our region specific Netflix content sucks balls.

But yeah, I'm also not on Twitter, Facebook and what have you.
Don't have an account there. Probably never will.


Speaking of security via VPN's,

this is a decent test to determine the level of your "anonymity":
https://www.doileak.com/

Thanks. That link was helpful.

Here's another link that will test how identifiable you are online, which shows how a unique combination of browser and device settings can serve as a digital fingerprint to determine your identity, even despite attempts to otherwise anonymize yourself through proxies and VPNs.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

[fastbilly1]

I highly recommend buying the HOPE conference videos or audio for the last few. Specifically Hope 2010s "Privacy is Dead" by Steve Rambam and the Wikileaks Keynote by one of the Tor developers.

Honestly, I have listened to a couple dozen of those presentations and not a single one of them has been bad.

[J T]

Hey J T, aren't you the only guy on the forum who uses a real picture of himself as his avatar? Way to protect your privacy!

A better critique would be that I have historically posted a great deal of information about myself on this site, and a few others. I'm not really concerned that some random human viewing this site knows what I look like. My concern is more about robots and statistical algorithms knowing who I am everywhere I go. Yes, facial recognition software does exist, and adding a face as a bio-marker does contribute to the ability to identify my and track me, though I don't think my avatar on this site will help them much with that.

My concern is really about a personality profile linked to identifiable information. Currently, using phone GPS data, or even public license plate reader data, it is easy enough for software to figure out where you live, where you work, where you shop, and who you visit regularly. As I stated earlier, even in the absence of a known IP address, it is possible to craft unique digital fingerprints of an individual to identify them. The NSA collects everyone's cellphone metadata to know who they called, when, how long, and from where. Police use Stingray technology to trick people within an area into running their calls through them so that all content can be surveilled. Voice-to-text software can readily store, search, organize, and catalogue any inputs you send through a microphone whether it be your Amazon Echo, Microsoft Kinect, or Apple Siri. Keystroke readers can watch everything you type. Even the director of the CIA had his e-mail hacked recently.

The problem isn't what any one person knows, it's what the cloud knows and the bots that mine its data. It's how your content gets linked to your ID and stored forever on a server god-knows-where for god-knows-how-long. It's about what purpose that identified personality data may serve, not just now, but well into the future for all perpetuity. Marketers already know more about you then they should. Target got in trouble a few years ago for having its data prediction congratulate a girl on her new baby before she knew she was pregnant, and before her parents knew as well, who saw her targeted advertisements. What about what your employer knows about you? You already have no privacy on a company network, but what about when they start linking your data from work to your data from your personal time? What if we start implementing a plan in the US like the one they are beginning to implement in China where you get a social credit score to determing how good of a citizen you are, which includes marking people who play video games as lazy and people without families who work 80 hours a week as more employable? What if your involvement in a political movement leads you to be secretly focused on and surreptitiously interfered with by the NSA, or some other governmental body or private sector security company? What if your intellectual property is stolen right off of your computer by something that was supposed to be tracking data for security reasons or simple text-prediction? What if your health insurance company adds your FitBit data or computer usage to their actuarial tables that determine your rates? The possibilities are endless for how data can be culled together from various sources to craft a personality profile of you, and this will be an automated activity taking place on unknown servers and developed using algorithms you will never see, but that will nevertheless be used to judge you under various circumstances that will affect your life.

[J T]

Another privacy tip I neglected to mention is that I don't use Google for search anymore. I only use DuckDuckGo.com now, since they do not track your search query information like Google does.