Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
view the rest of the comments
If I’m reading an article on espn.com for free, there has to be some value exchange. I either need to pay to read the article or I need to be willing to be included in future advertising to people who have read that article. We haven’t come up with a better model to support free content on the Internet than advertising.
I would be willing to pay 5p to read that article if there was an automatic and easy mechanism to deliver that transaction to espn.com.  I want their journalists to get paid and I want the content to keep existing. But I’m also not such a dedicated fan of that site that I’m ready to subscribe monthly. The last thing we need is an Internet full of subscription paywalls.
So in the meantime, if the fact that I read an article on espn.com about rugby scores puts me in an audience of people who like rugby and this complicated web of advertising is going to show me rugby ads and ESPN is going to make money from that and that is going to keep the articles free … sure, whatever they gotta do I guess. I’m not sharing anything personal or private with espn.com so if they want to pass that along to 1600 other places so I can keep reading for free… whatevs.  It’s not the model I would’ve chosen but I don’t have a better plan to keep ESPN in business. 
Sure, but that's not the only article you read on the internet that morning. Every other site you hit took a similar fingerprint of you and soon those tiny "this profile/user likes rugby" data points start to add up. Swapped across 1700 (that we know about from this article) on a constant basis makes it easy to target you, specifically, when "this profile likes rugby" and "visits these sites from this network while that phone is at a certain geolocation during these hours" and "this device pinged this website every weeknight approx 20 min after that other device on the same network closed the Instagram app and started snoring."
All pulled together into their model of you, as a digital pawn to be pushed whichever way they think will make them the most money that day.
Where's the consent?
I give my name, age and weight to whatever health app, and yeah, I think it's normal to expect a few marketing outreach attempts from them and their advertising partners down the line. But even that's pushing it for me, and once it feels like spam, we all deserve an easy way to turn it the fuck off.
There's no consent with this shit they're pulling. It's unacceptable. Fuck their feelings or considering their business model. It's certainly not being reciprocated.