this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
93 points (91.2% liked)
Asklemmy
44119 readers
648 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As a lemmy user i can click your name and scroll trough a list of all posts and comments you have made. Thats your data and its currently free for the taking to any corporation.
Eventually instances may develop ways to protect their users from this for example make posts only visible to verified human members that are members of a community. Now imagine a user joining such community from the meta threads apps. It wouldn’t be beneath them to fulltime record the app screen and ocr all the text the user sees.
They can, and do, scrape any public data I post regardless. As long as they cannot link it to my name, email address, phone number, bank account, social security number or health records, I don't care.
At some point meta tried purchasing anonymized patient data from hospitals.
We are also discovering there are many subtle way to identify a person, like grammar, spelling speech patterns (tor specifically warns against this).
Chances are high they already have some data on you, all they need is enough subtle unique things in your data to rule out anyone else. Based on the times your most active and references you might make.
Now i am not a zuck owned superai but to give you my human attempt for an initial culling:
A social security number is the name of the American name of such number. Purposely sounding American is a strategy on itself for non Americans but the act of trying to hide your identity by pretending to be from the us can be an identifier as-well. You also seem to be more on the political left so your your likely part one of 160 mil people (for convenience i am assuming a 50% split in left/right ideology in the us)
In most countries your isp have some of your personal details your isp is also able to see all the internet domains you visit. They cant see what you do on them but because every instance has its own domain they have a timestamped list of all federated instances you visit.
It only takes that info to be leaked/hacked or sold for the big corps to obtain it. Of course if you use a vpn your isp cant see the domain but if you do have a vpn congratulations cause its yet another identifier and they too can be hacked or be selling this data.
The best way and only (still not guaranteed) way to remain anonymous is by using tor browser in windowed mode. Refraining from interacting and if you post to run your speech trough an ai algorithm to generalize/neutralize any personality from it.