People just trying to live their life can have a camera shoved in their face or be filmed from afar, and judged however the uploader wants. Add editing and harassment is a real problem.

Passenger on a plane? Now you're the unwitting subject of an "influencer" 's video and you can end up being sent around the Web without having any idea or recourse. Influencers also deliberately making themselves as obnoxious as possible and filming passers by "staring" at them.

Most of us trade data for convenience every day, location tracking for maps, saving passwords in our browser, cloud backups for photos, and using autofill for payments. It feels harmless until we realise how much of our identity is stored on someone else’s servers.

Every device in our lives is quietly collecting data. Laws like GDPR and India’s new DPDP Act exist, but enforcement is patchy. Once your data leaks, there’s no way to “get it back”. It’s permanent exposure.

How do you balance privacy vs convenience? Do you use privacy-first tools or do you just accept that surveillance is a part of modern life?

So, I requested a takeout of my data and whilst sifting through the data I had found my old boarding pass with my NAME and DOB and 5 AUDIO RECORDINGS WITH MY VOICE from my Google home.

Give me grace, these were from 4 years ago when I didn't really know about all these privacy alternatives and the data these companies collect. But holy shi, this is my first time feeling somewhat disturbed.

I already unplugged my google home and i didn't give any other identifying info (other than my location, since my Google home probably snitched).

However, I'm not sure what to do with my email. I know that will most definitely never delete my data, so I need advice on things; is there any point in deleting the account and hope they miraculously delete the date? Or do I leave it and switch to tuta and/or proton and reroute everything there.

Any other advice is welcomed too.

I had requested them to delete all my information, including my messages, and I even went forward to give them every message ID I had in Discord by requesting my data earlier this month. Still, they refused to delete all of my messages. All they did was claim that they would delete some of the chats I no longer had access to, and even then they failed. What should I do, and how can I pressure them to delete my data since I am done with Discord and I want to take my privacy more seriously now?

I'm slowly degoogling and I saw a video from Louis Rossmann about Google storying old voice chats and voice recordings so I decided to download all the data from my google account (takeout it's called) and check myself.

I was astonished! I used to use an Android phone in the past for many years so this is what I've found so far (even though I've restricted google from tracking my data and deleting it as much as i can).

- All my online activity, literally everything, what device, serial id (if I bought the phone from google), logins and general activity info, all my activities on drive and google services

- Recordings of my voice for training "Hey Google".

- All my online purchases, even old ones that I would like to delete but cannot...

- All my old chats on google meet, all my meetings and meetings I've partecipated in and for how long

- Data that I deleted from my account (like my previous phone number for verification purposes).

- My fitness data, even derived data which I've no idea what it means, probably phone tracking steps rather than fitness watch.

And much MUCH more.

It's crazy how much we give away for free. If some government authority or other bad actors wanted to track me they would absolutely do it in NO TIME. I'm not in any danger but still I don't like that.

I hope that once I delete the account all my data will go away. I will try my best to delete it and obfuscate it before deleting but seeing how they store absolutely everything you do, even old data entries that you deleted or chagend I find hard to believe that I will be able to wipe all my data from Google.

Hey guys,

with all the talks about "chat control" and the governmental fight against encryption, I started thinking about the encryption of actual hard drives or SSD's, where we all like to save our most private stuff on.

Let's say we've got a AES-encrypted hard drive with a password containing 30 characters (upper-case letters, lower-case letters, numbers and so on).

I believe if someone would be able to decrypt it, it would probably be a governmental entity, but what would it probably need to be successful? How realistic is that? Are there developments in technology to enable that?

I've been using Ollama a lot and wanted a really clean, polished, and native way to interact with my privately hosted models on my iPhone. While there are some great options out there, I wanted something that felt like a first-party Apple app—fast, private, and simple.

Husk is an open-source, Ollama-compatible app for iOS. The whole idea is to provide a beautiful and seamless experience for chatting with your models without your data ever leaving your control.

Features:

• Fully Offline & Private: It's a native Ollama client. Your conversations stay on your devices.
• Optional iCloud Sync: If you want, you can sync your chat history across your devices using Apple's end-to-end encryption (macOS support coming soon!).
• Attachments: You can attach text-based files to your chats (image support for multimodal models is on the roadmap!).
• Highly Customisable: You can set custom names, system prompts, and other parameters for your models.
• Open Source: The entire project is open-source under the MIT license.

To help support me, I've put Husk on the App Store with a small fee. If you buy it, thank you so much! It directly funds continued development.

However, since it's fully open-source, you are more than welcome to build and install yourself from the GitHub repo. The instructions are all in the README.

I'm also planning to add macOS support and integrations for other model providers soon.

Android Users

I've just started the Android Version! I wanted to build both apps natively. I created and lunched the iOS app early hoping I get some contributors to improve/fix some bugs whilst I create the Android version as I'm only one guy 😅 If you're interested, leave a comment here and I'll ping you once its ready!

I'd love to hear what you all think! Any feedback, feature requests, or bug reports are super welcome.

TL;DR: I made a native, private, open-source iOS app for Ollama. It's a paid app on the App Store to support development, but you can also build it yourself for free from the Github Repo

As the title says, I’m interested in finding out sites that are known for selling info. I’d like to try to register and give information that’s just a little off… such as giving a burner phone # that I can access via an app.

Anyone know which site so greedy they sell info asap?

EDIT: I’ve been trying this and registering on many sites with a burner email forwarding account and burner phone number but so far haven’t seen anything happen. Would love to know at least 1 site that sells info. Second question, how long would it take before I start seeing the effects of this?

Hi, everyone! I’ve run into a frustrating and potentially concerning situation and wondered if I was overreacting:

I bought something online from a store powered by Shopify, which sent updates through the Shop app by default. But here’s the kicker: I can’t track my package unless I download the Shop app — and apparently it only works within the app. I’d rather wait than install software just to know where my delivery is.

Has anyone else encountered this? I’m concerned about the privacy implications when apps become mandatory for basic functionality.

I run and everyone around me is using Strava these days and some see me as eccentric for refusing to. I can't be bothered to learn what privacy terms they have because I simply refuse to sign up to anything (even with anonymous emails) and be exposed to a data breach like MyFitnessPal a while back.

I feel a little silly calculating my pace based on the time on my stopwatch app and distance using maps but I prefer this inconvenience.

Am I the only one?

Sorry for the post, I'm relatively new around these quarters, and I'ven't seen it put this way.

So google says it doesn't give out data, unless it is legally/judicially needed or consented by us. (Signing in — Somehow I missed the note where I was told it is a consent of data access. Rookie here, sir)

Benefit of doubt, granted.

The messed up thing, is analytics. To infer from loose pieces of data.. To try to infer motivations behind my each click and clank, (ref: Target predicted a teen pregnancy) fucked up beyond 1984 sir. It is.

Privacy policies fixate on data sharing, but barely talk about analytics. Shouldn't we demand to know how exactly our data is used? And opt out from certain named analytics? "Right to be left the fuck alone"?

TL DR : Privacy is not just about who keeps the data, but mostly on how they use it. Transparency is about using data only in the ways agreed upon. Privacy policies lack that.

Yeah, thoughts?

I had this idea the other night and I have no idea if it makes any sense at all but hear me out. So I was thinking about the battle between ad blockers and youtube, and its seems to me that a major problem is that YouTube/Google somehow knows what your using in your own browser. Which I think is total bullshit no one else but the owner of the web browser should know which ad ons or plugin the user is using.

So I thought what if there was a way to use a local proxy of a web browser that is essentially a stripped down functional clone of the web browser your using (or something different) to act as a middle man between the websites and your actual browser. I thought maybe this would give the user more control and mask information contained in the actual browser without giving website hosters that information about your browser. And hopefully not allow youtube to not know whether or not you’re using an ad blocker.

This is just some idea I had and im sure there is a lot of problems with it, but I personally don’t know why this wouldn’t work at least for some of the privacy type problems.

What do you guys think of this idea? Would something like this actually help at all?

First of all, I'm quite aware that Windows sucks for privacy. Saddly, I must use it for a number of reasons.

Since I'm stuck with windows, is there a guide somewhere on what can I do to increase my privacy on a windows machine?

I've found lots of stuff on the net, but a guide or site that gathers all this information would save me a lot of time. Does such a thing exist?

Recently I was at Privacy Tools looking at some tools, more of curiosity. And so I came across a list of search tools, like a tests browser, but search tools. And there I spoke of a good part of these tools. Mostly, it was said that it was or was not self-tasty, focused on profit or not focused.

In the middle of that, there was the Searxng instance called "Tiekoetter". Then I started trying to use her, and it worked well.

So far I'm having a great experience. But is this really safe or private? I thought that to use Searxng had to be self-tasted via docker or something. I did not know that there was public instances. And curiously, according to the site. They say it is a self-tasty instance.

Then. Is this really safe or private? What would you say about it?

Is whatsapp selling my data , is there any proof for it or just a maybe ?

I do have some experience where i saw ads after my whatsapp chats.

Hello, first time posting here, I didn't know what tag to put. Recently, a No caller ID called me, which I picked up out of curiosity. After i hung up, (Presumed it was a bot), It called again saying my first name, and later my home address. Note that it was not a bot, as the person on the other end whispered it through the call. He also apparently found pictures of me, and described how i looked on call.
I disabled Show Caller ID after.
Do you have any idea how he might've done this? He was able to find the information rather fast, and found a lot of information about me, I'm guessing solely on the phone number.

Online debit cards paid for with crypto? Looking for something like that

I want to sell a used process/CPU online, but I'm concerned with privacy. I just tried to list it on eBay, but their payment processor Ayden requires me to upload scans of the front and back of my drivers license, as well as provide bank information. I'm concerned about the privacy issues that could arise by associating a photo of my face in conjunction with my contact information on the Internet. It seems like every major website has been hacked, and theft of this data would make identity theft much easier (especially with AI image generation of my likeness). It's too much of a risk just to sell a $150 item.

Are there any alternatives to eBay that aren't so invasive?

Hi !

So in another sub a user posted about using faceseek to delete her college party days, so I checked it out and found photos of me on websites I never used and it faceseek doesn’t show me the full website name, so I can’t go to it and ask for them to take it down.

What can I do next?

At this point I don't trust any social media company telling me that they have deleted my content.

I just recently posted how I discovered Reddit doesn't actually delete accounts and they are still recoverable after "permanently deleting" them.

If I've posted something on Instagram, am I fucked for sharing pictures of me?

Kyle Chayka’s recent New Yorker piece paints a bleak picture of the internet’s future under new ID-verification laws. On paper they protect users, but in practice they risk dismantling what remains of the open web.

im currently torn about how this location data is used by Samsung and not sure if I should trust them. Im curious how many of you strictly only use a Web browser to check the weather, thanks!