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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Especially on an android browser like Mull (especially) or DDG.

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my apologies for the long screenshot. i had purchased adguard's vpn service for five years since its primary adguard service is well know in the iapple ecosystem.

on android, though, their app appears to send data to a lot of third-parties. has it always been this compromised? am i a fool to go for their vpn services as well?

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windows10 keepassxc.exe, ‎11.‎03.‎2024 ‏‎18:40:26, 52509, 140.82.121.5, lb-140-82-121-5-fra.github.com, 443 (https), tcp, Outbound, [B] Internal\BlockConnection

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My main question is, should we avoid VPN companies that are apart of the the 14 eyes, etc.? TIA!

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13035348

Following its investigation, the EDPS has found that the European Commission (Commission) has infringed several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365. In its decision, the EDPS imposes corrective measures on the Commission.

The EDPS has found that the Commission has infringed several provisions of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, the EU’s data protection law for EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (EUIs), including those on transfers of personal data outside the EU/European Economic Area (EEA).

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Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.

So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.

LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car.

On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.

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Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone knew of a FOSS editing app to use on PDFs, just to add text and and mark things out, I tried GNU image editor but it just works on images exclusively. Any ideas are appreciated, thanks.

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For a time it was Fennic for addon support but now that Firefox mobile has addons are there better alternatives? Those of you on android, what's your go to?

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I feel like with the rise of AI something that anonymizes writing styles should exist. For example it could look for differences in American versus British spelling like color versus colour or contextual things like soccer versus football and make edits accordingly. ChatGPT could be fed a prompt that says "Rewrite the following paragraphs as if they were written by an Australian" but I don't know if it would have a good enough grasp on the objective or if it would start shoehorning in references to koalas and fairy floss.

I tried searching online to see if something like this existed and found a few articles from around the 2010s such as Software Helps Identify Anonymous Writers or Helps Them Stay That Way by the New York Times. It talks about stylometry and Anonymouth but it seems like Anonymouth hasn't been updated in years. All recent articles seem to be about plagiarism and AI.

For context what got me thinking about the topic was remembering JK Rowling being revealed to be the author of a mystery novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling. Smithsonian wrote an article about it called How Did Computers Uncover J.K. Rowling’s Pseudonym?. I thought it could make for a neat post here.

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by clark@midwest.social to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 
 

I’m sorry if this is the wrong community to ask, I couldn’t find answers elsewhere.

When you have multiple devices registered to your NextDNS account (i.e. 1 iPhone and 1 Samsung), do all devices get 300 000 queries each or do they altogether share 300 000?

Thanks for any answers!

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Hey I'm sure you all know how sketchy club cards are for collecting your data. But I do begrudge paying slightly higher prices just for valuing my privacy. I was wondering if there was any way to sign up to these things whilst limiting the data they have access to. Would it be enough to sign up with fake details and never use their apps? Or should I just give up on this all together? Thanks!

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Trying to translate video audio if that matters. Tried Deepl on my phone held up to the speaker but it doesn't register for some reason.

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Charger8232@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 
 

Evidently Tails 6.0 released over a week ago, and my version never prompted me for an upgrade ~~(maybe because it's a major upgrade, I don't know.)~~ In any case, I wanted to first of all spread the word about Tails, and second of all mention this: My one problem with Tails is that it had some outdated software (such as KeePass being a few versions behind), but with the introduction of Tails 6.0, that seems to be resolved.

Tails also has dark mode now. I love dark mode.

Edit: "Automatic upgrades are only available from Tails 6.0~rc1 to 6.0. All other users have to do a manual upgrade."

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Who of you uses one of the above services, what do you think of it?

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Cross-posted to: https://sh.itjust.works/post/15859195


From other conversations that I've read through, people usually say "Yes, because it's easy on Windows", or "Yes, because they simply don't trust the webcam". But neither of these arguments are enough for me. The former I feel is irrelevent when one is talking about Linux, and the latter is just doing something for the sake of doing it which is not exactly a rational argument.

Specifically for Linux (although, I suppose this partially also depends on the distro, and, of course, vulnerabilites in whatever software that you might be using), how vulnerable is the device to having its webcam exploited? If you trust the software that you have running on your computer, and you utilize firewalls (application layer, network layer, etc.), you should be resistant to such types of exploits, no? A parallel question would also be: How vulnerable is a Linux device if you don't take extra precautions like firewalls.

If this is the case, what makes Windows so much more vulnerable?

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by SnotBubble@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 
 

I work on a corporate laptop that has an infamous root CA certicate installed, which allows the company to intercept all my browser traffic and perform a MITM attack.

Ideally, I'd like to use the company laptop to read my own mail, access my NAS in my time off.

I fear that even if I configure containers on that laptop to run alpine + wireguard client + firefox, the traffic would still be decrypted. If so, could you explain how the wireguard handshake could be tampered with?

What about Tor in a container? Would that work or is that pointless as well?

Huge kudos if you also take the time to explain your answer.

EDIT: A lot of you suggested I use a personal device for checking mails. I will do that. Thanks for your answers!

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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Reverendender@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 
 

I helped my 77 year old mother purchase a new laptop, and I want to be sure to get all the bloatware off of it, and set her up with with some better privacy options. I am aMac guy at home so I haven't done this kind of thing for many years. (I use Windows at work, so I'm quite familiar and capable, but obviously I have to rely on IT knowing what they are doing (they don't)). I did make sure to get the pro version of Windows 11. I'm going to set her up with Proton mail I think. This is the computer that is coming:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-thinkbook-16-g6-abp-amd-in-16-touch-screen-notebook-amd-ryzen-5-with-16gb-memory-512gb-ssd-gray/6565272.p?skuId=6565272

(Forgive me if this is not the correct place to post)

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Is there something that can generate random Internet usage to make the real sites I go to a bit obfuscated?

I'm thinking something that runs on my server, and simply visits a random website. It probably shouldn't actually be random, and some sort of tweaking would be great. Like the ability to have it visit every news site there is. That way the ISP will have a harder time telling my political bias.

The threat model for this is below using a VPN for normal usage, although getting a dedicated VPN IP address is a project for one day.

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