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How to demonstrate to people the importance of privacy by showing the data collected about them? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by zirzedolta@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I wish to convince my friends and family to avoid using privacy-invading ad-based services and apps. Seeing people discuss how much data these companies collect off of us, I want to know if there is a way you could get a sample of that data by yourself and show it to them for them to realize the gravity of the situation themselves.

The closest thing is Google's ad personalization panel in the Google Account Dashboard. It literally lists out the information of the account holder by the things they've browsed, including their gender, age, occupation, interests etc. I could've used it to show to my family but I turned off ad personalization for all their accounts a few years back so they aren't even aware of it.

The next closest thing to this could be browser fingerprinting tests but they wouldn't be able to understand the tech jargon from the results anyway. Also I am not planning to go to the 'deep web' for this. Is there any other way I could get this done, like a website/app specifically designated for this purpose, for opening some sort of userlog in the accounts page?

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[-] hollyberries@lemmy.blahaj.zone 37 points 1 year ago

I personally like to show how easy it can be to cyberstalk someone.

I pulled up a friend's LinkedIn and pasted their bio text into Google line-by-line until I got a trail to a very old LiveJournal which had links to a NSFW Tumblr (before the purge). What led me there was a phrase that they used frequently in conversation and on the bio. It was their "bone apple tea" moment that made it VERY easy to pin down. I also followed the username trail to some fanart on DeviantArt, and a snapshot of an old website on archive.org.

I present that, then tell them if I can build a profile like this with less than an hour's work, imagine what data processors can do with the amount of data harvested from voluntarily accepting an "invasion" policy, especially if they (the data processors) are able to automatically match speech patterns to users!

this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023

141 points (95.5% liked)

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