VolunTerry @ VolunTerry @monero.town

Posts

0

Comments

59

Joined

2 yr. ago

Smart. Everyone reading this thread who cares about privacy and separation of work and personal life should follow your lead.

Unfortunately, words on paper frequently fail to prevent organizations, public of private, from doing things they are technically not allowed to do. See the security state apparatus of any of the nations around the world including the 5, 9 and 14 eyes, or any number of tech companies that claim and market privacy respective policies only for people to uncover later that what they pitch publicly diverges in spirit from what they do or what is in the actual terms of service.

Hopefully if people find their employer going outside the bounds of the contract they can catch it, catalog it and hold them to account. Accountability can often be tricky and costly though.

This, but it won't matter if you delete history. They know anyway if the want, and can enable logging it if they choose.

Same can be said for any browser, any app, any connection while on the employers network IF they wished to monitor it. Even if you were able to delete all local browsing history and used private browsing, your employer would still be able to know every site you visit if they wished.

If you've authenticated with your credentials on the device, IT is able to see IPs visited and DNS queries and has access to all sorts of network tools to track, shape and otherwise manage your activity.

It's best to assume that nothing you do on your employers network, even when logging into their corporate VPN from a personal device, is private.

I'm always shocked by privacy conscious people who do not have complete segregation of work and personal equipment and devices.

Could it be designed so users generate and share the vast majority of the content? I'm envisioning something that is mostly self-sustaining once coded if it were simplistic enough so that continued development or features were largely unnecessary short of ocassional bug fixes and maintaining hosting.

It wouldn't need much moderation as the scope of the service would be sufficiently narrow. Could it then be written to limit what type of content was even permitted to be submitted in the first place and where content filters catch anything off-topic?

Just spitballing ideas. Anyway, if you ever found time and had interest, I'd be happy to toss some funds at it in an effort to help cover any development, hosting or maintenance costs.

Some do, some don't in my experience. They will still build a profile on whoever uses the card though. Then they just need to tie that to a real identity later. Are you paying with a card with your name on it? Whether they would invest any time putting the profile together this way or not is another matter. But they could.

It's like the data anonymization claims from big tech. Many claim the data they collect is all anonymized, but lots of researchers and studies have shown how easy it is to deanonymize the data and build strong profiles on individual users from anonymized data.

This isn't a bad idea, but the original poster's setup is much better for privacy. It would be similar to a VPN with shared IPs, so would obfuscate the individual users by lumping in the shopping habits with tons of other users making any profile built on that cards use unable to be tied to a specific person.

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, even if you were to get a generic loyalty card with no info tied to it, or fake credentials, it will still be attributed to a single person/household where they build a solid marketing profile and may tie it to credit card or other revealing financial or tracking information that is unique to that user.

Yep, I agree. And even if you were to get a generic loyalty card with no info tied to it, or fake credentials as someone else in the thread suggested, it would still be attributed to a single person/household where they build a solid marketing profile and may tie it to credit card or other financial or tracking information.

This is a good idea. If it doesn't exist, someone with the skills should build out an app or service. I don't have the skills or the time, but would definitely donate if someone else took up the cause.

Lots of good responses in here already. Any VPN that is reliant on the use of others resources, federated or not, will require some level of trust.

You can "roll your own" and spin up a personal VPN that you host yourself that may remove some of the trust concerns, but if you aren't building it from scratch or don't audit any source code you use from others, whether foss or not, you are right back to the issue of trust.

Everything has a tradeoff, just like people have pointed out about Tor in this thread.

My advice is to try to balance your needs and concerns by doing research and ask around until you can narrow things down to specific products or services and then dig in anf ask pointed questions about them until you reach a level of comfort and trust that satisfies you.

The security state and acronymn agencies are active enemies of liberty and of those they get their funding from and ostensibly claim to serve.

I'll cast yet another vote in this thread for AntennaPod, installed from F-Droid. Switched a long time ago and haven't looked back.

Per app network permission to enable or disable access by using a toggle would be such a great addition.

I'll decide what is misinformation or propaganda for myself. If someone else is limiting what information you can and cannot have or determining what is objectively true for you before you even have exposure to other ideas, everything you "know" is unreliable at best.

This is probably the best answer even if you were hoping to solve it via PayPal. Something like Monero, cash in person (or by mail if needed) or money order or something like that are all going to be better than PayPal. Gift cards could also work depending on what and why you are sending funds. Some of those have no ID requirements under certain values and are often just digital codes rather than physical cards. PayPal is far from great in a number of ways, not the least of which is privacy or pseudonimity.

Most locales have money transmitter laws, so if you are using a third party service rather than something like handing cash over in person, you are typically expected to include identifying information and I'm sure any "workarounds" would be in violation of PayPal's terms of service.

And in most places I think you are also supposed to do this even for cash over varying threshold amounts, though likely not for the one-off $100 or less amounts you are interested in. This isn't legal advice and all those disclaimers, blah blah blah.

In addition to the Microsoft trackers, I referenced this as well in another reply in this topic:

https://reclaimthenet.org/duckduckgo-down-ranking-russian-disinformation

There are plenty of other sources that also reported on this.

The Microsoft trackers issue is bad and they eventually had to address it due to the backlash, but that's not the only issue.

They also began explicitly censoring search results and information. Regardless of any given persons stance on any particular issue, things like censoring or downranking particular results or labeling content mis, dis or mal information means an entity like DDG is acting as an arbiter of truth and limiting the information users have access to rather than acting as a tool for users to utilize in searching for info and presenting any and all viewpoints, allowing the user to make up their own mind.

https://reclaimthenet.org/duckduckgo-down-ranking-russian-disinformation

It's about time. I had been using alternate engines specifically for image search for this reason. Although I was grateful that Brave search made it very clear to the user that image searches were being returned from Google or Bing. If Brave hadn't chosen to make that explicit with a popup, I may have assumed otherwise.

And it's getting some coverage now:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2019048/braves-search-engine-is-now-totally-independent.html

I agree, we need more peaceful noncompliance. Simply getting a small but significant percentage of the population to opt out of or ignore unjust systems and unjust laws would be a great starting point to standing in the way of bad policy and infringements on liberty.

Your point is a strong one, that having the tools available is a great first step, and now greater adoption and use by the general public is required.

Keep encouraging friends family and acquaintances to take the first steps on a larger journey away from those compromised corporate products and hopefully the needle will continue to move more significantly.