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Very well said. Everything you said I agree about 100%.

We need to get better at convincing non-nerds.

I'm doing my best. It's hard tho. They just... don't care. They don't understand why it is important. Important for their future, and for all of our future. They don't seem to grasp why it matters so much, and what price we have to pay when we get it wrong.

I try to find concrete examples for them. But when people are invested already in some big tech ecosytem, it's easy to discount the examples. "That wouldn't apply to me".

I'm trying so hard, but it is an up hill fight :(.

we are all moths and the internet is the flame

the pinephone does that, its not built into the lock screen button but, it has a switch for most the privacy central features.

Fairphone 6 with e/OS can use its physical switch to disable camera & microphone. Its only SW disabling but it forces app that want to use it request it. There's also privacy setting that gives apps fake geo data.

Its not perfect but any improvement is good.

Would need to disable the cell radios, wifi and bluetooth too since those are also used to track device location.

At some pint the extra data being sent to the trackers might start to consume more battery power and heat from CPU usage.

Pokemon GO did something similar to this and those were the side effects

So like what, just Faraday cage bags?

However much is earned by time saved by that app.

I stopped using openstreetmap because it wasn't reliable enough for me. I found myself going the wrong direction, or not finding what I wanted to find and having to swap back anyway.

I liked the goal but, it just wasn't a valid tool for me.

I'm not selling my life, every 3 months I'm very literally buying another year and eight weeks of life, more or less. The smartphone makes it a hell of a lot easier.

TrackMeNot is dead

visually blocks ads but under the hood clicks on them

I get where they're coming from on the idea. But the problem I have... it would still run all the fingerprnting scripts and other shit. Sure it makes some bad data added to the good... but still plugs me into huge adware ecosystems. It leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, if any of their shit hits my comp.

I really mostly want to not be part of any of that shit. 🤮 Just leave me alone, surveilance companies, thank you.

+1 for GrapheneOS. I wasn't particularly privacy conscious when I installed it; I was just super bothered by the Google/Apple duopoly in mobile OSes and wanted literally anything else. Came across GrapheneOS and a few others, but Graphene looked the easiest to install (and it was!) so I went with that. Barely a year later, Google's out here trying to lock Android down and harvest literally every piece of personal data they can find, and I feel like I dodged a bullet.

Would take a whistleblower to expose these things, and usually its done many years after.

Also its not that there's some person currently listening. Its that they're storing and probably transcribing all communications for all time, so that at any moment in the future, they can target a person and look up that history.

Also we know google and apple have been forwarding all these to the US goverment also, since at least ~2011, via the prism program, and thanks to Snowden and Manning's leaks.

There's hard evidence everything transmitted is logged and that any phone capable of connecting to the cell network can be listened in on at any time. I would be very surprised to learn monitoring/logging like that was not the default at this point given the infrastructure we've publicly built for that purpose and just how easy to implement it's become. You think an on device assistant can help schedule and summarize your day but the NSA is going to opt out of those capabilities on principle and let that big ol Utah data center sit idle?

To add to what others are saying, there's been hard evidence of apps doing this, notably Meta apps.

Snowden showed us ages ago that all phone conversations are recorded. This is fact.

Do phones record what we say outside of phone calls? If you have voice control enabled, yes.

Do phones listen even if that isn't enabled? Probably sometimes, but I don't know that for sure.

No, it is trivial to verify it by checking your data usage. We have these AI devices (one of them is called friend) that actually do listen to you the whole time and even they do a terrible job of transcription. That's when people wear them like pendants.

Now imagine using a phone instead that's sometimes in the pockets, in the bag or just on the table. Speech recognition errors would be terrible. Even worse when the speech isn't english. Use recommendation engines on this crap data and it'll be an advertising disaster!

Thanks for pointing this out, I just used an LLM detector and it said it was likely 100% AI generated.

We need radical technical solutions, not incremental privacy policies that change nothing.

This overused: "It's not x, but y" giveaway is one of the most annoying AI ticks for me. I give them credit for actually using a colon instead of the em dash. Buy yeah, that's just about the only step they took to obfuscate their AI text

He needs to enable lockdown mode, then go into the privacy settings and turn off "allow apps to request to track", disable the system services in location settings which aren't needed, turn off personalised ads under Apple advertising, then he well be good.

friend is stuck on his iPhone

my honest opinion is that it's a lost cause. people superficial enough to be on an iphone in the first place probably aren't gonna think through the deeper ramifications of privacy and information security practices at all.

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/IPhone https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Apple

Not familiar with the furi phone but hardware switches generally are very helpful to prevent tracking.

Google gets nothing from you if you purchase second hand.

lineageOS on 1 of the hundreds of nonBoogle phones?

Lyft/uber, airlines, hotels? Its nearly impossible to use any of those without a smartphone. Or its a huge hinderance.

I'm convinced most of the people on this instance don't leave their basements !

How do you get around 2FA? I was able to stay off of phones for so long, but the standard 2FA implementation has made it impossible.

It depends on what kind of devices you're using.

It's my understanding that SIM cards in phones are just to tie an account and identity to your phone, for purposes of enforcing people to be paying customers for the phone/data services, and tracking your usage based on what level service you're paying for and what you should receive (5GB of data monthly, unlimited texts, etc)

But if your phone doesn't have a SIM card in it, its still connecting to cell towers for purposes of emergency dialing, and the phone itself can continue to be tracked by cell carriers based on what physical cell towers its connecting to, as you travel around. The cell phone modem itself can control and connect to networks independently of what the OS running on the phone tell it to do, its a self contained black box.

If you have something like a desktop or laptop, both Intel and AMD have "management engines" embedded in the CPU's themselves that can take control of the device for purposes of shutting down, wiping, etc a company machine that has sensitive information or access on it, and has been reported stolen, not returned by an ex employee, etc. These management engines have direct access to the network stack and can phone home whenever a network connections is present, either from a WiFi network, physical Ethernet cable, or 4G/5G WWAN card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/...

If you have a device that is basically air gapped, no WiFi, no cellphone chip, no bluetooth, etc, than it's still possible to exfiltrate information off the device, but the software running on the device would have to be programming to be searching for methods to do that. Your average device, unless it's running malicious software, probably won't be doing that.

Can this be true if you use a device without any connection to the internet and no SIM card?

You've got the idea. There's a bunch to unpack here:

• If the device is truly offline, your privacy is okay.
• But there's lots of ugly ways vendors work around "being offline"
• Denying the device a SIM card means the device is not authorized to get online, but certain emergency services that require a network will work anyway. The SIM is to make sure we're paying to be online, and is otherwise not actually needed to connect.

I mean could a hardware connect to some kind of network to send private information?

If you're asking if it is possible to hide a secret antennae in an officially offline device, yes, absolutely.

I've heard privacy nerds theorize that these will become common in smart TVs, so the TV can phone the vendor with screenshots, even (especially) when playing pirated local media.

Because the basic thing is, it won't expose your data if doesn't leave your phone, right?

Exactly. And you've also caught the tricky bit - it's hard to be 100% sure a device isn't phoning home if the device is a closed proprietary (secret) design, running closed proprietary (secret) software.

Let’s assume it can read wireless network even with wifi turned off, it still needs to find a network and a password to connect to it.

rather than hacking wifi, it connect to mobile internet even without sim card. that is much simpler, the mobile internet is basically anywhere and it is free as part of some spying cartel with the mobile network operators.

any new car also spy on you and you don't need to provide sim card for that.

sorry for linking to youtube but it's related and from NaomiBrockwell ☞ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyirQOCUUK8

Not the CIA, the NSA does this all the time. The documents that Snowden leaked confirmed that the agency intercepts hardware being shipped to targets and swaps out the firmware to allow them to listen in on all network traffic going through that device. They also work closely with ISPs to install devices that mirror all network traffic going through that ISP to another device so they can log and analyze it.

I agree that systems have their flaws, but that doesnt mean theyre tampered or infected by government agencies, if this were true they wouldnt be forcing tech companies to create backdoors (UK government wanted a backdoor to Apple users ADP encrypted data)

What feels like spyware is that phones and apps collect so much data which then gets shared or sold to data-brokers or third parties, and then to government agencies

And encrypted apps do help, even if theyre in a flawed system

What we need is a more privacy conscious society, which then implements stronger privacy laws

You can turn off their tracking in Settings > Security and privacy > More privacy settings.

You can get a Google Pixel, install GrapheneOS on it, then keep it in aeroplane mode.

Nothing, you're the one guy who literally has nothing to hide. Just let it log when you sleep shit or fuck, every word you speak, and every place you go. Who cares, am I right?

If a specific guy was following you everywhere, that wouldn't bother you? Having a stalker wouldn't be a big deal?

I see no reason why it's less disturbing if it's done by my own phone.