this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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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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“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said. “The enhanced social media vetting will ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country.”

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[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 15 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

If you just have some random handle that isn’t your name. How are they gonna trace that to you?

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

How are they gonna trace that to you?

The modern Internet is essentially about spying on you as much as possible and then selling the data to whoever wants to buy it. Linking identities with devices/browsers is worth a lot of money and so most every website/app has a way of linking you to the devices and software that you use.

Unless the user took some pretty extreme measures to create the account, they've likely logged in from a phone/ip/browser that has been linked to their real identity at some point in its lifetime. That link will be sold to data brokers and used to tie the random handle to you, the person. Then the State Department just buys that information.

Alternatively, you should be assuming that sovereign entities with the means are reading all public network data. There's a lot of information that you can learn from that as well. Like, over time, the posts from the 'random' account could be strongly correlated to the times that you were accessing the site even if all of the data was encrypted with HTTPS.

Alternatively, alternatively. There is a threat known as Store Now Decrypt Later (SNDL). The idea is basically: Quantum Computers are coming and they can break some cryptographic primitives. If someone saves all of the encrypted traffic that they would want to read, in a few years they will have the means to read that data. We won't know when this moment occurs, because it'll likely be a secret, but we do know that it will happen and so you should additionally assume that anything that isn't using post-quantum encryption, which transited a public network, will be read and used to link you to your identities.

This is, essentially, the core thing that the Privacy community is attempting to mitigate.

[–] Photuris@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

I’m not a privacy expert.

And I know that, sadly, they probably have a lot more data on me than I’d like. Even though I don’t have traditional social media anymore, and I use VPNs to access Lemmy, that’s just normie precaution stuff. Anyway I do have a Google, Apple, accounts and the like.

My question is this: what do you / y’all think about the prospect of “poisoning the well”?

Meaning: you set up multiple traditional social media accounts, generate fake profile photos for them, give them the same real name as you and part of the country as you live in, and have AI chatbots fill ‘em up with generated posts matching a particular “personality profile”?

Would that be an effective countermeasure against this sort of data collection? Increase the noise-to-signal ratio?

Just thinking out loud here.

[–] cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 9 hours ago

Officer: please wait on the side