5 ms·
No way. The largest threats to your privacy by several orders of magnitude over the stuff we complain about: - Electric, gas, sewer, water, trash utilities tha
by superuser2 10y ago
No way. The largest threats to your privacy by several orders of magnitude over the stuff we complain about:
- Electric, gas, sewer, water, trash utilities that you basically can't live without.
- Thinking of going rustic? Better not own the land in your own name. Most places, parcels are easy to find online.
- Property management companies
- Sites that facilitate rental applications
- Your 100+ year old bank
- Credit card and auto lenders
- Employers and job application websites
- Cell phone networks
- AT&T, Comcast, and all but a handful of indie ISPs
- Insurance companies
- Retail stores and gas stations with your loyalty programs
- People who regularly enter your property like building maintenance, trash collectors (often spies for the municipal building inspector), etc.
- Cops and neighbors who can observe your daily routine
- Vital records offices that know who your families are
Hell, just yesterday Verizon gave my mom a $20/mo discount to plug something into her OBD II port. WTF else can that be for?
Facebook and Google are the kindest to your privacy. Your data is a closely guarded asset, protected by competent engineers, used to tailor your experience and show ads. All these other entities, many of which you basically have to do business with to lead a contemporary life even without social media and smartphones, know who you are, where you live, what you drive, who you care about, how much money and credit you have and how you use it, and they do not even try to keep these data in house. When the government or a PI is looking for someone, that's where they look first - to data bought, volunteered, interviewed, and stolen from every kind of company except modern tech, often through well defined and documented interfaces like LexisNexis and the credit bureaus.
Luddite doesn't do much. You have to sublet informally (usually illegal), get paid in cash (employers don't like to do this unless they are illegal businesses) under a false name (fraud), never use banking or credit, not own, rent, register, or insure any cars, buy single ride subway tickets (more expensive), and have a forgettable face (genetics?) etc. People can't even manage this when their lives depend on it. Fugitives are almost always caught these days - this is how. It's nearly impossible to avoid leaking your biographical data and physical location.
Modern tech might give more insight into your mind, I suppose, but deeper privacy than that is very hard - actors in a capitalist system are starved for information about their counterparties and work hard to get it.
- saganus 10y agoWhat? Why would Verizon want to connect anything to your mom's car? That's very strange. Could it be that they want to monitor cellphone coverage maybe? Or even monitor their competitors' coverage? It just creeps me the hell out thinking that my telecom would like to connect something to unrelated stuff...
- nitrogen 10y agoThey could collect coverage data with a 12V barrel adapter, no need for OBD-II. That can only be nefarious.
- nekohacker 10y agoI believe this (https://www.hum.com/ https://www.hum.com/) is the device in question. Seems like just another horribly insecure IOT device.
- ACS_Solver 10y agoPeople's situations may vary, but most of the ones you list differ in two important ways. One, they need to make an effort to invade your privacy. Yeah, my neighbours could observe my daily routine, my electric company may do more than know my use of electricity, but these would take some effort, while the tech companies can data mine about millions of people at a time. And the other important distinction is that these other things are highly compartmentalized, tech isn't, especially for the kind of person likely to be reading HN. I'm sure I am not alone here in that I basically live on the Internet. I read news online, I buy the books that I read online, discuss topics that interest me, watch movies, research my medical issues, read about stocks I invest into, talk to friends and family. My complete browsing history would certainly reveal more about me than ransacking my house for all the physical items, and corporations like Facebook try to have access to that, plus more - such as your private conversations, which is why they push their own messaging services. This is the truly scary combination. The extent to which online activities matter in your life (especially for the tech-inclined), and the ability of large companies to automatically process and analyse those activities.
- 10y ago