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25·9 months agoI get you want privacy, but there’s a line where it just stops making sense, and your personal info isn’t that valuable. Anyway
Actually, you don’t need perfect privacy. You just need good enough privacy, and here’s why:
If you’re a low-value target - i.e. a random internet user, that’s you and me - always remember that your value is low: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook… expend a certain amount of resources to fish for enough of your data to earn them a return on their investment. We’re low-value targets, so they first and foremost go for the low hanging fruits: the people who don’t know, don’t care, wallow in social media without any restraint and make it particularly easy to gather data from.
All you have to do is make it hard enough and expensive enough for the corporate surveillance collective to lose money on you: create accounts full of fake data and don’t post personal information - or make up fake personal information in your posts - to poison their wells. Don’t post photos of you or your family. Use throwaway email addresses. Use a deGoogled phone. Don’t browse without an ad blocker set on reasonably high. Use a browser with anti-fingerprinting. Don’t fill out Costco membership cards. Pay with cash stuff that you don’t want anybody to know about. Etc etc.
In other words, adopt a reasonable-enough privacy hygiene so that you’re not part of the low hanging fruits. It doesn’t have to be drastic, just good enough to make you not worth the sonsabitches’ time and effort.
If you’re a high-value target however, a Snowden or an Assange, that’s a different proposition. But for the rest of us, private enough is good enough.
You’re correct: certain facial features always stay the same, such as interpupillary distance. But you know what? On my selfie, I’m blind in one eye: ain’t that a shame for the poor algorithm eh?
Besides, they’re not the police: they don’t have a database of facial features of everybody in the world. So even if they do have my exact facial features despite the makeup, what are they gonna match it against?
It would only be of use if they went to the Dominican fuzz with my selfie, who then would have to contact the police in my own country, to have a chance to cut through my disguise. Good luck with that…
And at the end of the day, the aim isn’t necessarily to be 100% impossible to identify: it’s just to make it as hard and least cost-effective as possible for the fucking data brokers who sell our lives for pennies on the marketplace.
Haha thanks 🙂 But no, I don’t lead a super-exciting life: I just happen to be able to provide something people want to buy and I rabidly defend my right to stay anonymous at much as possible. So I just put two and two together, is all.
I sell specialized content on one particular specialized platform. That platform requires a scan of your ID card, and a selfie of you holding your ID card to your face when you open a seller’s account.
For payouts, they partnered with one particular payment processor that also uses the same system (ID card scan + selfie with ID card) to open an account.
Well, I opened both accounts using a fake ID and heavy makeup - of course under a fake name and with a Tutanota email account. I bet they didn’t actually check the ID and they didn’t:
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In the case of the content platform, how would they?
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In the case of the payment processor, in theory they’re supposed to abide by KYC rules. But they’re headquartered in the Dominican Republic, so I bet they only paid lip service to KYC and it seems I was right: I’ve had both accounts for over a year and earning money from my content without any problems since.
So it’s just a matter of knowing who you can feed fake information to and what the consequences are if you get found out. In my case, the only risk is having my payment account shut down and losing whatever earnings I haven’t withdrawn yet.
Of course, don’t feed fake information to your real-life bank, your employer or the IRS or something… But for internet content, that’s your pretend life: unless your content creation activities are frowned upon by the real-life laws of your country, assess you risks feeding the platforms BS and have at it.
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Believe it or not, you can set up wifi or ethernet in your home without any access to the internet.
“I’m looking for a privacy respecting vacuum robot” must be one of the most dystopian sentences I’ve read in quite some time.
I mean there is no lack of dystopian stuff going around these days. But if you imagine someone saying that 30 years ago, that someone would have conceivably ended up in a lunatic asylum. In 2024 however, it’s a perfectly valid and apropos question.
What a sad, sad world we live in…
This is where you clearly see Apple is all about privacy posturing and not much about actual privacy.
If they really cared about their customers’ privacy, they would require notification servers registered with APN to push notifications encrypted with a key that only the recipient apps have the private key to. This would be true end-to-end encryption, and Apple would only relay encrypted notifications across, enabling them to deny all subpoenas and any kind of snooping requests from law enforcement on the simple basis that they plain can’t even decode the notifications in the first place.
The very fact that they do have access to the notifications in clear-text is undeniable evidence that they actively want and do collaborate with law enforcement.
Meaning Apple’s stance on privacy is utter BS - something anybody with a modicum of critical thinking suspected from the start, but now the evidence is crystal-clear.
And this is a surprise how?
The entire digital economy is based on spying. It’s called corporate surveillance and it’s been around for 25 years. Why would AI escape this business model? If anything, it turbocharges it.