I wish to convince my friends and family to avoid using privacy-invading ad-based services and apps. Seeing people discuss how much data these companies collect off of us, I want to know if there is a way you could get a sample of that data by yourself and show it to them for them to realize the gravity of the situation themselves.
The closest thing is Google’s ad personalization panel in the Google Account Dashboard. It literally lists out the information of the account holder by the things they’ve browsed, including their gender, age, occupation, interests etc. I could’ve used it to show to my family but I turned off ad personalization for all their accounts a few years back so they aren’t even aware of it.
The next closest thing to this could be browser fingerprinting tests but they wouldn’t be able to understand the tech jargon from the results anyway. Also I am not planning to go to the ‘deep web’ for this. Is there any other way I could get this done, like a website/app specifically designated for this purpose, for opening some sort of userlog in the accounts page?
I personally like to show how easy it can be to cyberstalk someone.
I pulled up a friend’s LinkedIn and pasted their bio text into Google line-by-line until I got a trail to a very old LiveJournal which had links to a NSFW Tumblr (before the purge). What led me there was a phrase that they used frequently in conversation and on the bio. It was their “bone apple tea” moment that made it VERY easy to pin down. I also followed the username trail to some fanart on DeviantArt, and a snapshot of an old website on archive.org.
I present that, then tell them if I can build a profile like this with less than an hour’s work, imagine what data processors can do with the amount of data harvested from voluntarily accepting an “invasion” policy, especially if they (the data processors) are able to automatically match speech patterns to users!
Just send them the new report on Nissan of the Mozilla foundation 😂
Not just Nissan so many of the car companies do this.
Here is the Mozilla listing https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
IMO the problem is rather “What they gonna do with my data? Show me better ads? Nice.”
I’ve met a ton of people that just don’t care. The problem often isn’t that they don’t know companies are collecting a shit-ton of data. That’s really not new or isolated to tech companies.
“If I get better ads and it saves me time, what do I care?”
“I’m getting something for free. What does it matter if they know?”“It’s too much work to avoid”
If you’re willing to spend 40$, various data brokers will sell you all the information people in this thread have mentioned
Buy Congress data weekly and make it public. Watch some privacy laws happen damn fast.
If it were that easy, someone would have done it already.
Can dou you name some? I highly doubt that you can buy data from a specific person.
You would need a lot of data and the know how to trace that data back to a specific account/user
Maybe with good targeting it can be done with buying less data
Disgusting that we need to pay for it
Facebook Offline Activity page. It displays the activity you have performed on external websites. This was the trigger for me to disable my FB account
but now you can’t see what they collect about you 😐
Show them the consequeces. You might scare a few people who are already anxious by showing data collected, but most people will be apathetic. Illustrate why its bad. Be systemic about it.
The stunt outlined elsewhere of texting someone with their info is good, but “we all know google isn’t going to threaten us” is the prevailing attitude. Demonstrate what google is going to do and how it hurts people individualy and directly. Until there are personal consequences, peopae won’t really care.
If it’s worth $3 to you, I recommend “Take This Lollipop”.
It used to be free, but I guess they gotta eat too.
It’s basically a creepy interactive movie that uses a person’s own personal data to scare them about privacy and what they put on the net.
Seems cool. Are there many jumpscares?
Nah, the horror comes from how much data people leak online.
John Oliver’s Edward Snowden interview where they talk about the fact that the government collects people’s dick pics. If that doesn’t make them care, nothing will.
Honesty I’ve kinda given up trying to show normies that privacy is important. And have started to focus on making my own digital life as private as I can. Some will wake up and come ask you, and then you can share what you know with them and help them switch to privacy respecting tech and practises.
For example I recently converted a friend to Linux and they even bought a System76 laptop and has been very happy with it( I’m an old Thinkpad lover).
Or they will simply suffer the eventually inevitable consequences due to how little people care, and how much big companies and governments are willing to take advantage of that.
It’s not that I don’t think it’s a worthy fight and won’t continue to at least get called crazy for mentioning that it matters. But don’t be surprised how little most people care.
Way back in the early days of Justin/Twitch, if people wouldn’t listen about their data security being important, what I did was simply look up their home addresses and phone numbers and texted them the information.
Had them get on fixing their digital footprint quite fast.
Yeah OP, just dox them, what could go wrong?
I take it reading isn’t your strongsuit?
I rather clearly stated I sent their own info to themselves on their own private phones, I didn’t dox them, you dumbass.
I misread, but at least I’m not a dick to strangers online for no reason.
Like, say, accusing someone of doxxing people?
It was a comment made it jest. Would adding “/s” have made a difference to you?
I used to have a plugin that mapped how many companies were getting data from the website I was on. I’m not sure if it still exists.
One eye opener that’s easily accessible is going into their Facebook third party data agreements. If it’s not turned off they’ll probably be shocked about how permissive the data is. Just visiting a website can result in a Facebook agreement to share data with that company. It’s one of the reasons apps suddenly know random things you were just talking to somebody about. It gets keyed up instantly and they start that whole analysis of shadow profiles stuff industry experts talk about.
Show them exactly what the company says the collect in plane language not legalese.
Haha plane language. Like whats up my Airbus?
