Just listened to Naomi Brockwell talk about how AI is basically the perfect surveillance tool now.

Her take is very interesting: what if we could actually use AI against that?

Like instead of trying to stay hidden (which honestly feels impossible these days), what if AI could generate tons of fake, realistic data about us? Flood the system with so much artificial nonsense that our real profiles basically disappear in the noise.

Imagine thousands of AI versions of me browsing random sites, faking interests, triggering ads, making fake patterns. Wouldn’t that mess with the profiling systems?

How could this be achieved?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32215000

PewDiePie on Privacy: Don't call it privacy!

Unless you go all the way with privacy, it doesn't mean anything. Don't call it privacy!

Full video: I’m DONE with Google.

A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official's phone records and use Mexico City's surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency's informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday.

Hi there,

I have an Asus Zenfone 10 on Android 15. In this release of android a new feature named mobile security settings became available which are supposed to signal and protect against surveillance on the mobile network side, like at a protest.

When I try to enable these settings on my device they are off again when I reenter these settings. Do these settings have some kind of prerequisite? Are they working on your device?

Thanks!

Emails from Proton seem to go to Google's spam many times. this is the only thing keeping me in Gmail. How do you handle this?

We need 804 more signatures. https://www.change.org/p/proton-to-add-monero-payment-support?recruited_by_id=95fb2230-546c-11f0-89ad-6118a8d0681a

Is it a good enough solution for IMEI tracking to use an alternative device to provide a hotspot connection?

This approach appears to protect any new device that hasn't inserted a SIM card from being identified.

But I'm not sure how much information is carried to the second device by using hotspot.

Is this a good solution so far? Should I try to spoof IMEI?

Should I enable WIFI scanning / Bluetooth scanning / Network Location under setting->location->location services?

Which one would help me navigate inside a building or underground using open source maps?

I haven't tested yet, does google map requires any of those location services enabled to work? Should I just use google map in vanadium?

thanks a lot

Just a heads up for those who are using GrapheneOS. If you log into 2 (google or other) accounts on an installed app even on different profile, the service provider will still be able to link between your 2 accounts using MediaDRM. (Google will still know that both of the 2 accounts have been logged in on the same device)

More info:

• https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/18315-how-can-an-app-identify-that-it-was-reinstalled-on-the-same-device
• https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/9023-mediadrm-identifier

Note: I am not OOP, the OOP is u/lyf-ftw on r/privacy. I posted this here because I am also curious about URNetwork's privacy practices and I need a free VPN. I am really in a bad financial state right now, and I can't afford to pay subscriptions. And before anyone suggests to go with Proton's free VPN plan - the "privacy laws" in my country MANDATE all VPN providers to log their customers. Every VPN provider which have their app listed on Google Play Store and Apple App Store in our country MUST log their customers. When this bill passed in our country, some VPN providers made their apps unavailable to customers from our country on both the app stores. But Proton didn't, it's available for download on both the app stores till now. This sparked a lot of discussions online in forums related to our country (reddit and elsewhere). Many speculated that Proton accepted to log their customers in our country because they didn't want to lose their customer base in our country. Since then, whenever someone asks for VPN suggestions on forums related to our country the majority recommend not using Proton. The privacy conscious folks here mainly used VPN's listed on F-Droid. I used Mullvad VPN for a while but it had it's own issues- it randomly disconnected sometimes and expect from a few servers everything was slow. It was not worth paying a premium (over other VPN's) in my use case as I need 24/7 uninterrupted VPN and good speed. I can't pay for it now anyway. So here I am asking for free VPN suggestions.

Original post:

I came across URNetwork, a decentralized virtual private network (VPN) developed by BringYour, Inc. , whose team members hail from Palantir. The URNetwork Connect client, protocol, and API are published on GitHub. The team emphasizes an open-core philosophy to ensure privacy, security, and availability. They also claim to oppose censorship. The app is available on the official F-Droid repository, which is encouraging for users focused on open source and privacy. My main questions for the community are: Given the team's Palantir background, should we be more skeptical of their undisclosed data collection practices? Has an independent audit of their GitHub repository been performed, or has traffic been run through their network to verify their anonymity guarantees? Any insights, experiences, or pointers to deeper technical analyses would be greatly appreciated.

Food for thought.

https://youtu.be/dpE3feBwHCM

I got a new phone number last year. The last person who owned this number just left all her accounts tied to this number and one by one I've been reaching out to the places tied to it telling them they have the wrong number and to stop using this one. Simple enough.

But there is one company that refuses to stop using this number. Wynhdam hotels absolutely refuses to do anything about this. They keep sending me notifications and check in confirmations for her hotel visits. Using just the texts they send me, I know her full name, email address, home address, her reservations at the hotel, which hotel she's going to and what days. Using past conversations with the other hotels she's been to (called in to tell them to stop this months ago), I know she's been kicked out for making a scene in the lobby or something. Looking online, I see she has a criminal record, and a history of child custody losses, drug abuse, and is apparently an "experienced college girl" on an escort site.

In my most recent calls with wyndham, they told me that they can't change the number out. I will need to contact this charming person and have her do it. I am absolutely not getting involved in that mess in any capacity. I'm still telling her johns and dealers this is the wrong number.

Once I explained to the call center supervisor I was escalated to this has gone on long enough and I'm willing to let an attorney deal with it, they put me on hold and supposedly took my number off the account. But the next day, I get another notification. It seems she is providing her services again and it's still making that my problem. So I call and get routed to a promotional department that said they have no idea why they got this call, but I should probably just sue.

I tried calling the number listed on the confirmation texts but it goes to a dead end line that just asks for a remote access code and then hangs up, so I can't ask the hotel she is actually at flag her down and say "hey, you need to update your number."

I emailed their privacy department yesterday but the notifications are still coming in. I can't change my phone number at the moment as I'm dealing with some delicate matters that are tied to this number so I can't risk changing the number at this time.

How can I get wyndham to take this seriously? This is a dangerous amount of information I was able to get off a recurring text they know is going to the wrong place.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Lxkt50xOg

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32032383

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/215685

WhatsApp can now call on Meta AI to summarize your personal chats. As shown in a GIF, you can access it by tapping the button to unfurl all of your unread messages in a chat. But instead of showing your messages, WhatsApp uses Meta AI to generate a bulleted summary of what you missed.

The feature is rolling out in English in the US, with plans to launch in more countries and languages later this year. It uses Meta’s Private Processing technology, which the company claims will prevent it and other third parties from snooping on your messages.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, says its AI message summaries are optional, and the feature is turned off by default. You can also use WhatsApp’s “Advanced Privacy” setting to prevent users from using AI features in group chats.  We still don’t know if WhatsApp’s AI message summaries will struggle with accuracy, which is something we saw with the launch of Apple’s AI-generated message and notification rundowns.

Over the past year, Meta has continued stuffing different AI features into WhatsApp, including a way to ask Meta AI questions from within a chat, as well as a feature that generates images in real-time. Some users have grown frustrated by the new Meta AI button in the bottom-right corner of the app that they can’t turn off or remove. Meta also sparked backlash with another change that brought ads to the app — something its founders said they never wanted to do.

The app’s Private Processing is supposed to conceal your interactions with its AI model by creating a “secure cloud environment,” preventing Meta or WhatsApp from seeing your summaries. Other people in the group chat won’t be able to see the message summaries, either.

From The Verge via this RSS feed

I'm considering finally jumping off gmail. I'm not going to host my own email since I just don't have the skill to secure that thing well enough myself. Any mail server I set up would become a botnest within hours. So that has me looking at third party stuff.

Proton has a mostly good reputation, though their CEO's twitter post a while back praising the Trump regime makes me question if I should trust them with anything. I don't know enough about the entire situation to know if its just internet drama or a real concern, but anything involving Trump is a huge red flag for me.

Tuta looks pretty nice but I've read there are concerns about it being in a country that's part of the 14 eyes collaboration, so it might not matter what the organization wants if the government of the region they are in says fuck off and do what we tell you.

On the lower end of concerns, I am in the Apple ecosystem. (boo hiss I know). I like the clean and simple built in apps like email and calendar and how the notifications all work across my watch, phone, mac and homepods. I like how safari can just jump in and throw an email alias at things for me. I like how all my stuff is managed. But I also know Apple could piss me off at any moment and make wild sweeping changes I might not like, so relying on them too much could screw me over someday. I dont know, right now I really like their setup but portability does seem to matter more ultimately so this switch does seem like a better idea in the long run, even if I'm giving up features I may enjoy.

What are your opinions on the privacy email and calendar services in 2025? Should I even both with a cloud based calendar in the first place?

Psylo, which bills itself as a new kind of private web browser, debuted last Tuesday in Apple’s App Store, one day ahead of a report warning about the widespread use of browser fingerprinting for ad tracking and targeting.

It was a fortuitous coincidence.

Psylo for iOS and iPadOS was created by Mysk, a Canada-based app biz run by software developers and security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk.

“Psylo stands out as it is the only WebKit-based iOS browser that truly isolates tabs,” Tommy Mysk told The Register. "It’s not only about separate storage and cookies. Psylo goes beyond that.

“This is why we call tabs ‘silos.’ It applies unique anti-fingerprinting measures per silo, such as canvas randomization. This way two Psylo tabs opening the same website would appear as though they originated on two different devices to the opened website.”

I am trying to get away from Google and am looking for a decent cloud service that's integrated well into Linux, either by itself or by using rclone.

I tried Proton drive, but it is laggy and overall not very good.

I just need storage, nothing fancy. Self hosting is not an option tough, at this time.

EDIT: I don't want to write the same answer 15 times, so I'll just put this here: Thanks a lot for the recommendations to all of you! I've got some reading up to do now :-)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/457134

Comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31882019

Memo says cybersecurity office deemed WhatsApp a high risk due to ‘lack of transparency in how it protects user data’

I've had people tell me that this is (their words, not mine): "mental illness"