Why I am such a Privacy Nut

[TwoTankAmin]

If you do not know this, I am privacy nut in terms of the internet. Nobody has the right to my data without my permission. I protect myself by what I do online and how I do it,

1. I have only one device to access the net- my PC
2. I store no history, cookies or passwords on the PC.
3. I am not registered on any social media and my Windows account is a local one.
4. I consider smart phones and apps to be spyware and pretty much do not use or have these.
5, I refuse to register on most sites that are not essential to my existence- so I am registered at banks, brokers, my medical practices my ISP and my encrypted email provider (which is not my ISP).
6. To access my crucial online sites I rely on 2 step verifications with the second step being a phone call to receive a code needed to get me onto the site.
7. I run some security software and add blockers to help protect me.

There is a bit more than the above but hat is the essence of it. There is currently an ongoing phone problem in NY and many people can not access secure sites via their landline. If we call the site to be given a code verbally we get rhough but they can not hear us speaking. I am one such person with the problem.

I was surfing to see if I could find onfo about the problem and wound up visiting the DownDetector site and the landing page had the following on it:

I an not registered on Facebook and do not visit their site. So why is Facebook trying to track me and take my data when I have no relationship with them at all. I know why, because they want to steal as many peoples data as they can and they want to do so from folks who have nothing to do with them. If they are trying to do this to me what do those of you who do use Facebook etc. are having done to you since you give such sites a blank check to track you all the time when you register on them. For those of you who have read George Orwell's novel 1984, you will understand the image below:

 

[Magnum Man]

I understand fully, I'm just trying to be the guy they have no need to track... my wife's cousin. when she was in the Air Force, used to redirect "the" big spy satellite... well, she couldn't just point it where she wanted, but apparently, there was some "flexability" , when swinging it from one location to another, one day she had the chance to swing it over her dad's house, & he happened to be on the patio reading the news paper, & she could tell him what story he was reading...

somewhere, someone is watching... I think the key, is to be so boring, that no one wants to know what you're doing...

 

[Fishmanic]

@TwoTankAmin If you give me your password for your bank, I can check for you to be sure it's not on the dark web. That should put your mind at ease.

 

[Back in the fold]

I do not understand this obsession with people’s personal information . Is it nothing other than collecting what businesses and publications you view so that they can tailor advertising to you or is it something sinister ? Can they possibly get into your bank account or use your credit cards ? Is it the government making up an undesirables list ? What’s the story ?

 

[TwoTankAmin]

@Back in the fold

That is exactly what they hope you believe. Let's suppose the government is making such a list. How would you know? Who is it that might be deciding whether you are an undesirable or not?

"Ignorance in bliss." from “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” by the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray: “Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.’” What you don't know can't hurt you is another way to say this. And it is BS. If you went to the doctor and he discovered you had cancer would you prefer not to know this? I mean if you do not know, you will not worry about what is to come.

And those collecting a lot of your data may have the best of intentions. Then what about the hackers who get into their system and they now have your information and the intention of using it for purposes that you prefer they could not. And you might not even be told your data was stolen by bad actors.

I for one am unwilling to have my privacy invaded. If you do not mind that is your decision and an expression of your agreement to let it happen. I do not agree and I object to having somebody like Facebook doing it. By not registering with them I am essentially saying keep your nose out of my business and Facebook is basically saying they don't care they will try to take my info anyway.

 

[fishorama]

I'm not quite as paranoid as 2tank, but my privacy is important. I don't store anything to the "cloud", nor do I have a smart phone (yet?). I do have a FB acct but only for family & only close folks. I don't care that my dinner or fish experiences are of any importance here on TFF or to anyone else but it's fun to share minor ways. If you know my first name, we're almost too close for my comfort, lol...but I have shared it with a few here...Shhh! Don't tell!!

 

[GaryE]

I'm not concerned about government surveillance in this. I am concerned about private corporation surveillance. What they gather, they can sell.

The insurance industry would love to get all the ancestry DNA data people have volunteered. I know people in insurance, and the business is salivating over the possibilities to deny coverage or raise premiums based on that.

When I write, I have to use Microsoft products. It's what the customer wants. If I stop them tracking my prose for AI training, I can't open new files. That happened to me this afternoon. I thought I could opt out. And yet on top of that, I have to pay for the apps. Grrr.

Do we have options? Sure, we can drop out and deal with healthcare, finances etc all being smartphone oriented. I have been in places where cash was no longer a real option, without a lot of delay and trouble. Hey, even my aquarium lights are bluetooth run from my phone.

So I try to be as useless to the spy economy as I can be, but they are very good at extracting value from me.

AI is interesting. I have a new Windows laptop, and it gives me a news and entertainment feed. I have done what I can to confuse the evil algorithms for now (it won't work for long), and that news site and the reels are interesting. They want my religious views. Will I click on Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Mormon, Sikh or Jewish preachings? They feed them all to me. They want that profile badly. They know my sports interests. So they give me fake clickbait articles on baseball and hockey trades. I don't click on them because they aren't credible sources. Above all, they treat me like I'm an idiot. Half the things they want me to look at would be perfect for a simpleton's entertainment. AI is going to feed us wallpaper glue for our minds - superstition, hate week ranters, and clips on awful Sixties bands (they must be guessing my age).

The only freedom is to drop out of the internet entirely. It isn't going to happen with me.

 

[Fishfunn]

If you do not know this, I am privacy nut in terms of the internet. Nobody has the right to my data without my permission. I protect myself by what I do online and how I do it,

1. I have only one device to access the net- my PC
2. I store no history, cookies or passwords on the PC.
3. I am not registered on any social media and my Windows account is a local one.
4. I consider smart phones and apps to be spyware and pretty much do not use or have these.
5, I refuse to register on most sites that are not essential to my existence- so I am registered at banks, brokers, my medical practices my ISP and my encrypted email provider (which is not my ISP).
6. To access my crucial online sites I rely on 2 step verifications with the second step being a phone call to receive a code needed to get me onto the site.
7. I run some security software and add blockers to help protect me.

There is a bit more than the above but hat is the essence of it. There is currently an ongoing phone problem in NY and many people can not access secure sites via their landline. If we call the site to be given a code verbally we get rhough but they can not hear us speaking. I am one such person with the problem.

I was surfing to see if I could find onfo about the problem and wound up visiting the DownDetector site and the landing page had the following on it:

View attachment 358076

I an not registered on Facebook and do not visit their site. So why is Facebook trying to track me and take my data when I have no relationship with them at all. I know why, because they want to steal as many peoples data as they can and they want to do so from folks who have nothing to do with them. If they are trying to do this to me what do those of you who do use Facebook etc. are having done to you since you give such sites a blank check to track you all the time when you register on them. For those of you who have read George Orwell's novel 1984, you will understand the image below:

Also use a VPN so your ISP cant sell the links you visited to anyone.

I agree 100% with you. Google got away with data piracy and the government did nothing about it.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

I do not get much spam fromanywher. I get nothing from Microsoft at all. But I have a local account not a Microsoft account. I am not registered an soclial media anywhere unless you want to consider the few fish sites I am on to be social media. Since I do not use those sites, I have no reason to visit them.

Since I do not use a smart phone, that piece of spyware is not an issue for me, Since I do not download apps, they are not an issue. Since I do not store any history or cookies they also are not an issue. Like i said I ogt my first PC in 1987. I first went onto the net at the end of 1998.

When Verizon decided they wanted to fish my emails and redid their Email service using AOL as the new provider, they wanted us all to asign a new user agreements allowing this. So, I started to deleyte all my enails from AOL until they stoppedallowing me into my account until I agrred to their new user terms. Instead I switched to and encrypted service in Switzerland. They cannot read my eamils, In fact they cannot even tell me my pword as one must give them permission to see it. So, I cannot contact them to ask for my pword were I to forget it.

I refuse to do anything in the could. After all the cloud is just somebody elses computer. And AI scares the heck out of me. I see it as akin to atomic energy. Great for making electricity, bad when used for making bombs. The same applied to all the digital technology. It is great AI can read a colonoscopy better than a doctor, it is not great that it can spoof anybody or any event one desires. Gone are the days where seeing is believing.

So, my choice is not to go along to get along. No smart phone, I register almost nowhere that is not absolutely essential. So I shop an Amazon, I post on a few fish sites but I joinalmost nowhere. I watch things on Youtube, I search on Google and Google Scholar, but I am not a registered Google user. I avoid all social media like facebook, X, instagram, Tik Tok etc. etc. and always have.

None of those places as well as a smart phone do not offer me enough benefits to even consider using them. I use an old Garmin Nuvi as my GPS device. My car does not have one built in. I expect to die owning that car. I cannot use touch screen because keeping fish combined with naturally dry skin means most time I touch a screen nothing happens. I do own a flip phone for voice call when out of the house. It is not turned on 95% of the time and it has no touch screen.

My screen has no camera on it and I do not have a microphone attached to my PC either. I refuse to opt for the Verizon voice contolllable remote control either. I am not willing to bug my home.

I will admitthat being an old bachelor with no offspring of any sort that I have alot less reason to have a smart phone. I can almost count the people who know my flip phone number on my fingers. I see the present state of affairs dragging the human race down not uplifting us. It is not bringing us together is is doing the opposite.

I would bet many of the members on this site are here because they prefer it to what they can find on social media. Imo any information one might get from social media is likely unreliable and not accurate. But most folks reading this have been brainwashed into believeing the opposite. Your information is not being taken form you, you are handing it over willingly.

I will end this post with an interesting observation. I have been breeding and selling several of the rarer, harder to find and more expensive plecos since 2006. I have never had a website for this. I am not using social media to sell either. But, over the years people always seem to find me to buy my fish. I have been a vendor at the NEC for years and I do room sales when I attend the bi-annual Catfish Convention. So this works a bit like advertising.

I have also been a member on a few fish sites over the years which is also a help. Planetcatfish has been very helpful in this respect which is why I am one of th bigger donors there. I do list plecos for sale there now and then. When I do I sell them for less than normal and I also donate 10% of the proceeds to the site. But I only allow members in good standing on the site and who have been there for at leas t3 months. You cannot join solely to buy my fish. When I got started with the pleco breeding I was working with zebra plecos. If you bought 10, you received 11. I did not talk about this I just did it.

I had one buyer I sent a box and I was going away for that weekend, I called from my desitination to make sure the box got there OK and the fish were all alive. He said nothing about the extra fish, no thank you. I think he must have though I cound not count to 10 and the extra fish had been a mistake, Maybe he feared if he mentioned it I would ask him to pay for it or to return it. Before the conversation ended he knew the truth and did thank me.

Some of my better fish fiends spread around the country came to be because the people tracked me down to get my fish. Fishorama who recently joined the site is a friend I have never met in person. But when I needed somebody to adopt a few of my older zebras which I felt were unfair to sell, she agreed to adopt them and be their retirement home so I could close down their tank. She is an accomplished and knowlegeable fish keeper, so I know the fish went to a good home. And I do know her real name.

 

[seangee]

I have worked in software for over 30 years, including for companies such as Samsung and Microsoft. For the last 5 years I have been working with cyber crime (prevention NOT perpetration ).
As a result I am way more paranoid than @TwoTankAmin

 

[MaloK]

Over the years I ended up using strong edge devices for a real routing solution with a complete security package that does not rely on subscription, that actively deals with all unwanted network activity, detects attempts and automatically black list and tarpit, With precise reporting any suspicious activity can be assessed and mitigated quickly, in conjunction with forced hardened DNS service that will actively prevent connection to illicit ip's

In addition of a serious antivirus suite on each station, the use of open software browser with open software Add / tracking blocker.

A couple little twist that you can add to your Hosts file. And modification you can do to Your browser.

It's been decades that I have not dealt with a direct infection of any kind on my network.

It took a very long time to 1st Have a working completely stripped version of W10 that is brought to W7 status, de-crapified and de-bloated that does nothing in your back. 2nd choose an internet browser that has the full blown support for CSS alteration within the browser and an Add blocker that have the same capability. 3rd create rule packs that actively remove crappy code from web pages.

Lately I thought I lost it but with a little work, got it back. The only place I let publicity appear is on amazon.

All others standard stations goes trough the sanitation process and there's NO publicity showing up. NO where not even video embedded no tracking is aloud. My work computer goes much further with all the security packages activated and CIA style encryption, passwords and user names.

It's been the status-quo for so long, that sometimes I fix computers of friends that are loosely configured and have access to everything...

And the Sh*t that's going on in there terrifies me.

 

[Back in the fold]

@TwoTankAmin Thanks for giving me nightmares .

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Well I have a vision in the future of the Google - Facebook wars. Many phones, tablets and PCs will die before it ends.

And I am sure when Elon Musk dies X will mark the spot where he is buried.....