What reasons are there for being concerned about companies like google and meta etc collecting data and tracking me?

Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 170 points –

Please understandnim asking this question from a genuine place. I dont want the quora answer, i want the tech savvy, security expert minds of my fellow lemmings. If thats ok?

What happens to this data? What can/do they do with it? and why are so many people concerned about google tracking them?

Do i as an average user need to be concerned?

If so, What sorts of things can i do to avoid being tracked? Preferably without too much comprimise.

98

People don't realize how much data is collected, how it's analyzed to determine things about you, and how it's given out to nearly anyone. Here are some concerning examples that hopefully speak for themselves.

Data from fitness app Strava was used to locate secret US military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq by some random guy on Twitter. He did this by pointing out people running in squares in the middle of the desert. Imagine what America's enemies could do with this information that this company will sell to anyone.

Ad company Xandr allows you to target audiences with labels like "Recently purchased a pregnancy test", "Has a large gambling debt", and "Has depression". Once again, this is freely available for anyone to purchase. These tracking companies find out things that are very personal to you and then sell that info to people who might not have your best interests in mind.

Last but not least. Governments and law enforcement can access this information at any time for any purpose. Do you really want the government and police agencies to have a database of people grouped by their religious and political beliefs or their sexual orientation?

Hopefully you can see why the information being collected and given out to anyone is concerning. As to how to avoid it, I'm not sure there is any way besides government regulation. Maybe someone else has some answers!

I just don't use the internet, can't track me if I ain't on it!

If your friends have Facebook, and they share contacts on their phone, and they communicate with you Facebook has a shadow profile for your phone number. They still track you even without the app or an account.

Joke's on Facebook, all my friends are either Amish or live in anarcho-syndicalist communes

(Rumspringa can be a problem tho)

You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes....

Yes, that's why I have two phone numbers. One with an official work number that I give to friends and business partners - Its basically a requirement to have a public phone number if one runs a company where I live, so no hiding there anyways. And then I have a separate number I never give out, for data only.

Oh, you tried to call me but I didn't pick up? Sorry, I was busy/tired/generic excuse. But if you get on Element I'll give you my private account. Think of it as a backstage pass, you'll get in when nobody else does. You'll be special.

Kindergarten level psychology that works surprisingly well.

Are they both attached to smartphones? Location data can be pulled essentially equating the two numbers. If both devices always are in the same spot it’s the same person etc

Different tools for different threats. I'm not trying to hide from state-level actors and phone data is illegal to sell where I live.

And if I were, surely I wouldn't talk about it on an open forum. In such a hypothetical scenario I wouldn't even bring a cellphone, no matter if it's a smartphone or a plain ol' Nokia from the last millennium.

My point is they probably know both are you. I have two phones too, it just depends on what your goal is. If it’s not to be tracked by the Google, Microsoft, and Metas of the world you’re probably failing.

How can Google, Meta and Microsoft corrolate two phones where one is completely devoid of any Google Play blobs if they don't have access to location and triangulation data from the cell towers?

If you somehow have made sure every app you use doesn’t have a meta tracker in it then maybe. Although then you get into the territory of being so unique by blocking everything that you become identifiable that way.

I use custom operating system on my phone and router. I analyze packets, firewalls apps and block known tracking system on DNS level since I run my own In/Out VPN.

I have don't understand what you're talking about. Maybe I'm just not on your level.

Thank you for the interaction, but I don't think either of us will gain any more from this discussion.

Here’s what I’m talking about https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/every-browser-unique-results-fom-panopticlick

I'm aware of browser based tracking and have taken precautions to stop this. I fail to see how this is related to correlating two separate systems.

This continued conversation is wasting both ours time. I'm happy to discuss a different topic with you at another time, but posting links I evaluate to be completely irrelevant and perhaps even ignorant to the topic will only lead to conflict no matter who is right.

I wish you a good day.

You're not even safe from deleting your account.

You delete your account, come back with a new one to find that the suggested people are people you once had as friends or looked at.

Gee, wonder how they know that? /s

Oh you sweet summer child. You have no idea how much tracking goes on.

I watch a YouTube channel called The Hated One. He explains a lot about how to stay safe on the net. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like it's possible to be completely safe and to be even a little bit safe is a HUGE PITA.

I remember reading something about a guy that went so hard at being anonymous that the FBI almost arrested him since it looked like he was doing something criminal to want all this anonimity.

I couldn't find the source now

Interesting, where can I buy the info? Maybe I find something on my boss...............

Has everyone already forgotten about Cambridge Analytica, which scraped data from tens of millions of Facebook users and used it to microtarget swing voters in several countries with propaganda and misinformation to get them to either vote for right-wing candidates or stay home on election day?

I don’t think many people comprehend the impact. Most people don’t think they can be manipulated, and they are all wrong.

It's funny, the more likely you are to admit you can be manipulated the more likely you'll notice when it's happening. So I just go around telling everyone how easy it is to manipulate me.

Well the other crazy thing with voting is how narrow the margins are.

It doesn’t have to convince everyone. Only a small percentage across the country mixed with a few people in key locations and you can change everything.

Miami-Dade and Palm Beach says hello. A 537 vote margin in a few Florida counties decided the 2000 US Presidential Election.

One wonders how different the world would be today if George W. Bush didn't get that first term.

(Fun fact: the usual chicanery to depress Democratic votes also happened in 2000 - voter roll purges, roadblocks in Democratic areas, too few voter areas in cities... In many ways it was a trial run for the bullshit Republicans pull now)

Of course not. But in peoples defence, you can't forget if you never knew. And I seem to have the impression that this was a thing and then it's was pretty much gone again. Not brought up again and again over years like other, less important topics may have been.

Non-interested people would have been left with the impression it was bad, but it must have been fixed or else we'd hear more about it.

Just a personal story to bring one example into focus.

I got sober 8 years ago and never talked about it online until I was about 4 years sober. Never saw a single promotion for anything related to alcohol...

Until the day I made a single comment on Reddit telling my story to help support another person who was just starting their own sobriety journey.

And like magic, all promoted communities to me were alcohol related. Even though I'm an ublock user, when I would selectively disable it every advertisement I saw online was related to booze.

So even though there are ethical applications for my data, I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.

I think that's just really shitty targeted advertising, not surprising on Reddit lol

Reddit wasn't even the worst offender.

I made two posts one on asshole design and one on dangerous design and they cumulatively got something like 7,000 up votes and then "magically" the problem was fixed on reddit!

I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.

This doesn't even make sense. It'd be much more lucrative to target multiple things you speak fondly about it or have expressed personal interest in by actively searching.

If you enjoy something you buy it occasionally. If you are addicted you buy it every day, every time you have money, you think about it all the time. That's way more lucrative, it's the whole business model of the tobacco industry too.

That definitely doesn't describe how I act with nicotine, and I'm ABSOLUTELY addicted to nicotine.

I could say the same for alcohol, but I'm a very mild alcoholic.

Things we need are higher on our priorities than things we want, and addiction convinces you that you need that thing. So anything that can monetize that addiction is going to be more effective and consistent than something you merely want.

Keyword based advertising is overly simple

An example of this I use on occasion is:

You date someone years ago and no longer are. You've moved on, but that person then goes and commits a heinous crime. The police decide that since you dated years ago, and that record of your personal info is stored on some database they have somewhere, they no-knock warrant into your house, and shoot you dead in your own bed (Brianna Taylor - Louisville KY.) because they think there's a possibility he was there.

I don't like the idea that if history repeats itself, a powerful entity can force the data vaults open and see who they should send to the showers. I could be on the "correct" side at that time yet something I did or said last year has the system deem me unfit for the noble breed.

My worst imagination is labelling you and selling your label to the companies they supply to, and how wrongly those companies can use that data, example: google search "prostate cancer" or searching for symptons associated with prostate cancer - label telling probable prostate cancer developing with this user - insurance companies denying insurance to you or making it too expensive. Now extrapolate this to what your searches probably tell about you or your state, and multiply by the websites you visit, the time you spend reading article/tweet/forum/post about a certain subject, where and how you comment those articles, etc, and being labeled according to their perceived likes/hates/problems about yourself.

This. I remember that one video by LTT where he tried searching for a flight and he got a way higher price on the standard browser compared to the one with no personal accounts/cookies.

If I use search engines, be it to find opinions on a topic or as you said an insurance, I want those sorted by factors like the date it's been created and maybe the reputability of the source. Not what the algorithm thinks I want to see or I should see in "its" opinion.

My worst imagination is a nefarious entity using our data to determine if we are a threat or try and categorize people for some kind of psyop manipulation.

Something like Captain America Winter Soldier but more realistic. Even things like Cambridge Analytica show it is not that far fetched.

While social media companies and amazon may not have the desire to do those things, they sure make it easier for others by greedily collecting the data.

That doesn't happen. These companies don't sell user data and never have, they make money by being the only ones with your data through targeted advertisements. It's not in their interest to sell it.

It's called microtargeting, all big tech companys are sorting people in groups, just by their use of the service. It starts with simple things, for example: cats or dogs? And this goes deeper to your religion or sexuality, politics etc. Created mostly for advertising it got used by political parties. Check the Cambridge analytical scandal. If you easily able to sort the people for your target you are able to manipulate your targeted people.

Newest scandal for microtargeting came from the EU-Commission with the chatcontrol.

Cambridge Analytica stuff though I think mostly revolved around them identifying more vulnerable users.

I don't consider myself vulnerable to this stuff (I may consider grandparents and certain friends a bit more vulnerable) - should I still be worried about them having my personal data? I obviously would rather they don't have my vulnerable relatives data so they aren't manipulated, but for me personally does it matter?

You not considering yourself vulnerable to this stuff makes you exactly the type that is vulnerable to this stuff.

That's kind of silly really. Consider the example above where the woman gets fired for being pregnant. Now just pretend it was a man thing instead. What if you are diagnosed with a curable cancer, but your employer only sees oncology and fires you. What if they find out you go to a bar that is NEAR a gay bar and they just establish a policy that draws a radius around them? I can go on forever. You don't have control over what makes you vulnerable.

I think the best example is for women. Imagine they can figure out, with 95% accuracy or something, that you are pregnant, that could be valuable data.

Now imagine you are a woman at a large corporation who just got pregnant, but aren't telling anyone yet. Too early. Your corporation buys a batch of data and discovers there is a 95% chance you are pregnant. They don't want to pay for maternity leave or make reasonable accomodations during pregnancy or pumping breast milk. They fire you for "unrelated reasons", before you ever tell them you are pregnant.

Nothing illegal happened there really. You never told them so you have no way to prove they fired you for that.

This is very unlikely, because if they did it to more than a handful of people, the pattern would become immediately obvious.

Not necessarily. It doesn't have to be pregnancy either. It could be because you are 95% sure a Democrat. Or union friendly. Or atheist.

Bundle the "undesirables" in mass layoffs to increase the obfuscation of why they were laid off. "The algorithm said these 10% had to go."

The US and UK have both used data from period trackers to spy on women and monitor for "suspicious" miscarriages.

Governments in free, democratic countries are not supposed to spy on you without a probable suspicion of wrongdoing. Government agencies around the world get around that by "purchasing information" collected by private firms and use it to gain probable suspicion whenever they feel like.

Because then the authorities can get a warrant to access that information if they believe you are guilty of something.

In the case where a law is unjust or puts peoples' lives at risk, say like abortion laws in some US states, the government can use this against you as proof in a court of law.

Edit: here's another post about how this information is used against people:

https://feddit.uk/post/4030393

To add to this: Many people shrug this off saying they don't have anything to hide. Even assuming that is true, they usually mean they don't have anything to hide right now from their current authorities. Ask yourself the question: Is there absolutely no form of government/regime you might want to hide something from? Are you absolutely certain these authorities might not get access to your data? Doesn't even have to be a possible future government in your own country, it could be in some other country you might want to visit. Or maybe some terrorist organisation who for some reason targets people like you. Is there really absolutely no one you would mind having access to all the data collected about you?

The thing is, the data isn't going to be uncollected again. The way things are drifting the number of countries not in some way endangered by antidemocratic movements is constantly decreasing. Call me paranoid but I just don't want to risk it.

Good counter to people saying they have nothing to hide is the guy that lost his apple or google acct because he sent a photo of his child's rash to his doctor and it got flagged as CSA.

You don't need to have anything to hide to get fucked over by a lack of privacy.

Yep, one could imagine scenarios in Texas where women could in theory be arrested if their messaging app snitches on them and tells authorities about their planned abortion (since it's very easy for AI now to understand your conversations so it should be easy to automate in theory) or Google Maps reports them for having detected that they went to an abortion clinic.

It's not so much about you as an individual, it's about catalogueing and manipulating trends in our societies that can be used to make profit, for example Meta spends a lot of money and time manipulating election outcomes in favour candidates that will keep their taxes low through manipulating their content algorythm in favour of their desired candidates.

Corporations are scummy motherfuckers. Once they have this data they will keep it forever. Even if they don't have a use for it now they can come up with something in the future and will have no qualms about fucking you over with it. The technology available to analyze it is only getting more powerful as time goes on.

That's a lot of words to say "I don't know but everyone is saying it's bad."

That's not a lot of words to gobble corporate nutsack.

Damn that comment struck a nerve in you eh lol

I think if people knew the extent to which these big-data algorithms can figure out things about you just based on the links you click and posts you upvote then they would be more concerned. If it was just that they knew my location, age and interests then I wouldn't really care much but the reality is that they probably know stuff about me, that even I don't.

I simply don't like the fact that this database exists somewhere because it can come back to bite me one day. Just imagine what a fascistic government could use data like this for. Or maybe not even that, but remember how we first didn't have chatGPT and no one thought we would for years but then it just appeared and now it's there. Well what if tomorrow someone comes up with an equally fun tool that you can put any person's name into and it'll give you access to all this data. I want my page on that app to be very brief and inconsistent.

I'm perfectly aware that it's impossible to use the internet and not leave any tracks at all, but I want to make sure that my tracks are incredibly difficult to follow and preferably that they don't lead anywhere.

This whole thread makes me want to quit using the internet right now…

If so, What sorts of things can i do to avoid being tracked? Preferably without too much comprimise.

Stop using Chrome based browsers. Use Firefox or a Firefox derivative. Use adblockers such as Ublock origin or Adnausem, a plugin that will hide ads from you and click on the ads to mess up your digital footprint. Consent-o-matic is a plugin that will decline any cookies request from sites.

More technical inclined, For your home set your DNS servers to DNS.adguard.com, again blocks ads. Use containers with Firefox, it will limit the cross site tracking when you see a share with Google/Facebook/twitter. Those share butts are particularly nasty.

Do routers resolve domains for DNS? Would i need to enter an IP address? How will my router resolve DNS.adguard.com if it needs to use DNS to resolve the domain name? Sorry, that might be a dumb question.

The addresses are here under plain DNS

https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html

Something to keep in mind is that some ISP will intercept your DNS request and redirect them their own servers. DNS is done in clear text. If you are concerned about that you can use DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS to hide your queries. But that is a complex set up and not all devices/apps support DoT or DoH

Wait, adnauseum will clock on random ads for me? Does this make it an undetectable adblocker?

no it still gets detected because it is using Ublock Origin to hide the ads.

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When you have enough personal info about a population you can engineer advertisement so effectively that you can convince that population of almost everything. See Brexit.

It's not for your personal privacy, or to spare you personal embarrassment. But rather because large-scale demographic data collection is dangerous.

The Nazis used such collections to locate Jews. America used such collections to locate Japanese-Americans. The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal affiliation being printed on ID cards. In none of these cases were the data collected for the nefarious purposes it was eventually used for.

Information is a form of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power in the wrong hands is dangerous.

Personally I feel more easy minded because I know that whatever I do online leaves as little trace as usual. If I go out by myself say for a drive and I get back home I expect no one to ever know that I went away and where unless I decide to say so. Same goes for online activity. I would expect nothing to be tied to me and whatever I do to go unnoticed unless for some reason I agree with sharing such data. It's often said though that with privacy comes less convenience and that is true: not having app features ready before you even ask or easily paying or doing other things online so I see how wanting convenience over privacy can be preferable. For me though, the point I made in the beginning is stronger and motivates me.

Also on a side note I watched a video from Louis Rossman where he talked about some kind of police radio going stolen and the authorities went ask google for people in that area that searched that specific model online to help track that person down so... yeah, I'm already not a fan of leaving traces I don't want to leave. Let alone those that might make the authorities mistake me for a criminal.

Personally I'm trying to be as offline and anonimous as possible. I'm moving away from cloud storage and if a service can be used with a client without an account where I can locally save and back up things I like then I'm using that. The biggest challenge right now is youtube as a platform with that huge of a content and a decent algorithm for suggestions is yet to be created.

The biggest concern is that even if you are innocent, your data can and likely will at some point be used against you. This was proven by the Snowden Leaks. There are more than enough of these unfortunate cases, here are some examples:

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-location-data-avondale-wrongful-arrest-molina-gaeta-11426374

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

I can recommend Privacy Guides, it's a website created by volunteers to teach people about digital privacy and security. It's great for beginners.

If you are interested in the topic, join !privacy@lemmy.ml.

I'm sure there is a LOT of additional information about "what you can do", but here are some very simple starting points. You can do these today if you want.

  1. Only use Firefox with uBlock Origin installed/active for web browsing.
  2. Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). https://protonvpn.com is considered one of the best.
  3. Turn off location services on your phone (this will probably be controversial but I think it makes a lot of sense).

For more, subscribe to @privacy and read and support eff.org

Best wishes!

There's no one-liner that will make the importance of privacy "click" for most people, since it requires a bit of abstract thought, but this site is the closest I've seen to it: https://www.socialcooling.com

If you want to do something about it, check out privacyguides.org, or the lemmy community (and instance) run by its owner, !privacyguides@lemmy.one

Besides what other people are saying, big data is a thing, sometimes there are correlations no one is aware of, but an unbiased algorithm finds. Let me give you two facts:

  1. Insurance companies analyse personal history as well as general statistics when determining if they'll accept you and how much they'll charge you. e.g. a White middle aged man with some family history of heart problems will have a much higher price than a Black young woman without family history. This does not limit to insurance companies, banks can choose to not give you a loan based on any factors they choose, in fact any private business can do it.

  2. Some of the companies that do big data can predict that you're pregnant even before you know it, just basing on random factors like search queries and email contents. Think about this for a moment, you don't know that you're pregnant, but because you searched certain terms (even if they're completely unrelated to pregnancy) a company can know it. This is also true of other stuff, but because currently this is used for ads there's not much reason to specialise this to find things like health or financial conditions.

It's not unlikely that in the future insurance companies could buy that data and use it as an extra point of data to give you a quote or to deny you entirely. And this would be something like In average, 90% of people living in NY who search for the price of a flight to Rome within a couple of days of sending an email with the words "cigarette" and "help" suffer a heart attack within 5 years, so because you're trying to help a friend quit his cigarette addiction and are planning to visit Rome your insurance just went up, because there is a 90% chance you'll have a heart attack within some years based on big data analysis.

From what I understand and not trying to read any of the answers to this.

For the large part of the picture, it's about marketing. To market specifically to you that is based on where you've been, what you've bought before and what your interests are. So they know that you don't want to buy or subscribe into things you've no interest in at any capacity. So why not try to goad you into it by using things you're into because of the data collected that's filtered from your interests?

That's probably the only not-so worrisome thing I can think of. It's just a giant distraction and tool to get you to spend and subscribe.

A lot of people don't like to be tracked and having data collected because, we feel it isn't anyone's business in what we do. So, why should it be the business of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Firefox .etc to be concerned in what we do?

Aside from marketing, it'd be a lot easier for all of them to pinpoint exactly what we do to feed data to authorities for easier prosecution. Which depends on how you look at it, I just think that if you don't want to attract the attention of authorities who've been given a tip on you without you knowing, don't be a criminal.

All in all really and I'm starting to derail my own explanation, it's a big wiry issue with privacy.

To put it plainly, it's largely for marketing and we really feel it isn't the business of corporations to know what we're doing, if we're knowingly not breaking any laws. Also now that I've thought of it, harvesting so much data increases risk of security breaches that hackers can take. Which means it's going from bad hands to worse off hands because now hackers can just sell our data around in the black market and we wouldn't even know it.

If you comply with their interests, nothing. Once you do anything that even looks like being against their interests, they use this data. There are programs of called DARPA LifeLog which literally logs everything. They even create DeepFakes based on the data they collect, ofc, not officially.

Yes, never give any data more than you need to give and move towards free and minimal software.

Alternatives

Do you want to leave trace in your live, or will you disappear without a trace :v

...

All my life I give up all my data to any product of any company I use. I accept all cookies to track me, send auto-reports and telemetry, try to join all beta products and gladly report bugs that occur. I use one nickname everywhere it is available, my home address and phone number and all social network pages are easily googlable, all my profiles are public. I always say what I think. I'm from Kyiv, Ukraine, and I have never had a single negative occasion due to my Internet behavior. AMA.