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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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
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Some might say that no one needs LinkedIn at all but there are some jobs that people struggle to attain so they get on LinkedIn. I have noticed though that I've mostly seen users who are in things like tech, marketing, business, and blue collar jobs on that platform. I didn't see many people on there who work in medical professions but it could have just been a tailored experience for me. Are there career fields where you wouldn't even think about making a LinkedIn?

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Hey Lemmy!

Exactly as the title says, where self-destructing means that no matter what email provider I, or my recipients use, the email will be gone after a set amount of time.

The methods I have come up with are:

  • using a PrivateBin or PasteBin link.
    • requires the recipient to click on a link that opens in another app/tab
    • easy to set up
  • using an HTML remote content stylesheet with CSS ::after to inject the body text of the email; then, if I control the server, I can delete the stylesheet and the email will be gone.
    • embedded in the email, but plain text only. I'm not even sure if it can do line breaks.
  • loading an SVG from a remote source

Does anyone have more methods?

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I have received emails about updates to privacy policies from at least 5 companies yesterday. What is going on? Has government done something? Is it a scheduled thing?

Edit- As most companies have started messing with data for AI training, I have proceeded to delete my accounts with them. I should have done this a long time back.

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Hey everyone.

I make Peersuite, an opensource free communication platform.

It's private by default, there's no sign-in or email collection.

It's peer-to-peer, there's no server, after discovery you are connected directly to your friends my AES-GCN encrypted WebRTC channels. It forms a mesh and identifies superpeers. Because there is no server, in order to save your data between sessions, you can download your workspace into a password encrypted file. Happy to answer any questions.

FEATURES:

  • chat with images, PMs, channels, and file send
  • group audio/video calling
  • screensharing
  • kanban board
  • whiteboard for diagrams/flowchartswith PNG export
  • collaborative document editing with formatted PDF export

The best way for self hosting is docker, its on dockerhub as openconstruct/peersuite. You can also download desktop versions from the github or use on the web at https://peersuite.space/

github - https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65474221

https://archive.is/Htwxm

The EU is launching a new age verification app in July, establishing a tool that will potentially allow for tighter enforcement of rules requiring online platforms to protect minors online.

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Basically, my entire system is FOSS but I'm tempted to install the Spotify .deb package. Would that give Spotify access to info about my system?

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before buying expensive routers check OpenWRT's table of hardware and buy one that is supported by the current OpenWRT release and has decent specs. There is a detailed installation guide for each supported device in the wiki too so there are no excuses it's dead simple. Free yourself from stupid hardware manufacturers and their planed obsolescence products.

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publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/410366

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Hello I'm looking for private and secure calendar and note apps for android. Would love some recommendations!

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So, I found some Firefox forks. Those would be: floorp, zen browser, tor browser and librewolf. Could anyone help me decide which one to use?

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I want to move away from Google and was ready to make the shift to proton exactly the day before all that drama started about the CEO being a trump bootlicker and stuff…

Then I looked into some alternatives and haven’t moved yet. So I really can’t decide which one from tuta, Mailbox, kSuite or maybe still proton provides the best service. And recommendations or experiences y’all want to share to help me decide? :)

Either a good UI (web/iOS) or very good compatibility with third party apps, good spamfilters and maybe an integrated calendar would be important features.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30792652

Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025. Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer. But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?

If you bought your computer after 2010, there's most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.

Installing an operating system may sound difficult, but you don't have to do it alone. With any luck, there are people in your area ready to help!

5 Reasons to upgrade your old computer to Linux:

  1. No New Hardware, No Licensing Costs
  2. Enhanced Privacy
  3. Good For The Planet
  4. Community & Professional Support
  5. Better User Control
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I currently use iCloud+ for storing photos and files. I also use Hide my email that comes bundled in the plan. I use Cryptomator in files app for encrypting some files.

I want to switch to a more privacy focused provider for my files. The photos can stay in iCloud because I don't think it matters as Apple already has access to the camera.

So, I want to switch to a cheaper iCloud plan and start a new cloud subscription. I would also like an alternative to Hide my mail but I don't want to spend too much for it. What would you recommend?

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30846701

The question is simple. I wanted to get a general consensus on if people actually audit the code that they use from FOSS or open source software or apps.

Do you blindly trust the FOSS community? I am trying to get a rough idea here. Sometimes audit the code? Only on mission critical apps? Not at all?

Let's hear it!

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cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/193175

Thousands of home and small office routers manufactured by Asus are being infected with a stealthy backdoor that can survive reboots and firmware updates in an attack by a nation-state or another well-resourced threat actor, researchers said.

The unknown attackers gain access to the devices by exploiting now-patched vulnerabilities, some of which have never been tracked through the internationally recognized CVE system. After gaining unauthorized administrative control of the devices, the threat actor installs a public encryption key for access to the device through SSH. From then on, anyone with the private key can automatically log in to the device with administrative system rights.

Durable control

“‍The attacker’s access survives both reboots and firmware updates, giving them durable control over affected devices,” researchers from security firm GreyNoise reported Wednesday. “The attacker maintains long-term access without dropping malware or leaving obvious traces by chaining authentication bypasses, exploiting a known vulnerability, and abusing legitimate configuration features.”

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From Ars Technica - All content via this RSS feed

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/410276

Mullvad Leta

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geteilt von: https://europe.pub/post/958415

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65253750

Full text to avoid paywall


If you’ve left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you’ve ever left on any video you’ve ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be.

The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address.

The tool presents a significant privacy risk, and shows that people may not be as anonymous in the YouTube comments sections as they may think. The site’s report is ready in seconds and provides enough data for an AI to flag identifying details about a commenter. The tool could be a boon for harassers attempting to build profiles of their targets, and 404 Media has seen evidence that harassment-focused communities have used the developers' other tools.

YouTube-Tools also appears to be a violation of YouTube’s privacy policies, and raises questions about what YouTube is doing to stop the scraping and repurposing of peoples’ data like this. “Public search engines may scrape data only in accordance with YouTube's robots.txt file or with YouTube's prior written permission,” it says.

To test the service, I plugged a random YouTube commenter into the system and within seconds the site found dozens of comments on multiple videos and produced an AI-generated paragraph about them. “Possible Location/Region: The presence of Italian language comments and references to ‘X Factor Italia’ and Italian cooking suggest an association with Italy,” the report said.

“Political/Social/Cultural Views: Some comments reflect a level of criticism towards interviewers and societal norms (e.g., comments on masculinity), indicating an engagement with contemporary cultural discussions. However, there is no overtly political stance expressed,” it continued.

According to the site, it has access to “1.4 billion users & 20 billion comments.” The dataset is not complete; YouTube has more than 2.5 billion users.

Youtube-Tools launched about a week ago and is an outgrowth of LoL-Archiver. There’s also nHentai-Archiver, which can give you a comprehensive comment history of a user on the popular adult manga sharing site. Kick-Tools can produce the chat history or ban history of a user on the streaming site Kick. Twitch-Tools can give you the chat history for an account sorted by timestamp and sortable by all the channels they interact on.

Twitch-Tools only monitors a channel that users have specifically requested it to monitor. As of this writing, the website says it is monitoring 39,057 Twitch channels. For example, I was able to pull a username from a popular Twitch stream, plug it into the tool and then track every time that user had made a comment on another one of the tracked channels.

Reached for comment, the developer of these tools didn’t dance around the reason they built them. “The end goal of people tracking Twitch channels would certainly be to gather information on specific users,” they said.

Twitch did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment, and YouTube acknowledged a request but did not provide a statement in time for publication. But I spoke with someone in control of a contact email address listed on the LoL-Archiver’s “about” page. They said they’re based in Europe, have a background in OSINT, and often partnered with law enforcement in their country. “I decided I launched [sic] these tools in the first place as a project to build the tool that could be use by LEAs [law enforcement agencies] and PIs [private investigators.]”

According to the developer, they’ve provided the tool to cops in Portugal, Belgium, and “other countries in Europe.” They told 404 Media that the website is meant for private investigators, journalists, and cops.

“To prevent abuses [sic] we only allow the website to people with legitimate purposes,” they said. I asked how the site vets users. “We ask the users to accept our Terms of Use and do targeted KYC [know your customer] requests to people we estimate have an illegitimate reason to use our website. If we find that a user doesn't have a legitimate purpose to use our service according to our terms of use, we reserve the right to terminate that user's access to our website.”

The site’s Terms of Service makes this explicit in the first paragraph. “The Service is distributed only to licensed professional investigators and law enforcement. Non-professional individuals are not allowed to subscribe to the Service,” it says.

But YouTube-Tools is a “grant access first ask for proof later” kind of website. 404 Media was able to set up an account and begin browsing information in minutes after paying for a month of the service with a credit card. It didn’t ask me any questions about how I planned to use the service nor did it need any other information about me.

I asked the developer for an example of a time they had removed someone from the platform. They said they’d removed a client a few weeks ago after they realized the email the client used to obtain their license was “temporary.” The developer said they reached out to the client to ask why they wanted the tool and didn’t get a response. “They ignored us, and we therefore reported the issue to Stripe and terminated their access.”

The AI summaries are new and only exist for the YouTube tools. “The AI summary is to provide points of interest, so that an investigator doesn't have to go through the (potentially) thousand [sic] of comments,” the developer said. “This summary is not to replace the research and investigation process of the investigator, but to give clues on where they can start looking at first.”

I asked them about the possible privacy violations the tool presents and the developer acknowledged that they’re real. “But we try to limit them during [our] vetting process,” they said. Again, I was able to sign up for the site with a credit card and an email. I was not vetted.

“I also believe that the tool can be a very valuable source of information for professionals such as police agencies, private investigators, journalists,” the developer said. “That is why we currently offer free access to police agencies requesting it, and have offered [it] to several agencies already. If someone wants to remove any information that the tools has archived they can make a formal request to us, to which we will comply, as we've always done.”

Scraping public data is a big problem. Last month, researchers in Brazil published a dataset built from 2 billion Discord messages they’d pulled from publicly available servers. Last year, Discord shut down a service called Spy Pet that’s similar to YouTube-Tools.

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In the absence of privacy-focused ROMs for my tablet, I settled on flashing an AOSP GSI without Google apps. TrebleDroid to be specific, which is essentially vanilla AOSP, but with some additional drivers to maximize compatibility. Compared to privacy-focused ROMs like GrapheneOS, what exactly does AOSP send back to Google?

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submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by enemenemu@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 
 

LLMs can be very useful for my personal life. How can I deal with this in the future?

  • the quality highly depends on model, size, internet access, etc.
  • They get seemingly more accurate over time

Personally, I can find information within a second. I can ask it which philosopher wrote about "free will" and it'll provide me a good chunk of information that sounds very plausible. Gemini is very impressive from a layman's perspective. llama is worse in this regard but still ok. It may only be good on the surface but I can ask it for the book as well and it'll provide me information. It will get better over time.

Google already knows a lot of stuff and now it will collect even more information about people. I caught myself asking it a philosophical thought of myself.

I was asking the computer. I was not judging an output of it. I was asking to judge my output.

I was asking the computer a philosophical question that has no clear answer. I evaluated the computer's output and was happy it told me that I was right.

I also do maths with a computer. I trust it, it is usually deterministic.

I've also asked it about medical advice, which sounded good.

Today, I wanted to ask it something else, and I was observing that I ask a computer a question. I'd need many minutes, many difficult minutes to think about it. I'd need to research more information, talk to people. But I chose to prompt it.

I realised that I would need to think about this and prompt a community to think about it to exchange information by (hopefully) humans.

Using llms, especially online llms, e.g. google, yield higher quality output than local llms in my experience, hence I'd like to use online llms. But I do not want to give every question I have to google. I do not want all of us giving everything to google. Am I overreacting? Fear of new technology?

It can save me a lot of time. "I could achieve more" by using it. could I really? wouldn't the ai achieve it for me? do i want the achievement anyway? Do I want to get a headstart with ai? I write code for a living. is there a huge difference in writing deterministic code and the probabilistic llm output?

Fear of missing out is kicking in.

I do not want to get left behind but I also do not want to give up my free will.

I do not want to lose my privacy (to google).

I do not want to lose my philosophical maturity, or at least what's left of it.

Fear of missing out is kicking in.

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I have an older Sony TV which has (what I can only guess to be) Google's Android TV app installed on it. I'm sick of getting new recommendations from Amazon and Disney+ and all those services. Is there a way to strip it down bare bones and get everything I need from another app repo - kinda like with Graphene vs Android?

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Has anyone tried Saily? (https://saily.com/) It claims to be an app to easily setup international eSIMs.

I am curious about its setup process and the information they collect. Can you sign up without the app? How about the app on a separate user profile (android)? Do they require ID to signup (or similar)?

It is a part of NordVPN, which gives some confidence that it is not a scam, however Nord doesn't have a good reputation for privacy, but neither do SIM's in general.

Is it worth bothering with anything like Saily for travel, or does the tried and true pre-paid SIM's?

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I realized I was at risk by having smart devices on my normal network, so decided to move them to my guest network.

I don't like my smart tv, but it's all I have to work with for now. I want to keep it on my guest network, but still stream using jellyfin. I see on my netgear router there is an option to "let devices on guest network see other devices and access local network" which would probably allow it to see my jellyfin server, but then doesn't that defeat the point of a guest network? Maybe I need to learn what a reverse proxy is...jellyfin server is currently on windows (not my pc) but could move it to my linux pc if needed.

And yes, I plan to get a media center linux box in the future so I don't have to deal with the garbage smart tv os!

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30717996

Amazon and PayPal being out of the running of course. FWIW, I think Mullvad uses Stripe . . . 🤔

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