I'm sorry, this topic is kinda USA centric. At least the details. Maybe not the core idea though. For the non-USA readers, KYC = know your customer.

I am soon to move to a new home for a job xfer. I wish I could do it privately. I had a stalker who broke into my home. I am still apprehensive and tense even though it was years ago. It feels impossible to move privately 😠

I know about Michael Bazzel's Privacy books, and I have read over them. They are good and I follow his advize for some things. I still feel overwhelmed and don't think I can manage it by myself. One problem is, the last edition of the Privacy book was years ago. KYC is in many more places now. Like utilities and services you need when moving to a new home. I run into more things that demand a copy of a gov photo ID or they will not give you a service. This data makes toward the credit bureaus, they always learn. It used to be you could pay for utilities from an LLC, but that often triggers a KYC check now and sometimes they want to copy your ID.

I already try to fight my addy appearing in people search sites but that is hard. There are so many of them. Some outside the USA and do not follow takedown requests.

There must be ways to do this! Maybe they are only available to the rich and famous? I am not rich or famous, lol. But I am middle class and would spend a moderate sum for a service to handle this. I do not feel I can do it on my own. Maybe I could years ago before so many attacks on privacy, but no more.

Has anyone successfully moved AND kept a new home addy private from data brokers? Did you use a service or company to help?

Made a small end-to-end encrypted chat tool. No accounts, no phone numbers, you just self-host an MQTT broker and share a key with someone. The part I think is actually useful: there's a clipboard mode where you type plaintext, it encrypts and copies to clipboard, then you paste the ciphertext into WeChat or email or whatever. The other person does the reverse. You don't even need to be using the same app. ChaCha20-Poly1305, Argon2id, Rust + Tauri, ~5MB exe. I know there are better tools for most threat models (Signal, Briar, SimpleX). This isn't trying to compete with them. It's for situations where you can't install a dedicated messenger or need to smuggle encrypted text through an existing channel. No forward secrecy, no traffic obfuscation, not audited, Windows only. All documented in the README. Unlicense. I won't maintain it. Fork it if it's useful to you.

i've just seen a comment in a post, in this very community, saying people trust signal because of missinformation (from what i could undertand).

if this is true, then i have a few questions:

-what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.

-how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?

-what this means for other apps in general?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44781501

GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an account. GrapheneOS and our services will remain available internationally. If GrapheneOS devices can't be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it.

Even State Department-funded Human Rights Watch admits that authorities combine legal and illegal methods to obtain convictions: https://text.hrw.org/report/2018/01/09/dark-side/secret-origins-evidence-us-criminal-cases

Combining dragnet surveillance with device hacking is intended in the design of both tools. Hence, State Department-funded Signal dupes you into handing over your identity as part of the population-centric mapping. In custody, your phone will be hacked when it is taken away if it's important.

https://xcancel.com/hannahcrileyy/status/2034273723667161480#m

Like, we all know they're listening , but can we provide proof?

My friend was complaining about all the new super surveillance that will be government required in cars after 2027, and I said to him dude you have a stock android, you use every AI slop feature, you use a smart TV on your unsecured network, and uses x every day. They have everything they could possibly need on him. Oh and he posts questionable things to fb daily under his real name.

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/20954019

Reddit.

Source: Intelligence Committee’s annual Worldwide Threats hearing, question by Senator Ron Wyden.

Clip by Headquarters News.

i want to make this post so we can discuss the actual law text of the new "ECA digital" (basically a law that requires plataforms to have more responsibility in securing a safe youth on the internet)

There are dishonest arguments o both sides "you should'nt trust people who opose this law" "this law was made from moral panic"

while yes, the legal document requires "mechanisms that enable age apropriate experiences" (Art. 10. Os fornecedores de produtos ou serviços de tecnologia da informação direcionados a crianças e a adolescentes ou de acesso provável por eles deverão adotar mecanismos para proporcionar experiências adequadas à idade, nos termos deste Capítulo, respeitadas a autonomia progressiva e a diversidade de contextos socioeconômicos brasileiros.)

it also has some safeguards, like:

privacy by default "Art. 7º Os fornecedores de produtos ou serviços de tecnologia da informação direcionados a crianças e a adolescentes ou de acesso provável por eles deverão, desde a concepção de seus produtos e serviços, garantir, por padrão, a configuração no modelo mais protetivo disponível em relação à privacidade e à proteção de dados pessoais, considerados a autonomia e o desenvolvimento progressivo do indivíduo e justificado o melhor interesse da criança e do adolescente." no mass surveilance:

"§ 1º A regulamentação não poderá, em nenhuma hipótese, autorizar ou resultar na implantação de mecanismos de vigilância massiva, genérica ou indiscriminada, vedadas práticas contra os direitos fundamentais à liberdade de expressão, à privacidade, à proteção integral e ao tratamento diferenciado dos dados pessoais de crianças e de adolescentes, nos termos da Constituição Federal e das Leis nºs 8.069, de 13 de julho de 1990 (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente), e 13.709, de 14 de agosto de 2018 (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais)."

actual legal document (so we can have a informed discussion): https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2023-2026/2025/Lei/L15211.htm

Hiya! I've been using for dnsforge.de as my private DNS on my android phone for a year or so, and I've noticed about once a day my phone tells me that the dns can't be reached, and about once a week I can't access something on my phone without turning off the private dns.

Is this normal? I am in the US and I know they're in Germany, but I wondered if this happens to everyone or if something is going on with my phone, and if there are other good options?

Thanks!

Source: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/03/msg00199.html

• See: https://github.com/AntiSurv/oss-anti-surveillance/blob/main/TRACKER.md#current-evidence-index for current packages, distributions… discussing implementing age verification.

• Disclaimer: I'm not the author.

The Indian government has introduced countless rules supposedly to make smartphone safer. In reality, the rules will make phones less safe, and enable further mass surveillance and authoritarianism.

So I am the web admin for a non-profit that deals with and discusses private medical information. My country has laws around keeping this information safe which ironically I take more seriously than a lot of the public health services I personally interact with but I digress.

With all the push for increased surveillance lately and my trying to keep pushing people towards safer alternatives, the idea I've had for setting up a private forum is starting to become more important (maybe that and my yearning for the internet of old where people on the internet were people and not a high chance of being a bot). Currently the orgs main discussion is on Facebook (yep, don't get me started on that - I did not decide that, it was many years ago and I've always hated that it excluded people who don't use FB).

We have shared hosting for the website but this severely limits options. All the software that I can install on shared hosting through cpanel has resulted in ugly, difficult to use options or gotchas like not being able to make the community private (i.e. people will want to talk about their own medical situations with other group members, not the whole world).

So my next steps are to investigate what hosting infrastructure is secure and what software will best allow for a private and secure community. I was considering Discourse but this might be overkill and I don't know if posts and DMs can be encrypted, etc. Interested in suggestions for other forum or community software that is better.

I could get AWS for non-profits but it's Amazon and I don't trust them as far as I can kick them so I don't know how safe it would be to have or if encryption would help mitigate the Amazon factor.

My knowledge of these sorts of things is pretty outdated (I'm mostly just a web des).

As the UK, Australia, and other countries appear to be introducing ID requirements and banning anonymous access, Russia reveals it has the ability to block VPN access.

The news first came in 2024, but it's been very quiet since.

I've been waiting this whole time to jettison WhatsApp from my phone.

Is it available only in some parts of the world? If so can I spoof it?

We know that adversarial interoperability works, so why have we not been able to make this work?

All else failing, are there any unofficial WhatsApp clients I can use to preserve my privacy?

Actually, there are two services with the same name, onionmail.org and onionmail.info. Anyway, what do you think about it/them?

Thanks in advance.

(Edit: free accounts on onionmail.org can only receive emails, while onionmail.info is pretty hard to use).

It's me. But what do I have to do to post? Looks like it needs a Community. I suppose I need to find one. Eventually create one.

Source: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2032600868005310638#m

Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the internet and created infinite spam.

The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.

Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".

The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).

1. They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons

2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults

3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.

It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.

It fucks over everyone else.

Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.

The teacher opens an app on their phone, holds it up, and takes several photos of the room. Within seconds, the images travel to a cloud server, where a facial-recognition algorithm detects each student’s face, extracts it, and compares it against a database of biometric profiles. The app LRCO Paraná returns a list of names. Students identified in the photos are marked present; those the system does not find are marked absent.

For some students, a false absence is a bureaucratic irritation. For others, it could threaten their family’s access to welfare. In Brazil, eligibility for the Bolsa Família program depends in part on school attendance, and in Paraná such records are now largely generated by an algorithm.