Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Israeli companies have developed and are selling advanced cyber tools that can hack into the tech of your car and use it to collect intelligence on you.

These tools can also assist in a cross-referencing of data to identify an intelligence target among tens of thousands of cars on the road. This technology can track the vehicle's movements in real time and potentially eavesdrop on the people inside.

archive: https://archive.is/tDOFi

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I feel like everyone I know has been lookin for cryptpad alternatives (upon ditching google) as it's incredibly slow, clunky, and inconsistantly mobile-friendly. this ... seems good??

anyone tried it? what are yr experiences? other decent, private form builders you would recommend?

tysm!!

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cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59613920

Mullvad also pointed to other instances of alleged attempts to “escalate censorship and mass surveillance” in the UK, citing efforts to force Apple to install backdoors in its end-to-end encrypted cloud service, proposals that could introduce “client-side scanning and government spyware on all UK phones”, and government plans to fast-track legislation requiring identity verification for VPN use.

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Does anyone know more about these devices? Some are obviously cameras, but the others are likely some radio scanning, potentially BLE, but I don't know. Anyone know?

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I use X, Instagram, and Pinterest for thirst content. Sadly, the former two are unsafe (unsure about Pinterest but it is American and not FOSS so I'd assume the same).

I'd really like to shift off these platforms, but I'm having trouble finding anything with a reliable search and algo that isn't a dry well.

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Surveillance strategies in the UK and Israel often go global

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I am harassed by numbers starting with +870 (Satellite calls). How can I ban them?

I have an Android phone. I can't find an app on f-droid, ...

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I tried logging into Imgur recently, but they now block all UK traffic and redirect you to a GDPR deletion form, which I was happy to fill in.

Note that I was responding from the email registered to my account, and even though they could verify it, they still demanded:

  • A description of any private images (I cannot recall, it's a 10+ year old account I barely used)
  • My last login location (no idea either as it was probably years ago. Was I on VPN?)

I made a real effort to answer, giving my best guesses for both, but their responses were consistently passive-aggressive, as if I was the one being unreasonable! And all that friction just for them to delete my email address and a couple of images that I may or may not have uploaded to Imgur over the last 10 years.

After going back and forth, they left me no choice but to file an ICO complaint.

Has anyone else experienced this with Imgur?

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cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10786494

That's lovely honestly, I feel much safer now that we have reassurance about the purpose of age verification :)

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Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix, or are you using something else entirely?

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For some of us sadly proton and Linux still isn’t a viable option for daily gaming on PC. While that means you’re stuck on Windows it doesn’t mean your experience truly has to suck.

I went down the rabbit hole of Windows Debloating and to me the most viable option was Atlas OS. Not technically a new OS but rather an (overall) easy to use tool that will automatically remove and disable windows worst features. This is my honest opinion on it after using for 3 months !

Installation honestly was the worst part of the experience for me. I had additional issues due to technical problems with the motherboard. For most people it won’t be nearly as hard. The problem is many of the steps are decoupled from the Atlas provided software. In other words the process asks you to go to other websites to download other files. If you follow the steps perfectly you shouldn’t have issues. If you do and the errors are unrelated, things may get painful.

The key selling point of Atlas OS is increased performance for gaming. And to be honest this wasn’t a thing for me. My games ran as good and no better. CPU usages were exactly the same. What was better was the Windows experience. No more pop up ads. No more needing to delete 3rd party software I never installed. And best yet no Co-Pilot! It’s unclear to me if these are just disabled or entirely uninstalled. From what I can see most telemetry has been disabled. In short it’s the windows experience I’ve been expecting. Less hiccups and less crashing.

If you look you will find critics who say this takes away control to remove every thing you could want. But personally I can’t think of anything else I would want to remove. Is it still windows ? Well yeah. Is it entirely free of garbage, probably not but it’s sure a lot less noticeable.

For me and I imagine for many Atlas OS might be the “good enough” to keep dealing with Windows. And If you are curious I suggest taking a look. I do hope eventually we do get the full gaming Linux revolution. But for now. Atlas will do.

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Can’t access Lemmy.ml anymore even after changing servers. Using ProtonVPN everything loads fine suddenly.

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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by hellerphant@piefed.social to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 
 

Android users have a tonne of options, but is there anything an iOS user can do to make their phones more private. It was not my choice to get an iPhone but it’s what was provided to me so I’m rolling with it.

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I am trying to get better with my privacy, and I specifically want to try and avoid big US tech where possible. I know they there are many people saying you should use multiple browsers for better privacy and all that stuff, but I’m also being realistic with myself - I just want a solid browser experience that has decent privacy and i can live with that for the most part. Not opposed to maybe 2 browsers, but I’d like one daily driver, especially for work.

I do a lot of social media management and am using the Steam backend daily as I work for a game studio. I need to use YouTube and Bluesky and all those things, so it needs to handle media.

I’m running Vivaldi at the moment after jumping off Chrome. I don’t need to use Chromium. I was trialing Orion on my Mac but I use a Linux machine at home, a windows PC sometimes at work, having something across all would be nice and once again I know that is not 100% privacy, but it’s better than the average user.

Advice would be super appreciate.

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Many of us know how bad modern cars are for privacy. Yet many of our friends and neighbors do not realize how intrusive it really is. I linked a blog entry from Mozilla's investigation about car privacy. In that blog is a link to their make-by-make analysis. The amount of very intimate information a modern car collects is honestly appalling. It includes health data, real time mood information, weight gain or loss, and so on. And it does so even for passengers.

The web has many resources talking about this problem, but almost no resources on what to do about it. I know the simple thing is to say, "just drive an old car bro!" That's fine if you can, but not everyone can. Also it has drawbacks like more maintenance. Sometimes less safety if it's older than certain safety features. For the purpose of this thread, it is more interesting to focus on newer, surveillance enabled cars which are the majority of what people drive on the road today.

Some people have figured out how to bypass the surveillance package on some cars. One way is to uncouple the antenna it uses to phone home. Other times you can bypass the telematics module or remove a fuse that powers it. I feel like we really need a central model by model repository of information.

Past that, how do we prove it has worked, if we do it? Has anyone reading this tried to use an RF detector to see if their car is still trying to phone home, after they have bypassed telematics? What are your experiences? I want to buy one and use it to test my own car, but the info on the web seems sketch.

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cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59424100

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called for an end to widespread anonymity on the internet, saying users should post under their real names.

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Hi. I just got a new phone (Motorola) and spent a bunch of time manually removing access to location etc. I hate Google so much, "don't do evil" my ass. I'm just looking for my blindspots. Im not in tech so, what should be disabled to keep my phone private?

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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Zerush@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 
 

World's most secure P2P messenger. End-to-end encrypted, zero-server architecture, quantum-resistant roadmap. WebRTC direct connections, advanced ECDH + DTLS + SAS verification, full ASN.1 validation. FOSS

https://github.com/Secureremovedat/securebit-chat

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Lately I've been trying to degoogle/decorp my life in an effort to increase my privacy. So far I'm running GrapheneOS, using open-source software/apps (VPN, email, cloud storage etc), switched to Linux, switched browsers/search engines, and even switched from smart devices to analog ones. The only thing I have left that I can reasonably give up is a google home router. However, new routers are quite expensive for me. Is it worth buying a new one or does it even matter?

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