Comment by elzbardico 3 days ago
Cars, your TV, your phone, everything is fucking spying on you. At this moment I am more interested in how I generate a tsunami of more data about me to the powers that be to drown them in a deluge of irrelevant bits.
HN is not a social media platform in the traditional sense. For one, it is completely anonymous, unless your "handle" is somehow linked to a real identity (by choice or otherwise). It's very, very different from posting every aspect of your life on a platform like Facebook.
For most people, it's all irrelevant.
I'm surprised how many people think that keeping a low profile will matter in a society that attacks people for things you could discover from vehicle position data. In that society, you'll get attacked if someone wants to do it and they'll manufacture the pretext.
I think the attack vector most are considering are going to be government-sourced mass-targeting of individuals based on data triggers rather than any particular interest in the individual. The current example being many of the 12,000 annual arrests in the UK for online speech, many based on private messages. For many of those cases, these were private individuals in whom the government had no prior interest.
It's not difficult to imagine something like pandemic restrictions, where a digitally-enabled government could fine/arrest people based on location data, either because they travelled outside an allowed area or into a restricted one. Or they have data showing they were in close-proximity with too many people etc etc.
Yes, and that's very sad. However the solutions are pretty obvious:
Car -> unplug the cellular modem (more or less easy)
TV -> used as dumb monitor with a Linux HTPC
Phone -> GrapheneOS
PC -> Linux
Social media -> /dev/null
Email/DNS/cloud -> my own
The real issue is that most people are not aware of these issues and may even (unintentionally) compromise your own privacy by posting information or pictures of you to Facebook or other similar places.