Friends and family will be so excited for you and optimistically update your address in there phone book.

Oh yes! I have experienced this already! They put it in their contacts and then every sketch weather app and recipe app scrapes it. My friends are kind and well meaning, but hey have no idea how the information economy works. They do not understand how much data they are giving away about themselves but abotu me too!

have an attorney list his name for all utilities

That is what Michel Bazzel talks about too in his book, but it seems like this is difficult to find someone to do that. And it makes other kinds of things difficult too, if the residence is not tied to your name. I have had cases where I had to supply a “utility bill” tying my real name to my residence, in order to get some other kind of service I needed, or part of KYC.

I fear you are right about the difficulty of this. I don’t think it is exactly impossible. But very difficult, for sure!

Thank you for this. I am glad to hear you had success!

I do most of those, but not so far number 4.

I don’t know about utilities though. I believe that my current power company sells their customer lists, because I get junk mail at a misspelling of my name on file with them.

Did you have any trouble with moving companies? I didn’t move since the “surveillance economy”. It is hard for me to imagine moving companies wouldn’t capitalize on selling your new address where they had to deliver.

I have also heard that it is better not to file a change of address form with the post office. Instead to change the address on file with your charge card companies or banks directly.

Link for the event f4 is talking about:

https://www.popsci.com/technology/robot-vacuum-army/

He also gave his famous opinion about Facebook users. Deep down, he agrees with privacy advocates. The diff is that he’s a shitty enough person to take advantage of the less techy people out there even if his society will be damaged badly in the process. Most of us are not that shitty.

they trust me

dumb fucks

I think we can move beyond Facebook here. Trusting big tech with your data never works out well.

Theoretically if you never hook a smart TV to the net it shouldn’t be able to spy.

I think you are right (today!), but look what happens with cars… the car connects to a wireless network without asking you, to send back telemetry. The cost of doing that is coming down all the time, and there is a big juicy profit stream just waiting to be harvested. I will not be surprised if we see TVs do this eventually, like cars do already.

They could also be designed to simply refuse to function if they can’t connect. I didn’t hear about any like this so far, but it feels like a matter of time. Enshittification comes for everything.

I don’t get the idea that after all the shit they pulled someone’s like “well maybe this new thing’s nice”.

I look at my friends who do this even though I advize them not to. For them, data is invisible and out of sight, out of mind. Their TV is a consumer device like IDK a toaster or washing machien. They put it online with no real thought to data or privacy. From their perspective this is normal. Their neighbors all do it with their TVs. Their friends all do it! I am the only one who makes a warning to them. Everyone else they know does it. Who wouldn’t want a “smart” TV???

They don’t understand tech very well and they feel like what they see most people doing must be good. They are not thinking about the eroding effect on their whole society from normalizing dragnet surveillance and total privacy loss. It’s too abstract, and the allure of the shiny is too much.

Funny to see twenty-odd years later we are stuck in the same throttling ecperience us dial-up users had to experience organically.

Moore’s law. “Every 18 months, the number of transistors on a chip doubles.”

Gates’ Law. “Every 18 months, the speed of software is cut in half.”

It is backed up alongwith everything else, all my data, under a normal 3-2-1 idea, but 5-3-1.

Each of the copies on separate media inc my main PC is also versioned. I keep 12 hourly versions, 7 daily versions, 4 weekly versions, 12 monthly versions, and then per-year versions going way back. This helps protect against corruption, like I accidentally deleted an keepassxc entry without noticing right away or w/e.

Granted I didn’t use it to create my account

I bet that’s like 90% of what they care about tho. They really want to ID you when you first sign up, but they might care not as much about day to day use.

It’s fuzzier with reddit tho. Used to be you could sign up with a VPN with success. Some still have accts made like that. They are much sticklier now. It maybe possible but just rarely, and nobody seems to know what makes the diff. It also used to be posible to sign up with Tor, but today that’s instant shadowban.

My side rant is that shadowbans are MF-ing evil. I got caught in one because I used a VPN to sign up. I only ever tried to answer people on a tech help sub. I was posting in good faith. Tried to be helpful and contribute to the community. But none of my posts were ever being engaged with. No upvotes, no downvotes, no replies. Finally I looked without being signed in (“open in private window”) and sure enough… nobody but me could see my posts.

It felt bad, man. I put my time and effort into trying to help other people, for nothing.

It’s very difficult to not be truly unique if someone out there is purposefully tracking you as an individual.

And the neat part about that is… it used to be very expensive to do it. Now it blew right on through free, and into highly profitable. So it can be done to everyone everywhere at every moment.

No one knows how many people the Nazis employed to spy on the rest. Some estimates are like 1/4 of the population spied on the others! Today? We can put that to shame using only 0.01% or w/e of our population to spies on the rest. B/c that 0.01% has surveilance tools unimaginably powerful compared to anything the Nazis dreamed about.

There is a place in the world for targeted surveilance of bad people, mass murders, drug kingpins, w/e. You get a judge to sign off, and go to town. But dragnet surveilance of everyone at all times erodes the foundation of free societies.

Frankly humanity does not need this invention one bit.

Yah. Unfortunately, we’ve got it though. :( :( :(

People I know, some friends, they are completely oblivious to how much it will surveillance them. Or how much Meta already does, in other ways. “I don’t care, I’m not doing anything wrong”.

Constant surveillance erodes a society. It erodes democracy.

I think that’s what it is.

What it is today. But these things tend to slip-slope their way to worse privacy violations over time. Oh, children are getting around the setting? Well, we better tie it to a government ID.

I’m more afraid of what it becomes than what it starts as.

sounds to me like you’d have to have some stuff posted online under your real name for it to find and match to

They probably only need a reliable IRL ID for one of them. That’s a weaker requirement than posting under your name. Your name can be discovered other ways. For example browser fingerprinting, where that fingerprint is also associated with a “KYC” login elsewhere. There is a whole industry for using non-name signals to ID people. Big data is powerful.

Ofc there are ways to frustrate that. Yet the attacker only has to win once. The defender has to win every time.

But it will be statistical in nature. They’ll have some confidence attached to it. That could be very low, or quite high. Depends on how much you have disclosed online.

Excellent point.

For very long, I have thought vocabulary alone would be enough footprint to ID someone. If you had enough sample of their writing ofc. It’s like browser fingerprints. The words you use, and how often you use them, is a fingerprint. As UnknowableNight points out, some patterns are very unique, nearly enough alone. Yet even without those, you have enough signals. Sentence length. Whether you spell colour or color. Regional expressions. Word use frequency. Whether you bring in vocabulary used mostly in a certain profession, like medicine or law. Whether you use more paragraphs or more single liners. None alone are enough. All together, with the 100 other ones smart people can figure out? Probably enough.

Long ago it would be too much effort, only good for targeted cases. Today? Maybe you can do it dragnet, seeking to ID every person who writes online.

I do not know if that happens today. Yet I do not see anything to stop it.

Also California and others.

About that, here is the statement from FDroid:

If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications. (How many F-Droid users are there, exactly? We don’t know, because we don’t track users or have any registration: “No user accounts, by design”)

The two phone OSs which have together 98% of market would be under locked control of big tech companies. You could argue Android is still slightly less locked than iOS. But it seems like a distinction with not so much practical difference.

It’s a corporate capture of mobile computing. Not only they sell you the device, but the device will answer to its master only. That is not you.

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People are on places where many other people are

More on that idea here: Network effect

It’s a reason so many big tech companies hate interoperability. Without interoperability you get locked into their system. Then they can enshittify their service to extreme levels, and you are trapped.

Unfortunately there is a harmful incentive structure. The more abusive a service is, the more money it makes from its malicious but profitable aspects which we all know. Meanwhile less harmful services struggle because they lack the monetization stream.

Hopefully it can stay up. Reportedly Flock has been very aggressive about trying to take these sites down with DMCA complaints toward hosting providers and things like that.

I cannot get out of my neighborhood without passing a Flock camera. This pisses me TF off.

But there have been successes. In some cities in Oregon, California, other states too. The community has come together to put pressure on the city government to cancel the contracts. We don’t have to accept this. We can fight back against dragnet surveillance. It takes community effort and grassroots organization but we can do it.

Those are good thoughts, thank you. I agree, account reputation and initial rate limits is a much better approach than IP blocking.

It’s especially annoying when IP blocking happens long after you sign up. I was a casual user of a popular e-marketplace, mostly buying. Over 10 entire years, 100% of my feedback was the highest possible rating. I literally never got anything else. Then one day, no warning, my account was disabled. They would only unlock it if I sent them an unredacted copy of my government ID. I would not do that, so it remains locked to this day. I am sure it was because I always used a VPN. Yet I acted in the most upstanding and good faith manner for a decade.

This is why I want to see privacy normalized. Today, sites don’t have to care about shedding a few good faith privacy minded users if the blunt tool can sweep up enough abusers. We’re collateral damage. If privacy was normalized and we had some critical mass, then more nuance is required, because they can’t afford to shed so many good faith users.