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I try to think long and hard before I buy any hardware which has an obvious tracking use case, other than a router and a smartphone, but so many friends and rel
by michannne 7y ago
I try to think long and hard before I buy any hardware which has an obvious tracking use case, other than a router and a smartphone, but so many friends and relatives try to one-up each other by filling their homes with Alexas and Ring doorbells, and all sorts of tracking technology.
I'm not saying I'm perfect, like I said I have a phone and a router, and I understand at a point I can't hide certain things, i.e. my ISP can see what I'm pulling on the net and I find it's not worth the hit to convenience to try to scrub or obfuscate that info, but man, one guy I know has an Alexa in every room in his house! Another has IoT'd his place upside down with various Chinese equipment that is collecting who-knows-what data and sending it who-knows-where, and it's not that I have a problem with it, but they don't even think of the privacy implications when they buy these things.
I try to live my life as if I'd become president one day and the CIA/FBI/NSA would use everything in their power to find something heinous they could use to destroy my life, and also so that I don't have to worry about my future children having their entire life uploaded from birth to death because of mistakes I made in the technology I buy. It keeps me humble and skeptical of new hardware and I truly measure the impact it has on the privacy of myself and those around me, but I wonder sometimes if it has no affect because they could always build a profile based on how I've intereacted around others' technology
- matheusmoreira 7y ago> my ISP can see what I'm pulling on the net Will DNS over HTTPS help mitigate this?
- mister_hn 7y agoNo if the DoH Is performed by Cloudflare. We need decentralised DNS over HTTPS services, to guarantee anonymity. Obviously, no service should log users' activity as well
- onion2k 7y agoYour ISP won't see your DNS requests if you use DoH from Cloudflare. Cloudflare will, but so would whoever else you resolve queries with if it wasn't Cloudflare.
- newguy1234 7y agoNever trust a tech company to give you privacy. Big mistake.
- burpsnard 7y agoThey still see traffic to an IP, and the hostnames in the certs. Also the request/response lengths can reveal what was fetched
- andrerm 7y agoISPs will quickly move from domain names tracking to IPs tracking. How many times pornhub changes their IP? Never?
- lettergram 7y ago> my ISP can see what I'm pulling on the net You could use a VPN if you wish to avoid that. Generally, I agree with you and wrote about my thoughts: https://austingwalters.com/the-last-free-generation/ https://austingwalters.com/the-last-free-generation/ My concern is really that we wont have any kind of freedom in the years to come. There's pretty much nothing you can do. Only thing we can kind of do is provide some privacy, sometimes...
- cortesoft 7y agoThen the VPN company knows what you are pulling on the net...
- viraptor 7y agoAnd still the ISP to some extent. Content fingerprinting just from the packet sizes / timing is unreasonably effective. It doesn't matter that the packets are encrypted.
- jhanschoo 7y agoSome VPNs conduct third-party audits to be able to say that they don't persist info about your traffic. That's usually more than what an ISP is willing/able to say.
- nickpsecurity 7y agoI worked for quite a lot of companies that had a few planned and random audits by third parties, including government. We did things one way when they were there. We did it totally differently when they weren't. Made me doubt the value of anything other than live surveillance of the company or network, remote and with well-paid person stationed there.
- mgr86 7y agoI, admittedly don't know enough about VPNs. But could I just ssh tunnel to an ec2 instance and browse the web with a sox proxy?
- anon1m0us 7y agoI feel uneasy visiting friends with Alexa and all that.
- holri 7y agoI am not doing it.
- jimmaswell 7y agoShouldn't be any more than friends who just have a smart phone.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoNot at all. Alexa in known for uploading plenty of audio recordings. If phones were doing the same on a large scale people would notice the network traffic!
- officialjunk 7y agohow do you inspect the cellular network traffic?
- vageli 7y ago> how do you inspect the cellular network traffic? You can investigate cell traffic with an SDR.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoVarious cheap devices catch plenty of interference from a phone in transmission. You don't have to analyze traffic to realize that phones are transmitting all the time without a good reason. Also, you can easily intercept traffic over wifi. You can even do that while switching off GSM.
- pessimizer 7y agoI used to joke about being uncomfortable with people visiting my apartment carrying smartphones, now I'm actually becoming uncomfortable with people visiting my apartment carrying smartphones. All of my technology is dumb as shit/rooted. I've physically taken the webcam out of my new laptops for years before the first power up, which is with a Debian DVD. And I honestly think that I'm taking the lazy approach because I'm not overly concerned about being targeted, just caught in dragnets. Anybody practiced and willing to put in a few hours of work could own me. I could own me, so I know it's true. People who aren't technical with software, hardware, and web architecture just have no chance.
- t0ughcritic 7y agoYou do know who the president is right now right? You don’t need to do what you are doing -cia
- michannne 7y agoThat has no bearing on the conversation
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoThese reddit flamewar comments don't belong here, it adds nothing to discussion.
- Gibbon1 7y agoYou're the one flaming here, not the guy you attacked.
- gowld 7y agoIf you carry a phone, all the rest is just gravy. There's an old saying, "if you are going to get screwed anyway, you may as well try to enjoy it".
- everyone 7y agoIts also a good idea (and costs nothing, not even time) to always put in different garbage information whenever you have to enter a name, dob, or whatever, anywhere. Even before widespread computer use I think,it made sense to always spell your name in a different way on every form. Slow the bastards down at least!
- pcdoodle 7y agoThis is a good idea
- newguy1234 7y agoI used to be the same way but then I became victim to a very sophisticated and coordinated cyberattack. It all started when one of my financial accounts was compromised. I was able to get that mess cleaned up and I beefed up my security everywhere but then I started to get very strange things happening. I would get phishing e-mails that were very well crafted, so much so that they were able to get past g-mail's filters. I would get e-mails from "lost friends" trying to get in contact with me. They knew my name, my address, my phone numbers, where I worked, and even places I had visited on my day's off. I would get calls where the person would appear to sound like normal. They knew my name and all pertinent details. They would try to get me to small chat with them before asking out of the blue questions like what type of car was my first car. I am somewhat of a paranoid so I do not disclose any of this information willingly. It was very very freaky to say the least. I've beefed up all my security credentials and deleted a lot of my social media accounts as well. Most of what I do online now is pseudonymous. Lots of people say stuff like "I have nothing to hide" but trust me, you definitely do. You don't want people to know your first and last name, your address, where you work, your phone number. There are criminals out there that will try to rip you off any second they get and try to pull all sorts of tricks to get access to your money. The level of effort I saw in these attempts was significant and I could see how lots of people could get tricked by it. I would say that all of the attempts from the calls to the e-mails were custom written specifically based on the information they knew about me. In hindsight, this is all my fault. I was too trusting of big tech companies putting my information out there for all to see and now I am paying the price for it.
- specialist 7y agoMethinks scammers are just getting better at phishing and extortion. Eg, scammers are now scrapping haveibeenpwned.com, then matching it with all the other publicly available information. I imagine non-geeks easily believing the extortion emails I now routinely receive.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoThe other major problem is how public information can so often be used to authenticate as you. Someone asked Amazon customer support for the last address I had something shipped to after supplying them with my name and an address I used to live at. No amount of security best practices on your part can save you from these sorts of attacks.
- rebuilder 7y agoIt's a form of the tragedy of the commons. Any given individual generally has little to actually lose by allowing themselves to be surveilled by corporations. In aggregate, however, that increasing surveillance has a deleterious effect on society.
- lambertsimnel 7y agoYou make a good point, but I think individuals underestimate what they have to lose. We all have something to hide (in many cases including intimacy, trade secrets, client confidentiality and our plans for negotiations/auctions/etc). To submit to blanket corporate surveillance is to risk that data leaking to criminals or being taken by governments.
- tjoff 7y agoThey aren't aware of it though. I guarantee you that if brand X would have explicitly stated what they were doing the outcry would have ended it all rather quickly. They have nothing to fear or lose. So that one guy gets his promotion while everyone's privacy is sold for pennies.
- rapind 7y agoFacebook popularity (among others) challenges your guarantee :) I recently lost a domestic argument over Google Home Minis in my kid's rooms... we just sound like conspiracy theorists, even in this post-Snowden era. The response is a shrug of the shoulders more often than not. Honestly it's just going to be played out. The masses will need to get screwed badly before we collectively wake up. I'm opting to simply prepare myself for the fallout, like rampant identity theft, loss of privacy, lack of objective / critical news coverage, etc. As an example, the SASS service I built and run does absolutely zero user tracking / analytics, anticipating that some day this will be appreciated.
- scarejunba 7y agoI've got one of these smart devices in every room of my house. Love it. Fantastic experience. Maybe some day I'll pay for this. My take: I won't. I'm going to be fine. And I have no anxiety about this.
- iforgotpassword 7y agoYou're right. Most people "get away" with all this crap. My take on this is that I can't miss what I never had. Knowing myself, once I get used to some convenient tech it's hard to go back. I got my first smartphone only two years ago and even then consciously restricted my usage by basically just using it like my old phone plus email and a browser. No WhatsApp, no cloud services, no voice assistant. And every now and then when visiting a friend or colleague I'm amazed to see what's actually possible with modern tech if you fully embrace it. So I just fiddle around a bit out of curiosity and that's it.
- scarejunba 7y agoI respect that. Personal discipline. I think you can make your life better with these things, but if you've tried them and determined they're not for you, then not having them seems sensible.
- asjw 7y agoYou can smoke and get away with it. It's stupid anyway.
- scarejunba 7y agoNah, you can't. There is a continuous deleterious effect on your health, not just the increased risk of lung cancer. I used to smoke. The difference is huge when you don't. I've lived without the devices when I've been elsewhere for a while and I don't feel better in any way.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoCorporate surveillance "pollutes" democracy like a car pollutes the air we breathe. You'll get away with using a internal combustion engine. You'll be fine. But you are harming me and everybody else.
- marmaduke 7y agoI recently setup a home security system for on a renovation project, so we wanted something that could send us notifications. There was exactly one system that works by SMS only, and I like the simplicity: no ads, no phoning home to some server etc. I check the bill on the Sim card that the only activity is texting with my phone. In the larger context it's easy to forget that good compromises are available, it doesn't have to be all surveillance or nothing at all.
- voicedYoda 7y agoDo you mind sharing more with me about your setup? I've been researching options, including diy, but don't want/need all the bells and whistles espoused by the "easy"corporations.
- marmaduke 7y agoIt's a system made by Smanos, not diy, and has a central unit with battery backup, rfid tags and remote control. There are a bunch of sensors, standard stuff. The part that attracted me was the simplicity of using only text messages to control it and receive notifications.
- nickpsecurity 7y ago"I try to live my life as if I'd become president one day and the CIA/FBI/NSA would use everything in their power to find something heinous they could use to destroy my life" It's a smart move. It's more likely to happen during a regime change, shift in popular opinion, etc where a group is labelled unpopular, not to be tolerated, and/or dangerous. That has happened many times in my life. Then, the Patriot Act passed letting them black-bag people for torture flights or hold them indefinitely due to what they claim to find via secret surveillance whose methods aren't peer reviewable ("classified").
- jodrellblank 7y agoPart of the complaint about surveillance is the chilling effect it has of "someone is always watching over your shoulder", and the self-censoring which ensues; if you're going to "live as if I'd become president one day", the surveillance culture is having that chilling effect on you already even though you try to opt-out. (And you're not getting any of the benefits those technologies could have; worst of both worlds).