Today I was contacted by someone at work. She graduated school with me and our 20 year reunion was coming up. Why did she contact me at work? It was the only way they were able to track me down. I was included in promotional material by name. She told me I "was the hardest to track down"and I had to smile.
This is just a small anecdote about privacy practices and their real life impact (and how your employer can undo all of it, I guess)
I’ve come to realize most of the privacy hawk arguments are based on imagined risks, and the average privacy enthusiast is an ideologically driven idealist. What is the end goal beyond pumping one’s ego?
Especially internet privacy hawks are the worst. It just doesn’t really matter at all. Unless you are all cash, off the grid, no phone or bank account etc, you will leave a huge trail. Instagram figuring out I like basketball is the least of my worries.
Most aren’t going to thwart governments, serious policing, private investigations or very determined individuals. But they will reduce their exposure to advertising and online profiling. We are bombarded with soon many businesses try to constantly sell things and manipulate the way we think and act for thier own profit. Privacy is a series of small acts that can reduce hostile businesses effectiveness.
As an anecdote I once tracked down a person who threatened me. The only things I had were their likeness (whilst wearing a mask!), the car and plates (which were only useful to positively identify the person was correct when I called the phone number and asked ‘do you own such and such car with such and such plates’) and the fact that the person worked for a law firm (not specific) using only osint.
“only”
Yep. My only real goal is to reduce the amount of advertising I’m exposed to on a daily basis, and to that end it’s working…for now.
No cable, no streaming services, no broadcast radio, automated downloads of media, ad blockers everywhere, DNS sinkhole, etc. Thankfully, it’s all low maintenance once in place.
while i dont 100% disagree, cambridge analytica is a great example of how profiling our personality to the T can be used against us. thats not including the good points made by other posters here.
LLMs will be able to do more damage in a bigger scale, it only feels imaginary because you can’t really see it with your eyes, but would you let me install a RAT on your devices?
I’m fine with pumping my ego, i didn’t got asked to participate.