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So, recently, a person in the US was arrested for stalking people.
The evidence was some data from google, a work computer and from a VPN provider.
Let's take a quick look at that VPN provider. It (PureVPN) says on their privacy policy page that they do NOT store logs.
Guess from what VPN provider the FBI got those logs? Yes, PureVPN!
Althouh I'm happy they got this creep off the street, it still means that PureVPN has been lying to its entire customer base.
I personally hope that their reputation will be destroyed now because this should never happen.
A screenshot I took from their privacy policy page is attached below.
Keep your eyes open when choosing a VPN provider!
62 -
Had a conversation with someone a little while ago. I opened my email app (TutaNota) and he asked what the hell that email thingy was. Explained the encrypted/privacy reasons.
"Why would you encrypt everything?"
Because I have stuff to hide. Do you?
"Nahh I just use outlook, I have nothing to hide".
Told him to email me all his usernames/passwords, bank statements, porn preferences, emails, messages etc etc.
"But that's private data!".
Exactly.
"But I thought you meant like crime/illegal stuffs etc"
Nope. I just asked if you had anything to hide, you interpreted that as having anything non-lawfully to hide. I never even asked anything in relation to non-lawful stuff.
Because, having something to hide doesn't mean it's criminal/illegal, it means you'd like to keep that stuff private.29 -
Started talking about Pi-Hole (still trying to install this fucker by the way) today with a collegue.
He had it installed and showed me around a little.
CW: Alright give me an example then I'll show you wildcard blocking.
Me: google.com 😅
CW: *enters and saves it. then tries to load anything related to google.com*
*no google.com domains load, all give a blocked error*
Me: Works great!
CW: Yup.
...
...
...
...
Me: Uhm so you aren't like surprised that I went with google.com as example and that I'd genuinely would block it?!
CW: No, why would I be?
Me: Well, most people consider me paranoid/crazy the second they find out I don't want to use google/google's services.
CW: well that's fucking retarded. why would anyone redicule you for not using something you don't want to use. You'll have your reasons.
Me: So if I'd say i do it for privacy reasons, you wouldn't find that redicilous?
CW: No, why would I? Not using google (and for that matter facebook etc) for privacy reasons is very logical really.
FUCKING. THANK. YOU.23 -
Website: We care about your privacy and don't sell your information to third parties.
*inspects Privacy Badger*
*notices a truckload of Google/facebook trackers/ad thingies*
Yeah why don't you go fuck yourself.12 -
Hello guys. So after I posted the rant about me blocking Google and Facebook through my hosts file, some people commented with the idea of creating a gitlab page with more privacy tips etc.
Well, that is turning into a project (actual website) that I initially started alone but @ewpratten joined the 'team' as frontender!
He'll be doing the front end and I'll be doing the backend :).
I think this will be my first ever (active) collab so I'm pretty excited =D.62 -
Alright, since Facebook released a VPN service a little while ago but they're actively advertising it as a secure and privacy friendly service, I felt like - although I'm very busy right now - I should do a security/privacy blog post about this.
If you even slightly care about your own privacy or the privacy of anyone you're communicating with, for the love of God, don't use this service.
Hereby a blog post explaining stuffs: https://much-security.nl//...45 -
So, as everyone knows on here by now (or, a lot of ranters), I am a fervid privacy person.
Appearantly a new surveillance law in my country is about to extend mass surveillance/hacking a lot. So here a rundown of what they are about to be allowed to do (stuff that is not okay imo and this is the reason I am so pro-privacy):
- Mass Data Gathering: The intelligence agency over here (lets call it IA from now) can pretty much record everything send through the country.
- Extra Protection: If they want to conduct surveillance on journalists/lawyers, they have to go through extra channels first at least.
- Data/survaillance sharing: The IA is allowed to share their raw/filtered data with foreign intelligence agencies without limits. Also, they're allowed to conduct surveillance based on foreign requests.
- Secret DNA database: A secret DNA database will be created which can store the DNA profiles of any person who has commited any kind of crime. These profiles are allowed to be stored for a maximum of 30 years. This database is allowed to be shared with any foreign intelligence agency.
- Hacking: Unlimited power to hack any device deemed neccesary to hack in relation to crime. From computers to smartphones and so on. Also, it's allowed to use zero-days without reporting them to the vendor (we have seen what can go wrong with that through the ShadowBrokers scandal).
- Automatic Database Collection: They are allowed to directly tap into any database they see required (banks, healthcare, messaging services and so on). Practically this can lead to backdoors being build in because if you don't cooperate, you can go to prison. (mother of god I am not using anything closed source anymore if possible).
So yeah, this is pretty much the reason why I am so privacy consious. This country is fucked.57 -
Clearly Mozilla is the villain here for prioritising privacy and personal freedom over censorship, control, and surveillance. Oh, our parental controls don't work! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN! wtf
20 -
I tried DuckDuckGo like two years ago and my opinion was “meh, I don’t like the results”.
Yesterday @Root made it clear that the sole amount of data collected changes the whole perspective of tracking.
I went to shower thinking about that and as I was standing there enjoying warm water...
It hit me.
I liked google results and disliked DDG not because DDG was worse.
I liked google results because they were CRAFTED for ME to LIKE them. They exploited my confirmation bias, the strongest of all biases.
I took my other phone which is android, has a different sim that isn’t tied to my identity (don’t ask, this is Russia), was never connected to my WiFi and of course has no google account tied to it.
I tried googling stuff.
The results was just like what DDG gets you, the only difference was google amp were on top.
The fuck. One of the wokest moments ever.113 -
*in a chat with a fellow devRanter who is aiming more and more towards privacy things*
*hmmm shall i tell him about my Firefox privacy addons... *
*nahh let's not get too intrusive*
3 minutes later
Him: hey bro, what Firefox addons do you have?
😄😊😂4 -
This can annoy the hell out of me. When people ask me if they can have your Facebook or whatsapp or something and I'm like 'sorry I don't have that' and they ask why and you explain because privacy reasons and they go like 'oh you're a little paranoid are ya?'.
There's a motherfucking big difference between wanting control over your data as much as possible and being paranoid.
Fucking hell.31 -
So the new mass surveillance law will be going into effect from the 1st of January.
Of course, since I'm very keen on my security/privacy, I'm going to implement some precautions.
- A few vps's connecting to tor, i2p and VPN provider so that I can always use a secure connection.
- Setup anti tracker/ads/etc etc shit on the VPS's. Probably through DnsMasq and the hosts file.
- Use Tor browser by default. I've tried this for a while now and damn, the tor network has become way faster than only even a year ago! Some pages literally only take a few seconds to load.
- Wipe my laptop, encrypt the harddrive and at least put QubesOS on it together with probably a few other systems.
- Ungoogle my new phone, use it with VPN by default.
- Get rid of all non encrypted communication services. I think that only leaves me with a few account removals because I haven't chatted unencrypted for nearly a fucking year now.
If anyone has any more ideas, please share!42 -
I don't use Google/Facebook for privacy reasons (and their sub-services etc). Haven't used them for ages but noticed that google still loads a lot of domains like analytics etc. This goes for facebook as well.
I now blocked a lot of google/facebook domains through my hosts file.
It's funny to see the amount of DNS requests to those fb/google connected domains nearly go to zero and also the fact that I literally can't load google/facebook anymore!132 -
*Email*
"We updated our Privacy Policy"
"We updated our Privacy Policy"
.
.
*opens devRant*
**Rants on Privacy Policy**
-_-2 -
Which asshole designer and stupid website owners decide to embed 110 trackers on a single page!!
I mean sure some ads add their own trackers....but THIS is beyond shit
R.I.P Privacy
18 -
Just a quick update (been a little) on the privacy website!
Although both the frontend and the backend need quite some work, I managed, with the help of some other guys, to get everything (only for the IM section yet for now) loaded from the database instead of hardcoded! Yes, that also means that the tiny icon colors are either red or green based on database values :).
Going to keep working on this tomorrow in the hopes I can also get some other subjects ready.
Thanks!
43 -
Was programming on the privacy site REST api.
Needed a break and started searching for a good movie or documentary.
Found a documentary about big data/mass surveillance.
I now have loads of motivation for programming on this again as this showed me the importance of secure services/software.20 -
Twitter: We use your tweets to analyze your preferences and target ads for you..
Facebook & Whatsapp: We monitor your posts, locations, private chats and target ads for you..
Google: We spy your mails, sms, location, pretty much all your activity and tailor ads for you..
All of them combined: No one can beat us in breaching privacy and bombarding you with ads..
Amazon: Hold my beer 🍺
5 -
!(short rant)
Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"
For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.
tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).29 -
It's funny, whenever the subject of facebook vs privacy comes up (mostly I don't even initiate those convo's), people always start to defend facebook when I say that I THINK that facebook is build to get people addicted to it and get them to stay on facebook as long as possible.
Haha, one of facebook's early investers/ex facebook presidents said the following in an interview:
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop, exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
So even an ex president of facebook is admitting this.
I also found the folloing a good one:
The underlying thought process while creating platforms like Facebook or Instagram is something like “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
Last but not least, the part I found the most scary:
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Yes, I find this scary.
Oh yeah and for the people who are going to call bullshit on this one, I've got one source and if you search engine on the title of that article then you'll find loads of websites having that story:
https://fossbytes.com/facebook-was-...26 -
Alright, I just wanna start off by saying that I'm a huge privacy guy. I hate all kinds of data collection companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon and all that. Yet I'm forced to have a Google account for certain reasons.
But the thing that I want to say is that I often talk to people to express my concerns about privacy. And most people agree and say that "yeah sure that's some scary shit" but don't actually do much about it.
And the thing is. If you just browse through all of the options in your Google account. You can turn off and remove almost all data collection/ad serving and identification options entirely.
And yet purple complain about that Google sees what you buy and shit. Turn everything off. Get and adblocker and get noscript. The single best browser add-on out there. It's almost that easy to get at least acceptable amounts of Internet privacy.
Please, don't ever ignore the significance of in Internet privacy. And the potential issue of net neutrality. Don't be ignorant. Don't be the client.24 -
So the country I live in is going to get a huge mass surveillance law. Currently we're trying to force a referendum because this is highly (privacy) intrusive. We can still sign them for a little bit and a friend of mine hadn't done that yet. His reasoning was that it I isn't binding anyways.
We've got this John Oliver equivilant in the Netherlands who did a piece about this.
I put it on for my friend saying that I just wanted him to watch it. If he wouldn't change his mind afterwards, I wouldn't pressure him or anything.
We watched it.
Afterwards he looked at me with eyes like 😵😧😷😲😮😫.
"they'll REALLY be able to do this shit!?!"
"where can I sign this fucking thing to get this referendum going?"
So I asked him why he suddenly was all for it.
"I'm not much of a privacy guy but this shit just crossed a fucking line".
He's going to sign it as fast as possible 😁6 -
My coworker requested I add a bunch of tracking to our product.
I've previously tried explaining to him (and honestly the rest of the company) about privacy issues stemming from tracking, such as by their beloved Venmo. Venmo tracks absolutely fking everything you give it access to, from location data to your entire facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc. feeds, and sells ALL of it to third parties. It's scary. but! this guy simply does not understand, and/or does not care, and marches right on into all the surveillance, loudly singing the song of convenience to all who'll listen. (Nobody else in the company cared, either. :/)
ugh.
Anyway, I'm conflicted.
I have to install some tracking, but I can probably come up with an excuse to cut most of it out and gimp their surveillance. It'll still be useful to us, but it'll limit the amount of data the tracking company can sell to third parties.
but they'll push this guy pretty hard on it, and he's as technically-inclined as a smudged glass of warm, stale beer. "Better for your conversion!" they'll say. "How much tracking do you want?" he'll reply. "@ashkin, why can't you do this right now? What else do you need to make this happen?" he'll firmly inquire. and so I'll be forced to make it happen...
ergh13 -
So I said I'd rant this yesterday but a long night of server management came in the way!
Yesterday @trogus mentioned in a comment that he thinks everyone deserves a place where they feel like home and this is that place for me along with some sub-places which derived from here.
So in this linux/foss chat yesterday I was trying to get into an IRC chatroom (all people there (or at least a lot) are also like minded on privacy/security). I don't want to use email signup if not absolutely neccesary (don't judge me, everyone there own thing) and I found out very late (after 20 minutes of instructions from a fellow devRanter) that this thing required email signup. I didn't wanna do that so I said that and started typing a whole essay of why I'd rather not do that and what my reasons are (privacy partly) but then the guy said: "haha you got it man".
For one second I forgot that I don't have to explain myself over there on stuff regarding privacy that a lot of people would find paranoid. Man, that feels like being home :).6 -
Hello devRanters! A new update on the privacy website as I've had time to work on that last weekend.
For the picture: everything except for the images (although the URI's are in the database) is coming directly from the DB!
Also got a thingy working which can show one app on a single page including it's pro's/cons etc that you see on the main page but also (still have to write that part though and no screenshots yet as I've only done the backend!) sources (links to proof etc), a description and a guide on how to use that app/service!
I'm finally getting somewhere :)
29 -
I just wanted to share a quote that I think is completely magnificent.
"Saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
- Edward Snowden26 -
Trend of the day:
1. Facebook is really compromising user privacy, will delete my account!
2. Post about deleting Fb account to twitter, instagram, etc
3. "Ok google, what is privacy?"
4. Find a random app in play store and allow access regardless20 -
Although I do give some privacy related advice here and there on here, I'm planning on hiring a server dedicated to devRant regarding privacy/tiny simple tools.
I've got the folloing in mind:
- Host the privacy website
- Put a pi-hole server on it for everyone to use
- Own IP lookup API which would display it in a few data formats.
Any other ideas?74 -
So now I'm working on my first collab with a fellow devRanter on a privacy website thingy! Excited and want to start working on it right away.
BUT OH NO I'VE GOTTA GO TO WORK IN 15 MINUTES TO STAND BEHIND A TABLE PACKING MOTHERFUCKING BOXES ALL DAY, YEAH NO THAT SOUNDS FUCKING COCKSUCKING EXCITING. (okay I can pay rant but still).
I need a hug 😞41 -
- devRant TOR rant! -
There is a recent post that just basically says 'fuck TOR' and it catches unfortunate amount of attention in the wrong way and many people seem to aggree with that, so it's about time I rant about a rant!
First of all, TOR never promised encryption. It's just used as an anonymizer tool which will get your request through its nodes and to the original destination it's supposed to arrive at.
Let's assume you're logging in over an unencrypted connection over TOR and your login information was stolen because of a bad exit node. Is your privacy now under threat? Even then, no! Unless of course you had decided to use your personal information for that login data!
And what does that even have to do with the US government having funded this project even if it's 100%? Are we all conspiracy theorists now?
Let's please stop the spread of bs and fear mongering so that we can talk about actual threats and attack vectors on the TOR network. Because we really don't have any other reliable means to stop a widely implemented censorship.12 -
Programming on the privacy website together with 404response, this is awesome!
It's great to have someone who's good at frontend while you suck balls at it so that I can fully focus on the backend :D. (ewpratten if you still want to you can join 404response, he can explain you everything he's doing and how you can help)29 -
!!privacy
!!political
I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.
I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).
I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.
The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)
Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)
Like, scary?
And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)
So I won't be using Venmo. ever.
I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"
I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.
He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."
but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.
I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."
His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."
Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.
and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)
But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.
Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.
He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.
I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*68 -
Hey devRanters! A tiny update regarding the privacy tips etc site.
So as ewpratten doesn't have much time right now, I'm doing frontend as well for now.
Since some people also offered to contribute content, which I did not expect, I am also writing an invite/registration (based on invites) as we speak. So, this way, I can invite anyone (based on email address) into the CMS so that they can contribute content as well!
Regarding frontend, I'm introducing a system with icons. Icons? Yes, icons, let me explain:
Every application/service will get a couple of default filtering thingies. (not like clicking something and it'll filter anything out, yet) It'll enable users to see what an application does or does not. What the FUCK do you mean? Alright, so, as example, lets say open source. next to each application (read application/service) listed, there will be an open source icon. If the application is open source, this icon will be green, otherwise it will be red.
This will allow for a quick way of filtering stuff out.
For example, if you're only looking for open source stuff, you can quickly filter stuff out where the open source icon is red!
This will apply to things as open sourceness, metadata saving, usage of good crypto technology and so on. So you'll be able to quickly filter out the stuff you want to use (by eyes) through those filters!
Please let me know what you think and if you have ideas, I'll be glad to hear them!26 -
Although it might not get much follow up stuffs (probably a few fines but that will be about it), I still find this awesome.
The part of the Dutch government which keeps an eye on data leaks, how companies handle personal data, if companies comply with data protection/privacy laws etc (referring to it as AP from now on) finished their investigation into Windows 10. They started it because of privacy concerns from a few people about the data collection Microsoft does through Windows 10.
It's funny that whenever operating systems are brought up (or privacy/security) and we get to why I don't 'just' use windows 10 (that's actually something I'm asked sometimes), when I tell that it's for a big part due to privacy reasons, people always go into 'it's not that bad', 'oh well as long as it's lawful', 'but it isn't illegal, right!'.
Well, that changed today (for the netherlands).
AP has concluded that Windows 10 is not complying with the dutch privacy and personal data protection law.
I'm going to quote this one (trying my best to translate):
"It appears that Microsofts operating system follows every step you take on your computer. That gives a very invasive image of you", "What does that mean? do people know that, do they want that? Microsoft should give people a fair chance for deciding this by themselves".
They also say that unless explicit lawful consent is given (with enough information on what is collected, for what reasons and what it can be used for), Microsoft is, according to law, not allowed to collect their telemetrics through windows 10.
"But you can turn it off yourself!" - True, but as the paragraph above said, the dutch law requires that people are given more than enough information to decide what happens to their data, and, collection is now allowed until explicitly/lawfully ok'd where the person consenting has had enough information in order to make a well educated decision.
I'm really happy about this!
Source (dutch, sorry, only found it on a dutch (well respected) security site): https://security.nl/posting/534981/...7 -
Hai devRant! Working on the privacy app and want opinions on the page for details on specific apps (as in, applications so web/app/mobile or even embedded?!).
Yeah I know that the aligning is deffo not perfect but hey, gotta start somewhere :). Detail: everything you see here (the content and actually also the icon path) is rendered from the database already.
Tips/opinions?
47 -
I am trying to understand something for a while. devRant is full of privacy advocates and to be honest, part of it is almost taken by a group of people that call other people random swear words people because they are using a particular product of a company.
I will raise some points and will try to discuss them with other people in comments.
I will stick with Google. Since it looks like it's the most hated one. A company that has built one of the most intelligent infrastructure, the most popular mobile operating system and of course, the best search engine currently available.
The problem everyone sees is the privacy. Google tracks the search history to give users a better experience and show relevant ads. You might not need this "better experience". In case you don't know, you can turn off personalized search any time to make sure Google doesn't track. Same goes with Google Chrome, you can turn off all the data it is sending to servers in settings. You can simply not sign in if you don't anything to be synchronised.
An argument is Google should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But the general users are not tech-savvy. And yes, going to settings and turning on personalised search is a lot of work for a huge amount of people. Trust me, I worked in IT before. If they find other search engine giving them a good experience without changing anything in the settings, they will just simply move to that engine.
What interests me most if how people back DuckDuckGo. First of all, not all parts of DDG is not open source (it's fucking not, you can argue all day). Parts of it is closed because of licensing issues.
That is perfectly fine to privacy community. But it's not when Chrome is closed source for almost the same reason. I mean when you're using DDG, you are supporting a US-based company that has privacy all over its face and using closed source application on their server. Have you not learned anything from history?
You might be wondering about my obsession with Google. It hurts me when I see a giant company whose popular software is open source is bashed like this. Google has made huge contributions to open source communities. Chromium, Android, Kubernetes, Angular, GoLang, TensorFlow etc.
And PRISM, how do you know that DDG is not part of it? it's US-based after all.
I just saw an article that used a video with a title "TNW - Aral Balkan - Free Is A Lie | The Next Web" while asking us to switch to DDG. Ummm....DDG is also free right?
Maybe we should raise concerns with the US gov first rather than Google.61 -
Gotta say, I find it awesome that I can connect with some devRanters through encrypted channels.
It's awesome to talk to devRanters with the same mindset through channels that offer a very high level of security/privacy.
Thanks!39 -
Just wanted to say a 'thank you' to all people who bear with my privacy stuffs! I know quite some people who installed messaging apps, signed up to privacy services and so on, solely because --> I <-- want to communicate in private and I realise (I've always realized that though) that that can be tough sometimes.
Also a thank you to those people for not requiring me to get data fed into the big companies :).
Thanks!25 -
Hello again devRanters! This is linuxxx again. A quick update regarding the privacy site!
Right now we're up to the following:
Ewpratten
- Converting what we have right now on frontend to Bootstrap.
- Working on a page with a description as to what this is going to be exactly.
linuxxx (me)
- Converted the static stuff we used before to a simple MVC based PHP web application.
- Created a DB scheme for the custom CMS I am going to write for this.
- Starting to work on the custom CMS right now!
We'll update as soon as we've got a well working description/introduction page :)
We won't be creating rants every day/new tiny feature/change or anything but as this is our first productive night, it seemed like a nice idea to update what we already got done/started on :).
Stay tuned!28 -
I find it so infuriating when someone uploads a lot of data containing other people's data as well without asking those people if that's alright with them. (Contact information, address book, etc).
That you don't care about that/privacy is your choice, even your goddamn right but then please don't take other peoples right to privacy/their own choice away in the fucking process.5 -
So... an Italian government website published sensitive data of thousand of citizens, because they thought that it was enough to turn white the text color in order to anonymize the sensitive content of the files. Italy, 2019.
Source (in Italian):
https://wired.it/internet/regole/...7 -
devRant is truly amazing, a social network where I don't have to give up on privacy by giving out my number to confirm that I am legit when I'd use something as a VPN to protect my identity (unlike twitter facebook and google)
Thanks for giving a fuck about privacy and not giving a fuck about my data11 -
Removed my Facebook account about Month ago. Sister was pretty sad because I'm the one person she can tag in everything. Asked me why I deleted it and I told her it was because of privacy concerns. "Then why don't you make an end to end encrypted social network?". I'd actually consider this...11
-
Way to fucking go, Austria wants to push a law that forces online platforms (if possible around the globe) with more than 100k users to provide an accurate way to identify them.
"Name, surname and adress"
I just listened to an interview with a guy who is for that proposal. He said the platforms can just take the data directly from mobile providers, using the phone number. Also, even buying a prepaid sim-cards will require you to provide an identity card.
Way to fucking go! They say it's rather unlikely that this proposal will get approved by the EU, but given the shit they just pulled on us, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest id these fuckers just go with it.
Where is our precious privacy going? Some old pedophiles are taking it away from us, into their sex dungeons I suppose...
Unfortunatelly this is a rather new proposal, so I can't find an english article covering this story attack
https://br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/...
13 -
I want to be PROGRAMMING on the freaking privacy site already, not having to search for icons, download them in the right color/format etc.
Fucking hell. (although finding good/fitting icons is a funny challenge though :P)27 -
So today I learned i can pay my property taxes online. The way you pay is:
1. Enter address (street #, I live in an apt)
2. It will show all matches **including the owners full name**
3. If you click view, it shows the full account history...6 -
For my privacy advocate friends... They are logging keystrokes, clicks, and scrolls...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...18 -
Omg, when does the Stupid stop? New Zealand just passed a law that empowers immigration officials to compel travellers to unlock their devices. Otherwise, you pay a hefty fine. They are also allowed to copy the data and do God knows what with.
The horrible invasion of privacy aside, it also brings with it some legal hurdles. What if you are making a presentation or report to an investor or someone you have a fiduciary obligation with. You are carrying IP bound by several NDA's and other funding red tape that would end your life if it got out. Are you in breach if the data gets copied by the gov officials? Worse yet you have zero control over what they do afterwards.
I don't think any of this inspires investor confidence.
Government needs to stop touching things!7 -
Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!
I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.
So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.
I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.
'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.
I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.
Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.
So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.
TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.
Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.
There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.
I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.
Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.
I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.
Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!28 -
Ooh my f**king god! These privacy emails are getting out of hand now!!!!! I blame Europe for spoiling my inbox.11
-
Not to say anyone here is right or wrong about this, but I just do t get the whole privacy paranoia. Yes, I get that our rights are being violated. Yes I know I need to be aware and concerned.
People use specials rims, VPN software, etc... The bottom line is every keystroke, SMS, voice call, search text, historical reference... every piece of digital communication is recorded (At least in the US).
The sad reality is I can be as angry as I want, but unless I forego using tech or leaving the house, there is nothing I can do about it.
I await your comments, both positive and negative.53 -
For anyone that was too lazy to read all of @linuxxx's post. Here is a short summary. we are working together to create an informational website about online (and possibly offline) privacy. If this interests you, keep an eye out for updates from either me or @linuxxx13
-
!dev
An interesting read about why the second (and last) WhatsApp co-founder left Facebook while leaving behind a whopping 850 million because ethics/morals.
"I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit," Acton told Forbes. "I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."
Here's the article (do click through to the Forbes one): https://fossbytes.com/whatsapp-co-f...12 -
Currently working on the privacy site CMS REST API.
For the curious ones, building a custom thingy on top of the Slim framework.
As for the ones wondering about security, I'm thinking out a content filtering (as in, security/database compatibility) right now.
Once data enters the API, it will first go through the filtering system which will check filter based on data type, string length and so on and so on.
If that all checks out, it will be send into the data handling library which basically performs all database interactions.
If everything goes like I want it to go (very highly unlikely), I'll have some of the api actions done by tonight.
But I've got the whole weekend reserved for the privacy site!20 -
Alright so the security blog is coming up soon (as in, days probably) and I'm working hard together with 404response on the privacy site.
I do want to gain some insight into visitor numbers and so on but OF COURSE, commercial/closed source options are a no-go for me!
I am thinking about maybe using Piwik with all the privacy options enabled Also self hosted obviously. What do you guys/gals think?29 -
Just managed to setup a tiny/simple privacy-friendly analytics system.
You basically call an api from your backend with the api key and all the headers you received from the browser (php and Apache or nginx in my case) and the analytics api gets useful stuff out of that data without sacrificing privacy.
I get a little bit more insight into my websites usage and the client isn't sacrificing identifiable information!
I've been wanting to make this fucker for fucking months.15 -
*runs into underground bunker*
wew i'm safe!
*door creeks open*
someone whispers: "Psst, we've updated our privacy policy"2 -
Hello! A tiny update on the privacy site thingy. (linuxxx here yas).
I've finished the preview page (description of what will be on the site really) and slowly preparing for deployment.
In the mean time, since @ewpratten is very busy at the moment, I'm giving the frontend part a shot myself! Working on the general layout/presentation right now and I will show a preview as soon as I have anything solid enough to show :).
Also working on the custom CMS which is going well!
I am kind of hestitant to publish the preview page because I am not a frontender and I know that I'll get all criticism on here so please, please go easy on me! Also, just in general, if you find any kind of flaws in the web app or wherever, please report them to me! As for frontend, I won't fix anything because I've got bigger priorities (like creating the actual site itself xD) but general feedback would be appreciated :). And as I said, I'm a backender so don't judge me too hard on the frontend!
Alright now let's gather some courage to actually publish this thing 😅58 -
Internet privacy isn't actually about privacy. It's about choosing which company/person you are going to give all your data too..15
-
I just had to print out some bills for a colleague.
Nothing too bad you say?
Well.. She doesn't seem to care about security or privacy at all.
I opened the website of her email provider at my computer and moved away from the keyboard, so she could log in.
But instead she told me her email and password... In an office with some other colleagues... Multiple times and wrote it onto a piece of paper that the later left on my table.
After that I should look through her inbox to find the bills.
(Yup, I know a lot more about her now)
After finding and printing out her bills, she just thanked me and walked out of the office, because hey, why should I log out of her account?
It's nice that she trusts me... But that was a bit too much...4 -
So a friend of mine saw that I used DuckDuckGo.
Friend: "why do you use ddg? it has bad results! "
Me:"because I care about privacy,google collects a ton of shit when you search."
Friend:"yeah I don't care I just want to game..."
Me: 😱🤷♂️😶
Most people think like that sadly...23 -
> Open private browsing on Firefox on my Debian laptop
> Find ML Google course and decided to start learning in advance (AI and ML are topics for next semester)
**Phone notifications: YouTube suggests Machine Learning recipes #1 from Google**
> Not even logged in on laptop
> Not even chrome
> Not even history enabled
> Not fucking even windows
😒😒😒
The lack of privacy is fucking infuriating!
....
> Added video to watched latter
I now hate myself for bitting
22 -
Fucking phone company just sent me a notification, CCing all other business customers they have in Sydney. I am going to sign all those customers to a porn newsletter, and then advise them about the privacy breach.11
-
Wanted to get the privacy site cms REST API ready for programming again but hadn't put it on gitlab yet.
After some nervous searching I found it again 😅
This weekend I hope to get very far :)28 -
So we send a quote out to a client to update his website to make it compliant with the new privacy guidelines: SSL encryption, removing external libraries, removing Facebook Plug-ins, all that stuff. We didn't get a response.
On Monday, he called in a panic. "The website does not work, fix immediately!"
I check out the server, what do I see? An SSL cert installed the Friday before... Client decided to do it himself, on a Friday, without testing. He broke something, but cannot tell me exactly what he did.
And somehow he thinks all that is my fault :D4 -
For the privacy freaks of devRant, have a host file that blocks all Facebook owned domains:
Blocklist Facebook domains (2016) - https://github.com/jmdugan/...
(not mine, found on HN)7 -
Since I started caring about privacy so much my mom thinks that I have something to hide.
Hell yeah I have.6 -
My biggest hurdle:
Having to install Windows because some old application only runs on Windows.
No, i do not want to sign in.
I AM SURE
Installer: How about signing in?
Edit: Now it asks me about privacy options. As if i even had a choice..12 -
So, privacy aware dutchies of devRant.
I was waiting for a friend at Utrecht central Station and saw this sticker (image attached).
Basically, by walking in the building with your wifi and / or Bluetooth active, you're giving them consent to track you.
They use the tracking to see where passengers wait for their train and what the popular routes are.
I thought you should know.
(this is the site on the sticker: http://stations.nl/beleid/privacy/)
24 -
Instagram just imported my birthday from my Facebook, which btw, was not specifically linked when I used to post on Facebook.
Mark Fucking Fuckface Fuckerberg's team is destroying Instagram now. Ffs. 😒😒
Why is everyone okay with this invasion of privacy? And when is telegram launching an image sharing platform?32 -
Guy using VPN:
why would anybody use tor unless he hides something?
Me (using Tor):
why would anyone use VPN unless he hides something?
In my opinion there is no difference in using Tor than in using VPN, it's all about privacy. I would consider Tor as an free alternative for your everyday privacy needs, if you can't afford VPN, or am I wrong?22 -
All these 'We updated our privacy policy" mails remind me on how many (unnecessary) sites I am actually registered on...1
-
So here's the story about a big Fuck up by a TRAI chief in India
He posted an open challenge on twitter:
"Here's my 12 digit Aadhar card (social security no for Indians) number. Show me if you can do any harm to me. "
And Twitter obliged, a French hacker aliased @fs0c131y (Elliot Alderson) took the challenge and he started posting his phone number, email, and other personal stuff on twitter.
Still the official thinks he's safe and no harm has been done to him! He openly says, "Even if you get my bank account no what can you do?"11 -
This rant goes to my best friend.
Fuck you!
You do not fucking argue with people for doing what they like! So what if I want to use linux? What fucking problem does that make? Am I now a hacker fanboy for wanting to use a terminal instead of fucking pointing and clicking on shit like a monkey? Am I not allowed to want my privacy and free open-source? What? I shouldn't browse internet without getting my personal info stolen? Oh, they're tracking criminals? Then why don't you install a camera in your fucking living room so you can help them out? And don't fucking get me started on why I don't want to use Windows 10.
Fuck fucking fuck fuck. I know he's a good friend but this fucking shit gets my blood boiling.8 -
"I have nothing to hide."
I admit, I did utter these disgraceful words once. But I now take privacy seriously.
What is really sad and potentially dangerous is the fact that younger people do not give a fuck about privacy. Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram - these people use these apps and do not pay ANY attention to what might be the consequences of their actions.
The more data they own, the more they own you. We should start a privacy basics course in high school. Things could get out of hand in the future, as if they already aren't.17 -
Discussed my Internet privacy campaign - Google-free, encryption where possible, didn't even mention VPNs - with 2 people and they've both asked, "why, what are you hiding?"14
-
With the recent mark zuckerberg hearing, a ton of websites have actually changed their privacy policies and terms of service, to be much more transparent, so it did have a good impact, but the thought that it took that, to implement those changes is infuriating4
-
Update on my quest for encryption!
For the (large number) people that don't know, I want to use encryption for (almost) everything / actually give a shit about internet privacy... And I want it done by 2018.
So.. here is my progress so far:
I have signal
I now have an @tuta.io email.
I have a complex, long password.
I am using blankslate.io instead of Google docs (except for school)
I run important stuff through Tor or a VPN or both
I have a firewall running on Android.
Any more suggestions on what to do or things to change??
(@linuxxx)37 -
I've been reading a lots of posts about the "Age of No Privacy" and how our most personal information is spread and abused.
Well, obviously those complaining didn't have the displeasure of being born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family.
I had a small medical procedure, and my entire family (spread across 4 continents) became aware of it, created a WhatsApp group to discuss it (with message traffic that would shame any war room), and then my younger cousins asked that we post photos.
Of what?! My fucking colon? How about I stream the whole process live on Facebook, you crazy little shits?!
My point is - we violate the privacy of our close friends and loved ones daily, giving very little thought to what sort of information should or should not be forwarded. I'm not opposing to the battle against great evils, but maybe we should start by not committing small evils daily.15 -
Wow! Google's update in its privacy policy is impressive. Still too lazy to read it though. I trust Google. LOL5
-
To register for Facebook's hacker cup.
Fuck you 1:
I need a Facebook account
Fuck you 2:
I need to enter my address and phone number mandatorily. Because they'll send me a t shirt if I win one. It's not like anyone would not win a t shirt or not want one right? So fucking slurp away at all their privacy data any way.
Here's my address for you facebook
No 666, fuck you street, privacypolis, fuckington offville.4 -
This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.
I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.
I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)
In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.
Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.
So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.
If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.2 -
'I have nothing to hide'
in the last 20 hours i have heard this lie three times from three different people.
I just don't understand them. Everytime the topic privacy comes up (a lot of the times it isn't even me who starts talking about it) they I say this.
Would you want someone following you at all times, looking through your window, recording everything you say and writing all the information he gets about you into a notebook, potentially selling this information to others?
I really hope that you don't want this.
Privacy is a human right and it should stay that!
Privacy is a part of freedom and while freedom may be pretty difficult to define, privacy should always be a part of it.16 -
**Ahem**
https://google.com/search/...
"Never assume that data useless to your application is useless to all others - we are asking it different questions"
Privacy is dead because we could disseminate valuable data from crap if our lives depended on it, discarding simple key values for over analysed crap metrics every time.
Oh, and it's also screwing us over... if your keen know more about getting fucked go take a look at @linux 's rant about the matrix.org hack
- https://devrant.com/rants/2061177/...
15 -
Pulled this from a web site's privacy policy. Remember, just because there's a switch doesn't mean anyone has to abide to that rule.
Browser “Do Not Track” Signals: Most browsers contain a “do-not-track” setting. In general, when a “do-not-track” setting is active, the user’s browser notifies other websites that the user does not want their personal information and online behavior to be tracked and used, for example, for behavioral advertising. As required by recent Shine the Light law amendments we are required to inform you that, as is the case with most websites, we do not honor or alter our behavior when a user to one of our Websites has activated the “do-not-track” setting on his/her browser.5 -
my mum just sent me a picture of her and my long time no see cousin from US over WhatsApp. Short time after that, Facebook sent me a friend proposal of a girl from US I don't know - obviously it was my cousins girlfriend because she had a profile picture with him. My cousin doesn't have Facebook.
WTF?!
so what Facebook did must have been some face analysis of the picture my mum sent me over WhatsApp and compared my cousins face with profile pictures from friends of my friends to send me the proposal I got.
this is so fucking scary! I immediately thought of @linuxxx security blog and how my usage of such software affects the privacy of others besides me being transparent as fuck.
Definitely have to rethink my software choices and app/online behaviour!11 -
Last week I sent a pic of Nestle Crunch chocolate to my friend in Whatsapp. Today he told me that he got an ad in Instagram for Nestle Crunch!! Holy crap!
We were trying to figure out how did it happen because we never discussed about the chocolate other than that image. Then I realized that Whatsapp and Instagram was owned by the same fucking company - Facebook!!!
I've stopped using Facebook, Instagram for a very long time and I have ad blockers on every electronic device I touch. So I never understood the gravity of people losing shit over privacy, until today. This indeed is creepy and it hit me real hard. I'm now reading all rants with "privacy" tags and methods to harden my devices to repel from those buggers.10 -
Oh come on... Does even ecosia need to craft their truth. First party trackers aren't that better than third-party...
At least there is only one url to block. Easy.
4 -
*enters random page*
To continue, you must accept all cookies or click here to see our Privacy Policy.
*clicks to see privacy policy*
*in privacy policy page*
To continue, you must accept all cookies or click here to see our Privacy Policy.6 -
Fuck I hate bloated app permissions but I guess todo lists that know who you most likely to chat to when taking a dump is what we get for demanding everything for free. I get why Snapchat wants so much, I just find it fucking ironic that this is from a company that founded itself on the concept of privacy 🤦♂️
7 -
Introducing. Snapchat privacy invasion. You can see where your added friends are if they do not disable it (enable ghost mode).
Good job :)
6 -
On the bright side, with all these privacy update emails, it has given me a chance to unsubscribe from all the shitty newsletters that I subscribed loooong back and to delete unwanted spam accounts that I don't use anymore.
Thanks GDPR! -
Fuck GoDaddy man... Paid extra for the privacy feature thinking I wouldn't get harassed by phone. Think again! Got tons of calls from India in two days. What a rip off...
I guess they're selling our info or something...
What service do you guys use? I want to move my domains, any recommendation?19 -
Me half a year ago: I want to work at Google one day.
Me now: I want to get more privacy and to get rid of all Google / non private services.
Right now I am trying to switch to signal but it's hard to convince my friends, which also use Instagram Facebook and Snapchat to use signal because they don't give a fuck about privacy and can't be bothered to install an app which taks less time to setup than a fucking Facebook account.7 -
I feel I should open a github repo, for people to contribute privacy policy parts into, have say folders like "google analytics" and then whenever people encounter those in the wild, add examples there, so people could fetch together a full privacy policy for free, as all those new cashgrab websites are just fucking insane. But I am not really sure, if that would find any contributors tbh sadly.
P.S: I seem to have developed now a third sense, when the devrant post cooldown is down, so I can rant more lol, because whenever I feel like posting the thought or rant, the cooldown is just about to expire -
"There's more to it"
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time now, so <rant>.
Yesterday in one of my chats in Telegram I had a question from someone wanting to make their laptop completely bulletproof privacy respecting, yada yada.. down to the MAC address being randomized. Now I am a networking guy.. or at least I like to think I am.
So I told him, routers must block any MAC addresses from leaking out. So the MAC address is only relevant inside of the network you're in. IPv6 changes this and there is network discovery involved with fandroids and cryphones where WiFi remains turned on as you leave the house (price of convenience amirite?) - but I'll get back to that later.
Now for a laptop MAC address randomization isn't exactly relevant yet I'd say.. at least in something other than Windows where your privacy is right out the window anyway. MAC randomization while Nadella does the whole assfuck, sign me up! /s
So let's assume Linux. No MAC randomization, not necessary, privacy respecting nonetheless. MAC addresses do not leak outside of the network in traditional IPv4 networking. So what would you be worried about inside the network? A hacker inside Starbucks? This is the question I asked him, and argued that if you don't trust the network (and with a public hotspot I personally don't) you shouldn't connect to it in the first place. And since I recall MAC randomization being discussed on the ISC's dhcp-users mailing list a few months ago (http://isc-dhcp-users.2343191.n4.nabble.com/...), I linked that in as well. These are the hardcore networking guys, on the forum of one of the granddaddies of the internet. They make BIND which pretty much everyone uses. It's the de facto standard DNS server out there.
The reply to all of this was simply to the "don't connect to it if you don't trust it" - I guess that's all the privacy nut could argue with. And here we get to the topic of this rant. The almighty rebuttal "there's more to it than that!1! HTTPS doesn't require trust anymore!1!"
... An encrypted connection to a website meaning that you could connect to just about any hostile network. Are you fucking retarded? Ever heard of SSL stripping? Yeah HSTS solves that but only a handful of websites use it and it doesn't scale up properly, since it's pretty much a hardcoded list in web browsers. And you know what? Yes "there's more to it"! There's more to networking than just web browsing. There's 65 THOUSAND ports available on both TCP and UDP, and there you go narrow your understanding of networking to just 2 of them - 80 and 443. Yes there's a lot more to it. But not exactly the kind of thing you're arguing about.
Enjoy your cheap-ass Xiaomeme phone where the "phone" part means phoning home to China, and raging about the Google apps on there. Then try to solve problems that aren't actually problems and pretty vital network components, just because it's an identifier.
</rant>
P.S. I do care a lot about privacy. My web and mail servers for example do not know where my visitors are coming from. All they see is some reverse proxies that they think is the whole internet. So yes I care about my own and others' privacy. But you know.. I'm old-fashioned. I like to solve problems with actual solutions.11 -
I wont take privacy laws seriously as long as my pizza delivery service needs a fucken phone number as mandatory field.9
-
About a month ago I had looked up SMS gateway services.
I had checked out twilio few times then.
Today this happened. Coincidence? I think not.
3 -
So the US Congress decided that the online privacy of it's citizens do not matter. What steps do you guys take to maintain your privacy ? I can't even convince my friends to stop using fb messenger and move onto Signal.7
-
Today I had to give the privacy speech to my family as to why I don't want to use WhatsApp (where my family has a group discussion). It was pretty difficult in the beginning because they used a lot of the "You shouldn't care if you have nothing to hide." rethoric.
But in the end most of them understood my point of view, and I even got my aunt to install Signal to try it out. I have hope that some day all of our family discussions will be completely private.11 -
@dfox @trogus Hi, I was just wondering how to find the privacy policy? If I am missing it, sorry!
My question is about who owns the rants. It doesn't matter either way, I am just curious.17 -
Hmm, I find it highly peculiar that I let a friend borrow my pc to watch stranger things on Netflix, with her account.
I signed her into the guest account, she picked Google Chrome (not signed in).
Now my Facebook feed and YouTube adds are all about stranger things..
I get the ip gets logged & mapped.. But srsly.5 -
So this new fitness tracker includes "tone of voice" analysis, and I'm supposed to believe you're not recording every word I say all day long? Riiiight. I know what's in my production log files, and I only work in the textile industry.2
-
I'm at a Dutch Meet-up about security and privacy. Quite interesting. Any Dutch ranters here as well?
8 -
!rant
tl;dr at the bottom
This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!
So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.
This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.
Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!
TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!11 -
Should I care about privacy anymore ?
I had to switch to windows from Ubuntu in my laptop because of driver related issues.
Everytime I use Windows , I feel uneasy because of the data it collects but at the same time I am happy that I can play a couple of video games , my battery life is better and my display is better.
I own an Android phone , and no matter how many add ons I use , or VPN , I know that Google gets sufficient amount of data to know a lot about me.
It's getting harder and harder to keep my data private and it's becoming inconvenient as well.
In my country almost everyone I talk to uses Whatsapp. I removed my Whatsapp account for a few days and I barely talked to anyone and it was not a good feeling.
My point is , is fighting for privacy worth it ? How much inconvenience are we ready to accept ? Can I do anything to keep my data private and still use convenient services ? Please enlighten me .28 -
Okay so today I opened a link to buy a screen for my Raspberry pi on my phone(Chrome browser) and was simultaneously using FB on my Laptop in mozilla.
And that very moment I had ads on FB to but that screen.
Now I know it's nothing new, but at the moment of realization it just felt so creepy.
Privacy literally doesn't exist anymore!18 -
So enlighten me here. Am I the only one that doesn't lose his absolute shit when it comes to privacy?
I know that some companies are collecting data, and to a certain extent, I'm fine with it as long as the trade-off is good.
I like that Google is "learning" who I am and what I like, cause now, I only see news and articles relevant to my interests, and search predictions are much better. Same with targeted Ads. On an off chance that I'm not using Adblock I like seeing products that I might like, which I otherwise probably wouldn't even know existed.
Except for Microsoft. I have no idea why, but that's where I draw the line.96 -
I'm really loving Facebook's new design standards they fit so well their latest marketing and rebranding pipe dream to be viewed as a company that respects privacy.
They don't have to protect your info if you can't submit it 😂
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Start to read the book from Jaron Lanier "Who owns the Future". And suddenly realize that the company which offering us "free services" is trying to build a superior model of machine learning and read all of our behaviour.
Thus, i start to logout my facebook, twitter, instagram and all of my social media. But, i'm not the lucky one who could fight this "selling data practices", because I still use devices with "Android OS". My privacy stolen & sold is inevitable. What a Digital Life!24 -
I just woke up this morning to an email saying that someone from chile logged into my instagram account and I'm not actually what set me of the most.
The fact that my password was leaked, the fact I literally never got notified that I had a Instagram account I never wanted or the you have to disable most privacy settings, just to reset your password.
Like holy fuck, I disabled all options I could find on firefox concerning privacy/tracking and it still tells me I should disable some privacy settings.
So I enabled chrome again (fucking system app) and it worked on first try. Just as expected...
Anyway, fuck instagram and thank you dear hacker for telling me that I had a worthless to delete.5 -
I’m not an Apple fan boy but I do use their products and respect their business ethos.
I was please when I saw this as part of my software update today.
Before the haters start hating, if you use a google device or use Facebook then you already don’t have a leg to stand on.
15 -
If you need 10TB of User data to make a marketing strategy, you might be in the wrong business. When I was young we used our imagination to make good marketing ;-P2
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starting to use everything on Incognito, with a VPN, and (thinking) of switching to TOR.
a heck of a privacy that will be, but the cost of the Speed(Bandwidth) will be terrible.14 -
Recently I flashed Android 9 (Pie) on my Nexus, but to this day I still haven't logged into Google from it. One reason is because I don't know my password and I didn't git clone my password store yet (where it's contained). Another reason is because I want to reclaim my privacy and not be a data battery for a Matrix of convenience that feeds itself with my personal information. Eh, it sorta works out I guess. Yalp is an amazing alternative to the Play Store, and even offers its own shadow accounts to use along with Google Play.
One problem though, while I've noticed that I could log in with my own account to get all my premium apps (couple hundred euros worth, so not easy to just discard) it apparently violates Google Play's ToS to do so from a third-party app. So I'm a bit hesitant to do that. Do you know of any viable alternative way to preserve my privacy yet install, keep and have validated those premium apps? I could download them from e.g. BlueStacks and export the apk's, but that'd be tedious and wouldn't be able to get those apps validated on my phone unless I log into Google there as well (which kinda defeats the purpose). Any suggestions?23 -
I don't understand privacy advocators.
Am I the only one who wouldn't give up practicality in exchange for "potentially more secure"?
I don't understand so much what the deal is with people who avoid Facebook, or don't trust Google or Microsoft, just in the basis of "privacy" or "security".
Websites tracking you to serve ads? Well, it's pointless because I very rarely buy something from the internet or let myself be influenced, ads are waste of time, just use an adblocker.
I can pretty much upload my whole life or documents on Google drive, even if I made it public no one would really care or read it all. It's like that GitHub project you uploaded but never documented, so no one cares. I usually use alternative software not because of "privacy" but because it has features other software doesn't have.
In reality you realize people aren't that interested in your life more than their own life.24 -
I made a New Year's Resolution to take more of an interest in my Internet privacy. Feel like it's something I should have done a long time ago. I've stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo instead), moved away from my Gmail account (Tutanota instead) and stopped using Chrome (Firefox/Firefox Focus instead). I've had my Gmail account since they first announced it and you could only sign up if someone invited you. It felt good to delete 7000 emails and what I estimate must have been 13-14 years of Google/YouTube searches. Currently experimenting with VPNs, considering paying for ProtonVPN soon.9
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Watch a privacy video. See how Google use all your datas. Switch on DuckDuckGo. Feel private. Can't find how to go home drunk. Switch to google.8
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I want to switch to an encrypted email service. My question, what if the service provider suddenly decides to close down the email service.
I feel like it's too risky to move all my emails to them.5 -
To everyone freaking out about how bad Microsoft buying GitHub would be for "privacy". I want you to know that GitHub already uses Google and Facebook analytics on their site.1
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Been using Snapchat for a while.
But yesterday I uninstalled it. Since morning, while using YouTube, I've been getting advertisements to install Snapchat. Where is the privacy?3 -
Fuck this shit! Roommate just barged in at 3:30AM, his gf in tow. They went to bed like I am not here and he is snoring like a chainsaw. I never understood how can she sleep next to him while he snores like that. I have earplugs and active noise cancelling headphones on. I can still hear that motherfucker loud and clear. How the fuck is she not awake?!
But more importantly, 50% of this fucking room is mine, what makes him think he can just have his girlfriend over while I am here is beyond me. Like, sure, if I am not here go ahead but when I am here I would like some privacy, I guess the plank wall that I made in the middle of the room is not an obvious enough clue that I want privacy and I don't want to be disturbed :-/
Can't wait to have enough proof of his bullshit to get the block manager to throw him out.
Edit: To add to the snoring problem: I had a girlfriend who would snore, less than my roommate but still loud enough that I was awake the whole night when I went to sleep at her place... I HATE SNORING ... And when I went home for some holidays and my brother snored even for a second I kicked him off of his bed (because why not, he is an asshole to me like 99% of the time - and so am I to him :D //sibling love//)12 -
I start shaking and getting nervous when there is something I really, really want to say.
Today in school we started talking about Amazon Alexa and privacy.
This topic concerns me a lot and I started talking in front of the whole class about Google and things they do to spy on you. After about 30 seconds of me talking I started shaking because there was so much I wanted to say and with so much enthusiasm and also a bit of anger.13 -
God is always watching you!
Excuse me, but isn't that a violation of my privacy? Or is God, the NSA? Or is NSA, the God?12 -
When your boss wants to use the client's infos about it's clients without anyone's permission, and doesn't understand why it's against basic privacy laws
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Wohoo, new signal update :D
Now signal has in my opinion everything you need for a messenger and isn't bloated with useless shit like status, etc.17 -
"We value your privacy, that's why we want you to agree to all of these tracking cookies."
Fucking GDPR, is getting on my nerves now, can't go anywhere without encountering a cookie wall.9 -
F*cking morons complaining of privacy yet busy posting practically everything from pictures to finger prints and weird f*cking full details on social networks and some weird online places and platforms...😑🤕😤😤😤 (best safety, never go online)4
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Just funny to see how a lot of campanies send emails because of their changed privacy policies.
Some explain it to you and are quite pleasing (e.g. Tapatalk), but most are quite neutal about it and add sugarcoated reasons for updating their policies (besides that they're forced by law).
Quite funny to watch how every coorp explains the same thing in their way.
-----
Maybe we can make this post into a collection of funny, weird or otherwise remarkable mails regarding this policy update.
-----
Image: Some of those mails and the content of the Tapatalk one:
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I really like how there is something new everyday that you can do to protect your privacy even more 😄3
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Last night me and my friend were on a WhatsApp call discussing how we should practice algorithms and data structures more. We texted the logistics after and he sent me a calendar invite on google. I swear to god this morning I had adds talking about data algorithms all over YouTube but I have never googled this issue in the near past 🤔 this can’t be a coincidence...9
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!Rant
The new bill passed the house for ISP to be able to sell data. This get me ticked off. I already ausme that ISP did it under the table. Doesn't make it right. Now it legal for them to breach our privacy. At what leave do i need to run my own internet just to feel safe. VPN can sell the data, ISP can sell data about you. I spend my life teaching how to protect people online and now I can't even say they are safe at home from someone with wrong intention. A quote comes to mind.
"Dear lord I need to see some change, because the man in the mirror is wearing a mask"
I shouldn't have to feel every time. I boot my PC, that I need to remind my self that what I'm doing now is being sold so someone can lable me. When will the common man learn to protect their privacy online; And where is the line in the sand?
It not all bad, this event has given me the itch to code. Just to spin some heads I'm going to make a script to make random Google query across the widest array of topics, so my profile is full of contradiction.
The few who read this have a nice day!6 -
Brave Browser was found hardcoding referral links to partnered Crypto sites, even if you manually type the URL.
Since then , they have fixed the bug but it's hard to trust Brave again.
Privacy is built on trust. I have recommended Brave to my friends and family and seeing news like this , makes me skeptical about the company.8 -
So apparently some major vpn connection providers got compromised some time ago.
https://twitter.com/hexdefined/...
https://twitter.com/cryptostorm_is/...
adding the fact that major enterprise vpn network providers had security flaws earlier this year
https://sdxcentral.com/articles/...
Sums up what was the major topic in security this year.
At the end I see something like cloud act that allows wiretapping anyone.
https://justice.gov/opa/pr/...
And when we multiply this by number of companies that have services in cloud that sums up privacy these days.
Non existent.6 -
Really glad the privacy community can make some impact. I still don't understand why venmo has to has any public transaction feed and I don't think they have public off by default still, but at least they are explaining things to users instead of being sneaky with their dumb social-network-ish-thingy that made ALL OF YOUR FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS PUBLIC!!????
I don't understand why they hid this whole public feed thing. I'm pretty privacy focused and I didn't even know that my transactions where public untill I saw https://publicbydefault.fyi/.
9 -
I hate how people automatically assume anything coming out of China is spyware. Because the US and EU have such good reputations for preserving privacy right?3
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#Apple #FaceID
Yet another step towards the God's eye in Fast & Furious. Since it requires a 360 scan of a face, CIA just requires a photo to find anyone in the planet who's using an iPhone X [Stands for Expensive]. There's a reason why Apple ditched the fingerprint sensor.
RIP #Privacy 😶
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Hey guys, does someone knows if Twitter colludes with other websites and/or services to collect data, because I thought that privacy-wise, Twitter wasn’t as bad as Facebook as I just use Twitter to follow youtubers and Donald Trump(to keep up with his craziness) and never post anything. But I just got a Python Machine Learning ad just. And it’s spooky because I’m currently (trying to be) learning Deep Learning and Google knows it (🤬🤬 you udemy ads) but Twitter!!?? Do they have a way to link my account??
6 -
For all the privacy focused people out there, Cloudflare and APnic announced (about 2 days ago) that they created a privacy-first super fast dns server (1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1)
https://1.1.1.1/3 -
Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D
1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?
2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?
3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?
4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?
5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.
6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).
7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?
8) Any other advice you can give :P ?12 -
being a sheep over the last years I just recently started to overthink my software choices in terms of privacy. but hell it's far from easy!
just now I realize how dependent I am from all of these services. I mean no problem ditching Facebook for example, it's not essential to me. but what about WhatsApp and GoogleDrive? I'm using these services on a daily basis...
any advices on what software or providers to use alternatively? especially browser, messaging app, email provider and cloud service?
please keep in mind that although I am willing to bring sacrifices I by no means want to neither could live like Richard Stallman. so an argument like "sell your MacBook because macOS is spyware" is not that helpful to me - more like what can I do to increase my privacy within the boundaries given to me. I have to find some sort of compromise. so curious about your advices, stories and opinions right now!15 -
ARGH!
Since that privacy cookie policy change thingy, every goddamn site pops up the dialog asking about it.
I just want to fucking read the page, quickly; get off my screeeeeeen!
There should be a standard to add something that lets the browser tell the page if you accept cookies or not, and which options to use; or at least make all the sites use a specific attribute for the elements of the div, so it can be automated (I know this is a dream).5 -
A rant about fucking google!
I search for a page, but my internet is pretty slow (not on wifi), so while waiting I think of somwthing else to search. And now I have 4 tabs open on my phone.
After a little while, I get the following error (see attached image). I get a little frustrated, but I'm a calm person, I decide to solve the (still loading) CAPTCHA and continue browsing.
After a little while, I get an error that my browser (Edge) is not supported and I can't open the CAPTHCA. On other websites, it has always worked just fine, but they want me to switch to their Chrome, to steal my data.
It is quite a clever trick if you think about it. Either that, or I've been hacked and there's a bot on my phone.
9 -
I remember when doing some privacy cleanup, looking at the third-party list of a website and visiting the sites behind them. I ended up one time on Crazy Egg.
3 months later, I got an email if I wouldn't want to use their services.
They did have my email.
From where? (the answer is obviously from the sites they track)
But I mean, who cares about your email when they have your f****** passport
-->
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/pri...
This world is getting to crazy, I thought this would be the maximum. Of course...
Next headline:
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/...
I think tracking is a more serious problem, than I imagined (and I do already try to reduce data)
Oh yeah and btw I just noticed an iOS app could silently use my mobile data (was deactivated for the app) to display ads. Silently. I hope this was a bug. But I don't think so. -
Salespeople telling clients "Your site doesn't need a privacy policy/cookie policy since you don't actually sell anything on your site."
Wrong wrong wrong WRONGITY WRONG WROOONNGGGG!!!!!
Client to PM to me: "Well Jim said we don't need those on this site."
Me: "Well Jim is misinformed, since we use Google analytics, Facebook Pixel, and contact forms, you need to have both a privacy and cookie policy."
PM to client: "We'll find you a template you can use to get started, it'll cover most of what you need."
Me to PM: "we will do no such thing, we can send them a few links explaining why they need these, but they should consult a legal professional and cover their asses for their own business practices. I can provide any technical details they may need like what data the cookies collect if necessary."
PM to me: "well I'll just find something for them then."
*In my head* please just go crawl in a hole and die.4 -
Google hitting nails on their own coffins. Coming from someone outside the organisation can be discarded as a way of ruining the company's image, but when you see the words "Google, For Internal Use Only", even a Google fanboi(I am guilty of being one) has to accept that this can have adverse effects, not now probably but in the long run definitely.
Presenting, Google's Selfish Ledger
https://theverge.com/2018/5/...2 -
Google tracks Android users even with location services turned off.
https://theguardian.com/technology/...
Fuck Google & Apple; Are there any decent mobile operating systems that actually respect your privacy?11 -
So I went to take a look at Mozilla's "privacy not included" guide.
That's some good comedy right there, fucking rubber ducks that spy on you.
Jesus fucking christ -
Am I the only one who genuinely appreciates all the updated privacy policies and opt-in notices I'm getting? The GDPR seems like an unequivocally good thing, to me.2
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Trying to get away from Gmail, anyone know any email providers that respects privacy? Would prefer IMAP/POP access and an option (can be paid) to use my own domain.
Currently considering paying for ProtonMail.28 -
Today I managed to convince three people (including my cs teacher) to use signal, today was a good day.
Now I just need more time to learn about privacy / security stuff, can you recommend me any resources?9 -
Reposting this rant for more visibility. I do not like to repost, but this is really important, people's privacy is threatened.
https://devrant.com/rants/2436082/...9 -
DNS ove TLS might come just in time for the Netherlands (if we're lucky).
https://xda-developers.com/android-...5 -
!rant
I have a Facebook account, but I never post anything! neither I like or comment on any post, also I am following random pages!!!
I bet their privacy spying algo is confused af!!!2 -
"but we're the one that not unlock the iphone of a suspect murderer, or the one of a dad the last a son to recover all their pictures together, because the privacy BLA BLA BLA"
https://neowin.net/news/...1 -
Gmail > create new rule > Subject contains "Privacy Policy" > move to [Privacy Policy BS]
Hooray! I was going fucking mental from the daily Privacy Policy e-mails. Computaas help us. -
Is there some basic guide to privacy for (android) phones?
Like where you flash some secure ROM, get timely updates , no gapps or privacy threatening app, use secure services and alternatives mainstream ones, and use foss s/w.. And something like fdroid instead of playstore store or something..
Ignore the badly framed idea, but you get my point..6 -
Fuck DuckDuckGo!
Is this is what you "privacy savyy" like to get? Irrelevant content. WTF?! Such a waste of time. I'm selling my soul back to Google. Fuck your opinion.21 -
Just found out about this: https://publiccode.eu/
If you live in the EU and care about privacy, security and/or open source you might want to check it out.
To sum it up: The idea is to have all software written for and bought by public authorities, governments and such published under open source licenses to enable every citizen to verify the integrity of that software (and give all the other advantages of FOSS).3 -
Just went to my accounts in Google. And happen to go across my activity section. I had no fucking idea I was tracked so much! It even lists the app I have opened at particular time. It stores every frigging thing I do with my phone. Goddamnit! Yes, I understand I have agreed to share my information with you. But you just take everything.
Go to myaccount.google.com and head towards the my activity section. You'll know what I'm talking about if you are heavy android user.5 -
anyone else paranoid when it comes to privacy? i'm already deleting my stack exchange accounts after realising that whatever I do there would be hard to delete. i keep googling myself. this is crazy.2
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@linuxxx
Can you do a security / privacy check for ProtonVPN? All I know is that it is Switzerland based and pretty much secure.9 -
Just another privacy rant.
I'm sick of people using the excuse "I don't care if Google keeps all my data it's just for adds"
That's true now but if you look at the current trends governments are making to forcing ISP's to store metadata, then it will be the actual data. Eventually they push that to other companises as well.
Now look at Australia for example the police don't need to notify you, let alone get a warrant, to access your metadata. There's also a law in NSW were you can be charged for accociating with a peraon commuting a crime.... Now your in jail for downloading movies years ago that you forgot about but your ISP didn't. I now that's a rather extreme punishment but, Imagine if the government needed some cash so they fine every person that ever downloaded a movie and everyone accociated with person.
Just a crazy theory with poor examplees but just because your data isn't hurting now doesn't mean it won't.
I'm gonna sit in a corner with my tin foil hat now.5 -
So I'm pretty sure that when I went all in to Apple's Siri shitfest and turned on "Hey, Siri" that I had to accept some kind of privacy notice or some shit. Essentially, being an iPhone user and turning on that service, I've agreed to allow them to listen to me.
But what about the guy who sits next to me? Are his rights to privacy being infringed because my phone can also hear him? If so, who is the one infringing? Me or Apple?
Apple is just an example, but imagine if someone has an Echo in an office or a Google Home. Or what if you're unknowingly standing next to someone with a Google or Apple device that's always listening?
I know my old Android phone had picked up people at the grocery store before. I never turned on "Ok Google" but I used the speech to text of the keyboard a few times. When people showed how you could go see what Google had "heard", I was surprised to find how many OTHER people it picked up.
Anyway, just some thinking. -
I’ve been complaining about the privacy policy update emails since last week but I just realized that I won’t get a better chance to unsubscribe from all the services that I don’t use or that I won’t need anymore.
3 -
I think this needs a bigger audience :)
PRIVACY HEADS-UP
huawei devices are listening to your conversations. Contents of conversations are used for advertising. Hell knows where else..
https://devrant.com/rants/2237231/...
anyone else with similar experience? Tell us your story :)18 -
God Damn Privacy Regulations
Changes to our privacy policy
We've updated it privacy policy
New terms of service for your account
GDPR
Sigh...if i we're EU citizen it would be for the best, except for those businesses that can't bother to update but I'm not even EU.
Email filter activated!2 -
so this is the first time i am actively denied content because i am not easily traceable. what about no?
translates to:
dear readers, unfortunately there is a problem displaying our content. please open the article with another browser.
displayed using ddg-mobile browser
2 -
People, finally back with a rant😌
You definitely have heard about the new privacy policies in the EU. What do you guys think about this BS?
Who the actual fuck has come up with such trash? Politicians can be such dumbfucks sometimes wtf..😐🤔18 -
Why should I give a fuck as to whether or not Google knows my location?
I fail to understand why people treat it as such a big deal, so please shed some light onto your side of the story if you do care.19 -
<rant>
I'm getting so sick of people bitching about their privacy and apps (looking at you gdpr).
They want full anonymity and share 0 data... well fine but then pay me 2.99 a month to use my service... oh you don't want to spend money well ok then, ill use some of your metrics and share them with advertisers so you can keep using the service at no cost... oh you don't want us to collect the data you are already spewing around on every online platform? well then we cant have you using our service because you are costing us money... what? the gdpr is forcing us to keep providing you with the service... but... who is going to pay for resource costs?!
arrghh!!
</rant>
ps: the gdpr is so full of loopholes, half the arguments you "nerds(be honest you read it on facebook that we have to delete you data...haha..)" use for how great it is are...well... moot
pps: with you nerds I don't mean the readers of this13 -
Finally something good in the name of Privacy. I hope this is NOT a joke !!!
https://blog.cloudflare.com/announc...2 -
Haven‘t really understood this. If WhatsApp is End to end, why is it so avoided by people who are privacy conscious. Is it because of the contacts? Or what data do they collect?36
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Friend:
look! I've got privacy filters for all my devices!
Me:
Great! That's definitely gonna help!
*sitting behind him, watching him typing in nasty things over his shoulder* -
I just said "bye" to all my Whatsapp groups, and finally got rid of that service ! (meaning deleting my account as well, not just uninstalling the app).
It's so hard to make people understand what is happening and what I think about security/privacy... Guess I'll have to wait for people to finally come to Signal or Keybase if they want to reach me more efficiently :)12 -
One of my college professor just reached out to me on Whatsapp and he told me that my college is conducting a short crash course on "Machine Learning" for students. He asked me if I could visit and take a session along with others. He also sent me an ad banner which my collage had designed for this purpose.
Soon after the chat, I just opened up Instagram and saw my privacy going for a huge toss 🤪😡!!
6 -
I've recently moved from google to duckduckgo for my searches, Having in mind the growing concern of user privacy, what do you guys suggest for search engines, browsers, os, recommended addons, apps, vpns etc?15
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Let’s everyone use cloud so governments won’t ask us for data, they will just ask cloud providers.3
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PM: I can't see the Facebook page, can you check what's wrong with it?
Me: *click click tab tab* There's not much I can do... I don't have the admin access
PM: Who is the admin?
Me: ABC (who is on holiday)
PM then decided to bombard ABC with emails & phone calls (& to ABC's family)
PM: When ABC comes back, ask for the login details
Me: But that's linked to the personal account.....
PM: It doesn't matter
Where the f is privacy?
p.s PM is an arrogant bastard who logged in to ex-colleague computer, read her personal emails, found out she went to a job interview, told the boss and asked her to come back then fired her on the spot8 -
Fuck external stake holders, like politicians, those know-nothings, that pump their ego by finding multiple "issues" with our software like how we display the privacy data agreement and impose their stupid fucking nonsense rules on our software. Even if it is not part in any official law or GDPR
So there is the request that one needs to scroll down the whole data privacy crap nobody reads until you can press "Continue" and we *have* to implement that shit. Although it is completely out of line with Apple's usual installer handling. Nobody will understand it. It cripples the workflow.
But some Mr. Important demanded it, as if he is protecting users with this and makes a great contribution to the data privacy in our country. Yeah! And guy is so high up, unreachable for us through all the layers of other people, leaving us no time and means to dissuade this shitty request. If all your 'ideas' are so great you should not be allowed to do jack shit.1 -
I need your thoughts on a privacy related matter. I find this fact being very provocative.
So, at work we use Gmail:
Person AB has email AB@company.tld
Person ABC has email ABC@company.tld
How is it that when you send an e-mail to AB, that ABC sends back a god damn Out-of-office, without ABC being in either To, CC or BCC?
I reckon that the mailbox AB is owned by said company, and ABC is the owner of all those accounts. But shouldn't the contents of such mailbox still be private in some regard? (At least until AB isn't in the company anymore?)
It's funny, as a customer said she got an out of office from ABC, while solely sending one to AB.. I noticed this a few weeks back, and I'm rather infuriated by the fact that there's a possibility that every e-mail AB reveives, also ends up in in ABC's box.
🤔13 -
This is about an "Entrepreneurs", we as a consultant company with experience helping new businesses grow and consolidate, So we get a lot of clients who want our help growing their "startups".
Once I was talking on the phone with one of these who has a "millionaire" idea:
Client: I have a great idea of an app to monitor and control (an spyware) students phones when they were at their schools using geofences.
Me: Ok... What do you want us to do? (Thinking he wanted us to develop this spyware)
Client: I want you to get the support of the National Department of Education so we can convince the cellphone OEMs to integrate this app as an integral part of the cellphones.
Me: (Are you out of your mind?) I don't think it is possible for us to do that, first of all this app violates the user privacy and I don't any end user will consent to something like this.
Client: They won't have a choice, bla, bla, bla.
Me: (laughing inside and trying to learn more) Ok, so do you have an idea of how you want to monetize this?
Client: Since everyone will have this app on their cellphone, we will send them advertising and they won't be able to block it or skip it.
Me: Ok, Do you have a MVP ready?, What's the name of your company?.
Client: I have a presentation only, Do you want it?
Me: So you don't have anything tangible?
Client: I am still searching for seed money, bla, bla
Me: So how did you plan to pay us?
Client: This is a great idea, it will make millions.
Me: I don't think we can help you as you want, since there are very sensible topics about privacy and I need to speak with out lawyer, etc, but I can offer you other services like bla, bla.
Client:...
Me: We can talk later. (hang up)
Me: (Block that son of a bitch!)
I told everyone the story about this client and we all laugh.
What do you do about this type of wanna be entrepreneurs and their "super ideas"?1 -
According to a report from VentureBeat: Verizon Media has launched a "privacy-focused" search engine called OneSearch and promises that there will be no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing and no data-sharing with advertisers.
By default, Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode to the "off" but you won't have access to privacy features such as search-term encryption. In the OneSearch privacy policy, Verizon says it it will store a user's IP address, search query and user agent on different servers so that it can not draw correlations between a user's specific location and the query that they have made. "Verizon said that it will monetize its new search engine through advertising but the advertising won't be based on browsing history or data that personally identifies the individual, it will only serve contextual advertisements based on each individual search," reports VentureBeat.
https://www.onesearch.com/7 -
Which privacy-respecting email provider can you recommend? It seems that the following three are the best options:
- tutanota (0€ / 12€)
- posteo (12€)
- mailbox.org (12€)
Do you have any experience with them?
What do you think about a hosted email service with your own domain?20 -
Hey guys! I've just written Part 1 of a post on Privacy and how we're tracked these days. It's intended more for those who don't know about the issue or would like to learn more. Part 1 is mostly a long overview of the kinds of things that happen these days in regards to privacy and tracking.
https://thecapegreek.co.za/blog/...
I'd be honored if you read it. I also welcome any feedback as I'm not really a writer. Currently I want to figure out some formatting on the site to make the long posts like this one a bit more readable.13 -
I am trying to convince my friends to use signal so I can delete WhatsApp but they don't want to.
They don't really care about privacy.
Do you have any tips?5 -
FUCK THE GOVERNMENT!!!
if you believe in freedom and privacy and are from the UK sign here https://petition.parliament.uk/peti...7 -
Privacy Policy written the correct way. They state that they collect info about the users and provide to their advertising business partners which help them cover cost of hosting. In one line "We sell your data to provide you free service"
https://onesignal.com/privacy_polic... -
What keyboard do you use on your phone?
Considering the fact that the companies that made them may be spying on you?4 -
This is not a rant. Not really. It's more expressing my own insecurity with a certain topic, which somehow upsets me sometimes (the insecurity, not the topic though).
I have nearly no knowledge about security/privacy stuff. I mean, yeah, I know how to choose secure passwords and don't make stupid DAU mistakes. The very basics you would expect someone to have after a CS bachelor's degree.
But other than that... Nothing. And I would like to get a bit into that stuff, but I have no clue where to start. First getting my head wrapped around low-level stuff like network layers? Or something completely else.
This topic is so intimidating to me as it seems huge, I have no idea where to start, and I feel that if you don't have "full" knowledge, you are going to make mistakes which you might not even notice.
I sometimes get really scared about having an account hijacked or similar. Also in our job it seems to become more and more of a topic we should know about.
Anybody got any advice?
I am looking for a way to improve my knowledge in security in general for professional reasons and my knowledge about privacy for private reasons.
It's just, every time I start reading something related it seems that I am lacking some other knowledge etc...11 -
I have a huge axe to grind about companies sending me emails I have not consented to. Sometimes they have a checkbox for it, which I always, ALWAYS make sure I do not check. Sometimes they just add you automatically as soon as you enter your email adress.
Sometimes the 'Unsubscribe' link leads to a dead page, or just doesn't work.
And sometimes... They send you a bunch of emails to let you know they will absolutely stop sending you emails 😑
Why. Why? WHY? WHYYYYY?!?!?
Why are so many, even otherwise respected and very customer satisfaction minded companies so disgustingly cavalier or downright dirty about emails?
Even after this whole GDPR thing!1 -
What was the name of the service for acquiring domains for free (or was it with privacy(?)) that was trendy a couple of weeks ago here?
I might be thinking of buying a domain5 -
While trying to fall asleep, I came to the conclusion that a solution to privacy would be an encrypted p2p messenger. You'd need a dns-like system that can tell the peers how to contact their communication partners. Then I searched for one, and there was a good looking one, but it wasn't open source. looks secure otherwise, but perfection looks different.
Can anyone recommend something similar to kripter/tell me why it would be secure/insecure to use their service instead of, say, signal? Not that I truly NEED this, but I at least want to try it :)5 -
How would you guys feel if your favorite app gave you 3 monetization options.
Crypto Mining at max 70% load
Giving you 100% privacy.
Ads, rip privacy, rip cpu.
Paid content /micro transactions
Rip wallet , some privacy concerns, happy cpu.
Thoughts?6 -
1. Hardware was freely and easily upgradeable in the same way software is
2. Social movements forced both governments and companies/organizations to respect privacy
3. I was financially able to buy any 1 new tech product a month -
Opening your inbox in anticipation of updates on projects you're watching and instead receiving privacy policy updates
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Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .
Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?
Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .
All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!
IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .
Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .
IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.
One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .
I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.14 -
Dear fb user
We know we have been abusing, molesting you.
But we have now been told to stop.
Would stay with us to make this relationship work, we still need to make money, by you staying.
Sincerely,
Erin Egan
Global Chief Privacy Officer -
After all this time I’m still confused, why was Cambridge Analytica such a huge deal? I feel like a lot of people knew this in years prior, that Facebook/Google were scraping user data and activities to use for personal profiles and hence more directed as placement. Stuff like Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Ad Nauseum (rip it’s Chrome plug-in) etc. all focused on not allowing these same trackers to get information, so not like this case just magically busted the doors wide open screaming that all those websites you visited are now in Facebook’s database and no one knew.
I just can’t quite understand why everyone got up in arms after this.1 -
What are the thoughts of privacy conscious people about quantum computers? As far as I understand current TLS version encryption method is vulnerable to quantum computers, thus if your ISP or other agencies store all your traffic data right now, they'll be able to decrypt it after gaining access to quantum computers.
One way to secure your privacy would be to use your own VPN that uses encryption method that is quantum-resistant, but again the VPN would be using TLS to connect to the Internet.6 -
How to protect privacy and stay sane? It feels like I have to think and do everything or it's all useless...4
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I tried ProtonMail after a user here got creeped out after watching snowden. And I like it. Sick of gmails intrusion to what I buy, where I go and yes the need of phone number. Why tho?
I think we as a developer community should educate the need of such encrypted non-intrusive services not necessarily proton to common people. Privacy is a right.
*doesnt apply to insta models though, lulz*1 -
Woah there, Facebook. We've not even been on the first date yet.
Well, you've been taking my info for a while now, so technically we're married but still.
Creeeeepy.
5 -
I've been considering mailbox.org for my email and cloud office requirements, but so few reviews exist online so I hope some of you have experience you can share.
I currently use Gmail and Google Docs, Sheets, Drive, and Slides. Ideally I need to replace all of these. Here are my requirements:
- A service I pay for with money instead of personal data
- Personal email service
- A privacy conscious privacy policy
- An online office suite for documents, spreadsheets, file storage
Optional features:
- able to send encrypted email (almost no one I know can use encryption)
- open source software stack
- Android apps
- Cloud presentation software (Slides replacement)
I don't have the time or resources to set up my own email server or cloud.
I'd like to hear from anyone with mailbox.org experience, or other services that meet the above requirements.8 -
Guys, I'm changing my email provider and am looking for a (paid) one that focuses on security and data privacy. Any suggestions/experiences?5
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!rant
What actions do you take to protect your privacy while browsing/working? What browser/browser extensions/other stuff do you use?4 -
What makes WhatsApp not privacy friendly? They don't state that they share contact information and only statistical stuff (App last opened, etc.) Which is marketing, but not really bad. And they use end to end encryption.
By the way, this here is there Whitepaper on end to end encryption. But haven't read through it yet. https://whatsapp.com/security/...15 -
This whole thing about privacy and google is getting a little paranoid, it's almost like the Y2K bug back then...
-
Programming is life ❤️
Just as life, it has it's ups and downs, but it's truly satisfying to create complex systems and get them to actually work and be useful to others.
We have only just started with the digitalisation of previously manual, tedious tasks. Imagine what all this saved time and labour could bring us to achieve in areas we haven't yet had the time to explore.
I hope mankind is ready for the ongoing and upcoming challenges regarding data privacy and security.
Nah, in reality, we will be stuck with Fakebook and Tweeter selling all our dickpics to *in Trump voice* "Chiner" and censoring unpopular opinion and discourse.
These "digital parasites" can all go sit on a rusty spike. -
Not a rant, but a concern: should I make a bigger effort to take my picture off as many public places as possible on the Internet? I already use avatars for FB and Twitter profile pictures (share photos only in private). Or am I being paranoid? What do you do about it?7
-
Had to add a privacy policy to my app because of some google ads identifier bullshit. No one is going to read it anyway.. However, I found a beautiful privacy policy generator so I didn't have to read it myself.3
-
Bit of advice people, ALWAYS pay for the privacy option when registering a domain, I bought this yesterday, I have already emptied my spam box, and yet still they somehow get through
1 -
What’s up DevRanters.
Is what’s up still up today ?
Sooo, my question is, what’d you do for your privacy ?
I’m using Signal and Riot.im for chat, ProtonMail for email (tutanota in the future).
But I’m using iPhone, can we really trust Apple ? Is this better on Android with a specific ROM ?
Same for computers (btw I’m not an Arch user 😎).19 -
How to manage privacy and online presence?
I've seen the privacy advocacy making its rounds around here lately. The concept of hiding as much info as possible is something I'd like to try, but on the other hand I do want to maintain social media and have an outer presence. Additionally, I do want to use some Google services even if I do move my email (mostly developer related things).
I try and be a fairly social person alongside my introverted dev life, so this has been my dilemma the past few days. I could move to those obscure open source social media sites but that defeats the purpose of being connected with the non-tech people in my life.8 -
So, I've been seeing a lot of people concerned about privacy around here lately.
I completely understand it, and I too, don't want all my data to be available for anyone at any given time. I get it.
However, the only way to get privacy, is to build it yourself.
Buying a phone? Who says (apart from the company itself) that it doesn't have some integrated chip, or that the os lies to you or w/e
When using your phone, who says your Sim provider isn't intercepting all your traffic with a man in the middle attack?
These sound like conspiracies, however, if you really want privacy, either build it yourself (or with other privacy activists) or let go of the comforts of technology (i know, you're not the only source of info about yourself, the only way to shield yourself is to go into the woods and live a simple life.)
It's pretty sad that these are the two options, but I've yet to find a better one.
(ps, I used to have a "no logs, no ip, no anything" VPN provider, and as soon as some agency requested info, they got it, so I wouldn't easily trust the promise of 3rd parties anymore.)12 -
Just discovered something really shady that Google does. (wow, how unexpected right!)
On YouTube, you can have multiple channels under one Google account. When you do so, you create a "brand account", which is a holdover from the Google Plus days - which has a different public-facing profile from your main Google account but you still sign in the same way.
When you create it, you have to tick a box that says "I understand I am creating a new Google Account with its own settings, including YouTube search and watch history".
Here's the kicker: this includes all your privacy settings like Ad Personalisation - they are all reset to the default (i.e. yes, oh baby give me that data *slurrp*)!
Hiding behind that seemingly boring "legalese" checkbox is some very nefarious behaviour.
Don't Be Evil ™
5 -
Saw a movie related to Data Security and Data privacy. The movie ended 1 hour ago and i am now terrified how my data is going to end up somewhere where it can be misused .Frantically removed all app permissions from my mobile. Wonder how many days it will last. But now after hearing such gory details , i wonder how i can keep my interests safe in this world. I am now even afraid to give my laptop for changing its battery.. Thinking of wiping all possible compromisable data. But dont know how to.
How will technologies like blockchain affect this ? Will it make it worse or is it trying to make it better..?11 -
Do you guys think that it would be possible to build a cryptocurrency that could replace traditional banking and money at all?
A non anonymous cryptocurrency, that could guarantee enough privacy to not be used for surveillance but at the same time could be used by common people.
I had this thought recently but at the time of writing ( :P ) I haven't enough knowledge and time to go deeper than this (meaning "nothing").22 -
Hey guys, how would you rate iOS vs Android for privacy? I read recently that Android pulls up to 10x more data off of your phone (for data mining) than iOS and that overall, iOS is really the mobile OS of choice when privacy and control of your data is a priority.
Anyone have any hard evidence to support this?12 -
TL;DR : How would you 'smart home' with privacy?
How would you go about a privacy focused home automation/smart home setup?
What I feel is not necessarily important
> some assistant that you can have conversations with.
> Not being in home network to automate.
What I feel is essential. (in decreasing order of importance)
> Being a able to control appliances/electronics with voice/app (optional gesture)
> Have features to automate stuff, like turn on something if something happens (IFTTTish)
> Easily play music from Spotify or something similar, e.g. " * Play some Tchaikovsky."
> Simple alarm and reminder features.
So far I have seen relays and other devices that you add in the wiring and they connect to wifi. They work surprisingly well, but whatever I came across also collects personal user data.
Also not aware of any google home and alexa alternative that can so seamlessly pick up commands through ambient noise.
What are your thoughts and views?
P. S. I would have picked up something like this as my side project, but I don't see my self having that much free time atleast for the next 4-5 months.6 -
Because of the current debate I'm starting to get more into all the cyber security and privacy stuff.
So now I am searching for a password manager.
Do you have any recommendations for me?
Or maybe some additional tools I really need to use?
(Got PGP for mail, signal as my new messenger, a vpn and tor for now)4 -
I've started to get more into the TOR idea over the last couple of weeks.
I know I'm way to "non protective" of my privacy but changing would mean I'd have to break many habits and stop using things I'm used to.
A couple years back (I guess it was in like 8th grade or so) I had a presentation in German (my first language) for an extra mark. It was about tor. In the process of researching all of it I learned quite a lot about it. All of this knowledge has stuck to me the whole time, unused.
Fast forward to today, I've finally decided to use the couple of bitcoins I have (like 15€ or so) from my home mining experiment to rent a vps for a tor relay. First, I was lucky enough to find a service provider that accepts bitcoin for a 3€. They advertised "Fair use Traffic", later found out, after committing for three months since I was like "yeah... will be fine", in the customer panel there is a graph that shows me that I have used x% of 1.5 TB... I guess the customer support will get an email from me asking what "Fair use" exactly means... But that's fine... Oh... And ipv6 wasn't a thing to be found...
To wrap it up... I've now got a 2 weeks old little tor relay <3
(I didn't wanted to put it on my main vps where I have 200mbit guaranteed at unlimited for 5€ a month since that's where I have my mail server running and a hidden service for my next cloud)1 -
Is privacy really that big a deal some of the more tin-foil hats make it out to be? Look at Estonia, their government knows every last detail about an individual citizens life. Result: they are basically in a golden age as everything is efficient as there is zero red tape. This is what technology can achieve if we don’t bog ourselves down with non-issues2
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When a company makes changes to their Privacy Policy, they just have to provide the diff of the agreement.
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#privacy rant
if I use canvas defender/chameleon etc. to protect fingerprints and become unique, doesn't that nake me more prone to identification? 😓
or they randomize each time?8 -
My least favorite part of the world is the engrained habits within society (for lack of a better word).
These habits can be pretty broad but since they are so widespread, it makes it hard for people who value their privacy to stick to their beliefs and go against them.
Examples of this are like saying no to giving away some information, or asking for someone to delete something like a photo of you. Society is trained the other way. Society is trained not to be privacy aware and therefore reacts in a way that puts massive pressure on those who want to keep themselves more private.
I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with this already. Any tips? -
I honestly have to say that nowadays, the only company I trust with my information is Apple. If I ever get a voice controlled speaker at home it'll definitely be from Apple.4
-
What VPN? There are many but I need one that allows portforwarding, dedicated ips and is out of the 14 eyes. Any recommendations?12
-
I'm an idiot, almost
I needed a tablet for uni but I also wanted it to be quite powerful and with an OS I could actually get things done with (this precluded android and iOS)
I also am quite pricacy concerned but I never did much to prevent it
I ended up buying a surface pro, for its weight and power
joined with a mac at home and a google nexus in my hands... my privacy is fucked :)1 -
I have a question for all of you (actually some of you).
Which alternate browsers do you use (less known)? How are they regarding privacy?
I have tried Epic browser, but it's kinda shitty to use8 -
!rant
A more of an informative thread .
I'm a noob when it comes to privacy protection..
I'll ask all the Indian DevRant is, how can an individual/organisation misuse your Aadhar card , email address and phone number details .
Like if they have it together , how can they misuse it?
It'll great if you can let me know9 -
Looks like the EU is about to do another healthy push towards data privacy. What do you guys think? Is this the real deal, or is there something hidden underneath?
https://politico.eu/article/... -
Just installed Firefox Klar on my Android and really love it. Any suggestions about cool privacy apps?9
-
This privacy fever isn't bad, at least companies have to pretend to give a fuck a little more now. But the effects aren't all good!
I have updated every app on my android phone at least 2 times in the last 2 - 3 weeks. Argh! Every one of them using the "updates to our privacy policies" card. -
Does anyone have suggestions for privacy respecting payment services?
I currently use PayPal and Venmo but I don’t really trust PayPals business practices and am investigating other options.
any suggestions ?15 -
As much as the build quality and features of Google products are appreciated, how many of you are concerned about the data they collect about users ? Do you guys take steps to avoid such data collection ? Who wins eventually .. convenience or privacy ?1
-
Ram drives are a very good and useful thing why has no one made a nice ram drive caddy using laptop ram, the speeds on the older ram and drives out do any drive on the market and the unit is not a lot to make, I happy to put some old DDR 2 ram a new life as a USB ram drive using as a page or swop drive or Live CD Drive.
Or am I missing something and they really hiding somewhere, the ram drives I seen are stupid price and offer functions we don't need or aimed at big server companies but this would really help privacy, or better still anyone know if we can make some kind of ram drive with maybe a maker board and laptop ram ?1 -
If we’re concerned about Big G tracking our location without our consent, I’m wondering why there’s actually less complains about SIM cards being trackable. They don’t even need an internet connection to get your location, and there’s no way to turn it off.
Reference to posts/rants/articles such as this: https://devrant.com/rants/1020761/... -
I want to create an open source sort of clone of Facebook but privacy minded.. I deleted mine a few weeks ago because of the massive amount of datacollection. I mean, talking on messenger about shoes for example, then going on fb to see shoe commercials. I mean, fck that man.. you can change some settings but nothing in regards to this. This go beyond my limit of privacy.10
-
EY and ConsenSys announced the formation of the Baseline Protocol with Microsoft which is an open source initiative that combines cryptography, messaging and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet. The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain. The work will be governed by the Ethereum-Oasis Project.
Past approaches to blockchain technology have had difficulty meeting the highest standards of privacy, security and performance required by corporate IT departments. Overcoming these issues is the goal of the Baseline Protocol.
John Wolpert, ConsenSys’ Group Executive for Enterprise Mainnet added, “A lot of people think of blockchains as the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Mainnet as middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the Mainnet is good at while avoiding what it’s not good at.”
Source : ConsenSys -
Is anybody using Onesignal. It is free but their privacy statement is scary. Just read it and now I think I should stop using this service for my app.
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Why is it hard to improve privacy on IM?
I am improving again my online privacy these days. I was not using Twitter anymore for a few years, so I created a Mastodon account these days. I am still find interesting people over there, but it was quite simple.
But for IM, things get harder. What to use? XMPP? Matrix? Both appears to be good and bad sides. And it makes no sense I just install any of them and try to connect to random users. I actually need to make people I know to use the software as well.
Not only that, I will still need to keep other APPs on my phone, as they are necessary for some people. So I will still need a bunch of installed software.
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