Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Partner started receiving ads in foreign language they don't speak (infosec.pub)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm learning a language, I speak it in public to other people who do. I don't research the language, because I have some old text books on it. My partner doesn't speak it and doesn't research it on their devices. I don't normally have my phone on me in public, but my partner does. It took about 4 months of publicly speaking in the language before they got ads

What do you think this means?

::edit::

It was a Reddit ad and my city has embraced those AI smart cameras, so I assume some of those are Google owned which makes sense with Reddit and Google's recent alliance. This is assuming our devices aren't listening to us without our permission and AI cameras are mining data on passersby

Other theories are that since cellphones are involved it doesn't matter if I nor my partner ever searched for the language, at some point my phone or partner's phone was near someone who spoke that language and the data brokers/ad sellers inferred from there

Seems like the consensus is that I must have posted in the language on some social media or used Google to research it or made some new friends who speak the language and that's why

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So your theory is the there is no opsec if any cellphones or anything with GPS are involved?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That sounds legit. If your GPS location is on at all times (assuming this is on your cellphone), then they've got enough geolocation data to associate you to your partner.

And if it's off? Your SIM card is acting like a GPS (though a less-accurate one than your phone). Do you trust your mobile service provider to not be selling this data? (And this would be even more of a factor if they're also your partner's service provider, and/or your ISP)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, so a mitigation would be to remove the GSM chip and be WiFi only, with a Faraday cage to ensure the WiFi is not on by accident or the software is backdoored. Also would need to remove the mic and speakers to avoid any cross chatter

But at that point might as well just have a laptop with external WiFi only

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Anddd... You use wifi to connect to their servers, so they'll have your residential ip (unless you got a VPN on at all times... And even then there's probs some way to fingerprint you enough). Partner uses the same wifi network and your profiles are linked again...

There really just is no way to completely escape. Blocking all ads and trackers on a DNS level (using a pi-hole or external service like nextdns[paid, but its pretty good]). Is a good solution though, at least you won't need to actually see ads