Examples may include using tor as your daily browser, using VPNs when you can’t use tor etc.
I’m curious to have some philisophical discussion over if there are actually any visible benefits to being private while online…
Do you walk around naked? Do you go outside naked? When using a public bathroom, do you leave the door open? Do open your windows when you take a shower? When you go to sleep do you leave the windows open? Do you write all your mail on postcards? Have you never whispered? Have you ever not said something when somebody was around, only the later talk about the subject when they left?
If you answered no to any of these questions, privacy might be right for you.
Yes to all of those. LIFE ON THE EDGE BABYYY
I’m one up on you: I write my postcards while sitting naked on a bog I set down in the middle of the town square and screaming my most intimate secrets at the top of my lungs at rush hour.
That’s an image AI prompt I am not going to put in
Maybe there’s even a stock photo for it
Not naked, a poster in front of your chest on the subway, with your bank details, phone number, first and last name, full address, family photos and the exact date when you travel on vacation and are away from home. This gives many followers and likes.
To be fair, I would most likely walk everywhere naked if they didn’t arrest me for doing so.
The way I look at it is, the more information is known about you the easier it is for someone or something to predict/manipulate you.
Now sure this can be beneficial to you if that someone/something is a looking out for your best interest or at least is looking for a mutual benefit solution. However the vast majority of the online world isn’t looking out for your best interest they just want your time and your money. Because of this I personally try and keep my data to myself.
I do my best to block ads and trackers and just be careful about where I am giving out my real information. I think this has helped me avoid buying crap I really don’t need and helping avoid scams as is hard to fall for a scam when they think your Name is Tommy Baker living at a Walmart address in California.
Being private I feel will also help you with social media addition. I spend less time on YouTube/Reddit/Lemmy or wherever if I am not logged in vs if I am logged in. Simply because my accounts are very personalized to me thus it does a better job suggesting content I would be interested in looking at. (Sucking up my time)
*Edit grammar.
Agreed on all of this. There was a time that I was more worried about “the government” but the reality is that if a state level actor wants to fuck with me I’m probably screwed. I’ve also gotten older and realized there isn’t anything about me that would be interesting for people like that, so that’s not who I worry about with privacy.
These days I’m more concerned about scammers and more garden variety cyber criminals. Having a broader online presence presents more of an attack surface, a place to build out an initial profile for a planned social engineering or spear phishing campaign.
Well said :)
People will probably have better responses, but one that immediately comes to mind is airline tickets.
Something about airlines using tracking to jack up the prices while you search for them?
Switch browser or try to book ten minutes later and the price might change
That’s an urban legend. Prices are aggregated and cataloged by ITA matrix (purchased by google/alphabet a decade ago). The only time a price change is when the airline itself changes the current retail price.
Now, if you’re using a third party service - like Priceline or Travelocity - to check and book tickets (which is a terrible idea, btw) they may track your history and alter their price, but the master index (served by google flights from ITA matrix) will not change for you, personally, or your specific ip or other identifier.
Note: Airlines will adjust their prices based on interest/purchases, so if you’re hitting a flight with requests to bill so hard that the airline thinks the flight is popular, or you go through the reservation process far enough to “fill” a particular fare class, then the price will change - but it will change for everyone, not just you. Similarly, Amazon will raise pricing during a buying surge - but it’s for everyone, not just you.
On the (mostly) plus side for untracked browsing - as long as it’s so tight that you’re hopping ips and avoiding any back end fingerprinting of your system - Many merchants do source-based pricing. Ex: if you go to book certain services direct vs following a referral link (like via a cash back site or association) you my find different pricing. Using and AARP link to some travel services will result in a 25-30% price increase, to offset the 20% rate coupon they offer, plus a little coin for themselves. Other sites will also trigger cost basis alterations - especially for services which are hard to identify or compare a fixed cost.
I’ve heard they would change based on generic demographic and periodic trends, but for individuals? Is that even legal?
I literally saw hotel prices going up minute by minute, the longer I snooped around. With shit like “only n rooms left” and “x people are currently looking at this hotel”. Then reset to the initial prices once I opened an incognito tab.
Oh gosh, fuckin baffling! I’m surprised, but also kinda not at the same time
If you’ve ever helped somebody get away from a stalker. You realize how important privacy is, and how little most people have.
I’ve had a stalker, and it was scary af. She was sending me secret admirer letters to my work for years. Later on, she somehow found the instagram profile of my girlfriend at the time and started sending her wild accusations about me, such as that I tried to sexually assault her and that I had a secret family in another country I had traveled to often. She then spread these rumors around my workplace. Once I found out who she was, it got even scarier because her public record showed a history of violent assault on men with a firearm. I was completely paranoid for months.
I don’t practice privacy because I think anyone’s out to get me. I don’t think the gvmt know or care that I exist, much less about the opinions that I hold. I’m not trying to hide, I’m just trying to be private. I don’t want there to be a shadow profile of me but if there is I want it to be as inaccurate and meager as possible. I don’t want to have tailored outrage designed to sway me politically shoved at me or to be a sellable data point to increase, however marginally, some billionaire’s personal wealth.
So for me, the answer to your question is that privacy itself is the tangible benefit.
I think that this is a point that often gets understated. Most of us aren’t important to be specifically targeted for being watched, but there is a significant amount of passive data collection / watching that goes on by governments and big tech. It definitely makes life a little better to not have outrage and echo chambers being the only internet you see.
I treat it like the front entrance of my house. I lock my doors because I want to protect my things. Now can someone break my windows and steal my stuff? Sure. Can your average locksmith or even novice hobby lock picker open your front door? Sure. It still doesn’t mean I am going leave my front door wide open for anyone to just walk in. However, it also doesn’t mean I am going to lock down my house like a fortress and put iron bars all over my windows and doors, or move to some remote cave out in the middle of nowhere.
Each person has their own concept of how private they want to be, but I think it’s healthy to balance that with pragmatism. I think any kind of step towards being more private is worthy, especially in an age where your data is being used more and more for malicious purposes, but don’t kill yourself over it.
People are often not aware that privacy is synonymous with security on the Internet. Now, 100% privacy does not exist, but we must differentiate between what any page we visit can find out, mainly technical data, such as our public IP if we do not use a VPN, but which allows the page to be presented in our language, why The public IP reveals the country in which we live, but not our exact location, only that of our ISP service, which may be hundreds of km away. Also data such as our OS, mobile or PC, which allows the page to adjust the format.
Another different thing is our private data, this is what must be protected on the front line, since a leak as has already happened on several occasions, where hundreds of thousands of sensitive data were leaked, including banking and medical data. Protecting these depends primarily on our common sense and discretion on the network. We cannot prevent authorities from accessing this data that our ISP, Doctor or Bank may provide them if there is a court order for this, but we can prevent individuals or companies from tracking and profiling us in order to sell this data to third parties ( urveillance advertisings), since in this case we have no control over how this data is processed and protected in the hands of third parties, it is precisely there where these massive data leaks occurred.
Countermeasures, apart from our own caution and discretion as the most important thing, there are all kinds of measures such as ad/trackerblocker, VPN (especially with public WiFi) and others, not using the mobile phone for banking transactions (convenient, but a mobile phone can never offer the same security such as from a PC, or better to do the procedures in person), use long passwords and 2FA, or better a physical key, such as a pendrive, although it is annoying, ALWAYS read the TOS and PP of a software or service, (even if it is FOSS!), there we can discover the biggest surprises that we later regret.
Use tools, such as Exodus and InVizible Pro on Mobile, Blacklight, Webkoll, Portmaster, PiHole, etc., to find out who is looking over your shoulder using an app or service, test your browser with Browserleaks, to see the holes it may have, adjust it accordingly, and never use search engines that log and track activity.
Google your name. If that doesn’t kick someone into gear, nothing will.
I’ve also argued “if you have nothing to hide, why do you wear clothes?”. Interesting arguments ensue.
I actually just did and I’m impressed that after several pages of search results I couldn’t fine anything. That means I’m doing a good job, because besides a Facebook account and an Instagram account I purely use to reach some friends I have no social media.
Now that is the joy of having a very common name.
The last time i search my name (Firstname and lastname). I was not in the first 20 pages of google results.
My uni put my name on their page and there is nothing I can do about it …
Cries in I’m in the only person in the world with my first and last name combination.
In my experience, it can be difficult to grasp for privileged folks, who do kind of have not that much to fear, if they don’t hide their identity. But for minority groups and well, women, it comes a lot more naturally.
You can search my full legal (dead)name online and find absolutely nothing. Not a single picture, mention, or anything even remotely close or even in the same vicinity as me.
Obviously that’s not a benefit to everyone but it is to me and has been achieved by maintaining some level of scrutiny over the information I make available.
I envy you. My name is too unique and some papers published with my name (between others) make me really visible.
I have a fairly generic full name. Searching me online comes up with everything else but anything actually about myself. So many people of all ages have my name I was pretty surprised.
Moreover, I kept myself off of Facebook and most social media including all those meetup/dating/influencer/vlogging apps.
However, a few friends, colleagues and familly may have a few inadvertent cameos of me in their photos/videos. Which I do not mind, as they are unavoidable in day to day life.
Overall, I have taken mesures to leave as much of a messy digital footprint I can with things totally unrelated to me, my preferences and my knowledge.
We can’t really have complete and true privacy in our modern age with big data, “vacuum” everything/anything and decrypt later, deep learning and multi-domain tracking/inference. We can at least consciously (by choosing more privacy aware services, or by choosing to not give any/all our info) and unconsciously (through automation, scheduling of unrelated “activity” generation and mixing of different activities with others on the same profile or tracking token) leave a noisy footprint of ourselves and others.
You cannot really exercise your right to free speech online today without having a pseudonymous account so some elements of privacy is at least good for something.
Immediately, probably not. Privacy is one of those things where when you really need it, you can’t get it… unless you already have it.
Also, it’s not like you know the motivations of all 7 billion people on earth. If you’re out in the open, it just makes it easy for the lazy to find you.
I can get behind using a VPN, a phone with Graphene or Calyx, adblocker, user agent switcher, librewolf, and stuff… you give up some convenience for privacy, but it’s not overbearing. Tor, however, isn’t exactly useful as a daily driver.
So is there a visible benefit? Hopefully not. If you’re doing it right, you’ll just live a normal life and not be bothered.
There are lots of people who really need their privacy. If I can add my noise to the background and protect a journalist, whistleblower, etc… 👍
Being able to developer a personality, your personality, yourself basically.
IMHO Shoshana Zuboff explores this quite well. Imagine all the time there was an entity who was able to watch over everything you do, all the time, and could act on it, either by telling your government or companies, would you truly do everything you want to do? Note that this doesn’t mean anything illegal or immoral, especially as a young person when one does not even know what that means. I also would link that to the chilling effect, for example if one does truly believe Google or Facebook can know a lot about you and if say you want to reach a position of power, say become a politician, would you dare criticize them knowing they might give information to your opponent?
So… IMHO some of the perceivable benefit of being private is that you can become an individual, not a transparent clone of what some commercial actors of society today expect you to be. That is particularly important in a democracy where we collectively decide what is right or wrong and how we define our own future.
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Alternatively, when you’ve had enough, and you start resorting to violence you’ll be glad you don’t have a large digital footprint. Obviously if you never do anything of note, privacy has no value to you. But to those that need it, privacy is priceless.
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Yes most people are. The you is the general you, not you specifically. But the theoretical person/people who do decide the time is right, will be glad to have that privacy.
Basically privacy is worthless if you don’t need it and priceless if you do.
So you wouldn’t mind being arrested just for cycling through an area. Keep in mind, this is what we know about.
Of course this is not a good thing. But to entirely prevent being “placed” at the scene of a crime you would never be able to carry a cell phone, drive a car, or even walk/cycle with your face visible. You’d have to leave and enter your house taking special care not to be seen by any cameras, etc
The point he was making is that if you want to entirely prevent any of these problems, the steps you have to tale are extreme otherwise you’re always leaving open a potential security hole.
