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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Show them the consequeces. You might scare a few people who are already anxious by showing data collected, but most people will be apathetic. Illustrate why its bad. Be systemic about it.

The stunt outlined elsewhere of texting someone with their info is good, but "we all know google isn't going to threaten us" is the prevailing attitude. Demonstrate what google is going to do and how it hurts people individualy and directly. Until there are personal consequences, peopae won't really care.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Coming from an outsider, could you give an example of a way Google attacks people individually and directly?

Preferably something more common than traffic accidents, since people drive cars regardless

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Google scans all the photos you upload or send to other users, multiple times they have accused people of uploading CSAM and completely nuked their accounts simply because they were sending something to their pediatrician or their doctor.

In one case they have reported them to the police who then obtained a search warrant for all the (obscene amount of) data that google has collected on them.

They then disabled and deleted all his google related accounts including his phone number (he used google fi)

In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company

Louis rossman has a video on those incidents on youtube.

Google could have potentially and very easily destroyed this persons life. With them you are guilty until proven innocent, actually your always guilty. This mark guy sent the police report that exonerated him to google, yet they still think he's a pedo....

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