Americans Flunked This Test on Online Privacy

[bnew]

The time to have given a fukk a bout online privacy was like 20 years ago a little after 9/11, it's too late now. Whenever you see issues like this finally go mainstream know it's 10 years too late. It was already too late when Snowden brought it to light and it's worse now.

have you actually done research on this?

 

[Geek Nasty]

This whole thing is a really sad turn the internet took maybe 15 years or so ago. When I first got on line (I'm an oldhead) EVERYONE used aliases. Then the social media companies started getting big and people stopped drawing that line between online and real world personas. Now, you can't even avoid leaking your personal identity. There's so many slick ways they have to intercept your personal info just by you being on the internet.

Too lazy to read the whole article but Google also reads your emails to build an advertising profile if you use Gmail. I'm sure all the cell phone companies scan your texts and listen in on your phone conversations too then sell that info.

 

[Mike Nasty]

the data was collected by the grinder app on his phone or the ad tracking firm they used in the app.

catholic journalists investigated him.

Couldn't they have just found his profile on Grindr. They could have just stole phone and looked through his apps.

A journalist hacking app is a much bigger story than a gay Priest. Please post how they obtained the information.

 

[daemonova]

I don't need to take no test to know that Americans can't mind they business

 

[Sleepy Floyd]

@Beta Male Strategies

https://archive.is/nedxv

This is not true, it's just a bunch of random nonsense used to make people paranoid. They're taking advantage of people's ignorance and are just grifters pushing their own apps on you. "Your browser is bad, use these browsers instead." Notice how they're advertising stuff in their own tweets. Pay attention. Fingerprinting is not real.

I literally have a Computer Science degree.

What exactly are people trying to hide from, anyway?

 

[bnew]

This is not true, it's just a bunch of random nonsense used to make people paranoid. They're taking advantage of people's ignorance and are just grifters pushing their own apps on you. "Your browser is bad, use these browsers instead." Notice how they're advertising stuff in their own tweets. Pay attention. Fingerprinting is not real.

I literally have a Computer Science degree.

What exactly are people trying to hide from, anyway?

nobody is making money off of tor browser.

some browsers do collect info from users out of the box and some don't.

users don't want to be surveilled and thats not a bad thing especially since the consequences of having your data harvested can manifest in a myriads of ways.

 

[bnew]

Couldn't they have just found his profile on Grindr. They could have just stole phone and looked through his apps.

A journalist hacking app is a much bigger story than a gay Priest. Please post how they obtained the information.

it's right in the article.

The outlet said that after obtaining “commercially available records of app signal data,” it found that a “mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.”

According to The Pillar, the data didn’t identify names of app users. Instead, it correlated a “unique numerical identifier to each mobile device using particular apps.”

Signal data, after it is collected by apps, with users who had consented to data collection, is aggregated and then sold by data vendors.

edit:
i found addional info from another article.

A Catholic Priest's Alleged Grindr Outing and Data Privacy

A newsletter reported a powerful Catholic priest regularly used Grindr. Their source? “Commercially available app signal data”

time.com

snippet:

Someone could feasibly approach one of these third party vendors, King says, and pay for a package of location data, which might include when a user logged in and out, their approximate locations, and their phone’s static ID number (a unique string of numbers assigned to each mobile device). These packages can feature users of specific apps, like dating apps, explains Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.

The issue, King explains, is that if you wanted to find the static ID number of a particular individual’s phone, and knew identifying factors like where they lived, worked, and traveled, you could parse through all of the location data to figure out which static ID number belongs to that person.

It appears The Pillar did just this. In its report, The Pillar said it “correlated a unique mobile device to Burrill when it was used consistently from 2018 until at least 2020 from the USCCB staff residence and headquarters, from meetings at which Burrill was in attendance, and was also used on numerous occasions at Burrill’s family lake house, near the residences of Burrill’s family members, and at a Wisconsin apartment in Burrill’s hometown, at which Burrill himself has been listed as a resident.”

This tactic isn’t unprecedented, King says. There’ve been examples of debt collectors using similar methods to track people’s movements in the repossession industry.

“In essence, the privacy protection that you get from anonymizing things before you aggregate them and package them to be sold, is really a facade,” says Zhao. “Oftentimes companies think that they’re doing the right thing by anonymizing data, but what they’re doing actually falls short of what is really necessary to completely protect users from privacy attacks.”

“People in academia and in some industry circles have understood this for a long time,” he continues. “But I think there’s a general lack of understanding of this for the public, and that perhaps is why this particular story is so shocking to many people.”

“Experts have warned for years that data collected by advertising companies from Americans’ phones could be used to track them and reveal the most personal details of their lives. Unfortunately, they were right,” said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden in a statement on The Pillar report shared with TIME. “Data brokers and advertising companies have lied to the public, assuring them that the information they collected was anonymous. As this awful episode demonstrates, those claims were bogus – individuals can be tracked and identified.”

 

[Vandelay]

@bnew

Good shyt with the receipts.

In addition, I worry about this data collection because:

• You never know when the government will move the goalposts and criminalize something, and then they have all the historical data in the world to profile people who would break that new law...
• The more worrisome initiative and directly correlated action to me is, all this data will be sold to private companies like insurance companies, background check companies it'll be used to deny everything from insurance claims to employment based off of a psychological profile your internet history has devised.
• Thirdly, all this shyt is algorithm based and subject to whoever the programmer or the program manager is, and seemingly innocuous things might be treated as malevolent based on that person's personal biases.

That social credit system I fear is coming to the US, and internet history will be one of the biggest ways they decide your score.

 

[Yapdatfool]

nobody is making money off of tor browser?

some browsers do collect info from users out of the box and some don't.

users don't want to be surveilled and thats not a bad thing especially since the consequences of having your data harvested can manifest in myriads of ways.

He got a CS degree tho

his words >>> proof and data

 

[Yapdatfool]

This is not true, it's just a bunch of random nonsense used to make people paranoid. They're taking advantage of people's ignorance and are just grifters pushing their own apps on you. "Your browser is bad, use these browsers instead." Notice how they're advertising stuff in their own tweets. Pay attention. Fingerprinting is not real.

I literally have a Computer Science degree.

What exactly are people trying to hide from, anyway?

Knew it.

Good old 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about' trope

 

[bnew]

@bnew

Good shyt with the receipts.

In addition, I worry about this data collection because:

• You never know when the government will move the goalposts and criminalize something, and then they have all the historical data in the world to profile people who would break that new law...
• The more worrisome initiative and directly correlated action to me is, all this data will be sold to private companies like insurance companies, background check companies it'll be used to deny everything from insurance claims to employment based off of a psychological profile your internet history has devised.
• Thirdly, all this shyt is algorithm based and subject to whoever the programmer or the program manager is, and seemingly innocuous things might be treated as malevolent based on that person's personal biases.

That social credit system I fear is coming to the US, and internet history will be one of the biggest ways they decide your score.

social credit score = credit score.

you can already be denied certain jobs, deemed unqualified for housing and denied loans.

 

[chineebai]

There is no online privacy. Just assume that everything you do is traceable, trackable, and your data is being sold to advertisers, companies, and who knows who else. As a matter of a fact, google which is pretty good with consent management as you can log into your account and request data deletion and so forth, only something like 20 people actually asked for their data to be deleted in the last year. That’s how much people not only not understand how their data is being used and sold but also don’t give a fukk at all.

Fingerprinting has been around for a long time and it’s unique enough where cookies or any other identifiers aren’t even required to uniquely identify you. The combination of browser, location, font, languages etc will make you unique.

 

[IIVI]

There is no online privacy. Just assume that everything you do is traceable, trackable, and your data is being sold to advertisers, companies, and who knows who else. As a matter of a fact, google which is pretty good with consent management as you can log into your account and request data deletion and so forth, only something like 20 people actually asked for their data to be deleted in the last year. That’s how much people not only not understand how their data is being used and sold but also don’t give a fukk at all.

Fingerprinting has been around for a long time and it’s unique enough where cookies or any other identifiers aren’t even required to uniquely identify you. The combination of browser, location, font, languages etc will make you unique.

Yup. If anybody is familiar with SQL, your activity and patterns are basically a composite key.

 

[Vandelay]

social credit score = credit score.

you can already be denied certain jobs, deemed unqualified for housing and denied loans.

In some ways, but that's all financial and has nothing to do with internet activity. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Clout.com. They essentially were trying to usher in what China has as far as their social credit system. I think it it's a step farther and far more insidious.

 

[bnew]

There is no online privacy. Just assume that everything you do is traceable, trackable, and your data is being sold to advertisers, companies, and who knows who else. As a matter of a fact, google which is pretty good with consent management as you can log into your account and request data deletion and so forth, only something like 20 people actually asked for their data to be deleted in the last year. That’s how much people not only not understand how their data is being used and sold but also don’t give a fukk at all.

Fingerprinting has been around for a long time and it’s unique enough where cookies or any other identifiers aren’t even required to uniquely identify you. The combination of browser, location, font, languages etc will make you unique.

all of this information can be randomized or faked.

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