Privacy

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1458484/nitter-update-oct-10th-seeking-funding-and-legal-help

Hacker News.

Source: Nitter.

As the title says, I’m trying to find a bookmark manager with peer2peer syncing and can work between browser engines. I’m currently jumping around different browsers to figure out which to stick with (all have something I don’t like for now). I have a ton of bookmarks I want to bring along but I don’t have the time/want/energy to set up a homelab at this point in time, which means no NextCloud and no DAV, which by extension means no Floccus since it relies on DAV.

I don’t care if the P2P functionality is built in or if it writes to a local file that has to rely on Syncthing for syncing between devices. That being said Syncthing would be a plus. I’ve been looking around all day and can’t find anything that’d work. The closest thing I’ve found is xBrowserSync, but that looks like it’s abandoned.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/canada@lemmy.ca/p/999377/signal-vp-reminds-lawmakers-the-secure-messaging-app-wont-comply-with-bill-c-22-betakit

Secure messaging service Signal is still ready to shut down its Canadian operations if Bill C-22, known as the Lawful Access Act, becomes law and is enforced. >

Meta's AI Agent Muse maps users and their contacts—including people who don’t use Muse—and shares anonymized insights across its system, according to a TIME investigation of its internal instructions.

first of all i wanna say i have already tried a linux box with plasma bigscreen and its unfortunately not my thing

SO something that's easy to use (like an android box) and has support for youtube adblocking (and maybe even sponsorblock). I'm not looking to use a little keyboard controller to navigate a desktop ui, i would like to use a standard enough remote and navigate something that was made for a tv

i know this is like impossible and it doesn't need to be crazy private, just something that doesn't take all of my yummy data :)

thank guy

When I read that the US had proposed making ESTA visitors hand over five years of their social media, I asked myself, would I even want to go there now? Then I went looking at where all that information ends up. Part 1 of my Five Eyes series.

This was an incredible documentary. I was too young to grasp the whole Snowden thing when it happened so this was a great recap. But I have a question. This all happened, but what was the aftermath of these leaks? It seems people today have completely forgotten about this or don't really care, so that domain kind of failed. And were there any consequences for the NSA, any legislative intervention, anything at all, or was it just <insert "we're sorry" south park meme>. Do we have to assume nothing changed and the surveillance is still in place or probably even worse?

USPS says the cameras, put on USPS truck dashboards, will scan roads, signs, and more.

The United States Postal Service is running a pilot program to put cameras in its mail carrier trucks that continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks, and improve “community safety,” according to a letter posted by a labor union and a statement from the agency to 404 Media. The idea is that, since the trucks are constantly traveling anyway, they can be used as a way to collect data, eventually potentially across the nation.

The letter, written by the United States Postal Service (USPS) Labor Relations to Brian Renfroe, the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, says the USPS will partner with Next Base, a dashcam company, for the pilot. At the moment, the cameras will be used in the Washington, DC area, and will be installed on a hundred vehicles, the letter says.

On its website, Next Base offers a variety of dash cams, marketed to ordinary drivers, fleet operators, and ride share drivers. Its website says Next Base’s cameras record in up to 4K, and can capture every “license plate” with precision. The cameras don’t run automatic license plate reader (ALPR) software, though.

The pilot was slated to start on September 21, and is expected to last several months, the letter says.

USPS trucks already have 360 degree cameras that capture the outside of the vehicle for a period of time.

Cross posted from https://piefed.ca/c/privacy@lemmy.ca/p/870753/gamers-nexus-forcing-vpn-companies-to-become-palantir-canada-s-data-harvesting-law-ca-22

• Invidious
• Youtube

Sometimes I will share a resource on YouTube here. I think it is good on its own for the community, but really its a good intro to share with friends and family.

People often push back because of the link being YouTube, fair, but simply saying find a front end is kind of entailed. Many that are public go down and never come back, and the link does have the video ID at the end of the URL so if you are self hosting you can just load it up.

"End-to-end encrypted email, hosted in Germany, with 10 GB free forever and no ads, scanning, or AI ever."

Is this another provider that seemingly promises a good private email alternative before enshittifying down the line a la Proton, or is this legit like Mailbox or Tuta?

Predictive surveillance is here and it's near impossible to escape. My independent research cannot happen if you don't support me: / thehatedone

What if I told you that McDonald’s has a 500-page-long dossier of your personal life? A dossier that doesn’t just contain information about what you ate the restaurant but one where the company has followed you everywhere on the web? Where it tracked down your social media posts and spied on you from inside third party apps on your phone? It’s a personal file on you individually with your name, address and everything that identifies you and your movements. And it’s not just a historical record of what you did. It’s a list of predictions McDonald’s made about what they think you’ll do in the future.

If this doesn’t sound real or too much like from a dystopian SciFi novel, all you need to do is to visit McDonald’s Privacy policy website and request your very own copy of every piece of data McDonald’s holds on you. If you are a resident of California or any member state under the European GDPR law, you can get access to your very own Minority Report.

Not only is all of this real. The true scale and depth of the new age of AI corporate surveillance goes far beyond what we previously thought was even imaginable.

McDonald’s isn’t alone in this new surveillance scheme and in fact, they probably weren’t compiling these records all by themselves. They could’ve been helped by what is now a secret AI industry that is doing something behind closed doors that nobody has any inkling about.

They are collecting information on hundreds of millions of people with a new purpose. Not for targeted advertising. They don’t run any ads. Not for personalized experience either. They don’t have any users. What they do with all that data is to give every individual person a secret “consumer score”.

It’s a hidden rating that can determine everything from how long you’ll be put on hold during a customer service call, what offers you get or what rewards you’ll receive from a loyalty program. A retailer can use your score to fix prices you pay or products you see. Airliners use these scores to choose who gets a seat upgrade. Credit card companies can use these consumer scores to decide if they want to make you a counter-offer if you want to cancel your card.

Edit sources fixed thanks to @HelloRoot@lemy.lol

Sources [0] https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ [1] https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/sites/corp/nfl/pdf/MCD%202025%20Annual%20Report.pdf [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-score-access.html [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-score-access.html [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-hold-for-45-minutes-it-might-be-your-secret-customer-score-1541084656 [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/electronic-scores-rank-consumers-by-potential-value.html [6] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/personalized-pricing-has-spread-across-many-industries-heres-how-consumers-can-avoid-it [7] https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/personalized-pricing-ban-9c0d92a9 [8] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/privacy.html [9] https://innovationcenter.msu.edu/who-goes-there-a-new-whole-body-biometric-recognition-system/ [10] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/12/1116295/how-a-new-type-of-ai-is-helping-police-skirt-facial-recognition-bans/ [11] https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17206 [12] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/malte-spitzs-ted-talk_n_1701775 [13] https://www.ted.com/talks/malte_spitz_your_phone_company_is_watching [14] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/02/china/china-beijing-protests-police-mobile-signal-intl-hnk/index.html [15] https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-content/uploads/sites/412/2025/10/17195957/The-Loyalty-Trap.pdf [16] https://futurism.com/future-society/reddit-breaks-mobile-website-download-app [17] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260401139/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept [18] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept-c2b968fb [19] https://www.ft.com/content/b127ee7a-5ac4-4730-a395-c9f9619615c7 [20] https://futurism.com/future-society/tech-billionaires-city-startups

Hey all.

I made a video this week about Flock's leaked employee buyouts and, in researching it, found this neat site that maintains a database of entities and municipalities that have canceled, suspended, or opted not to renew their Flock contracts.

If you need something positive to think about today, this is a good place to start. There were over 100 contracts canceled just in September alone.

"Everyone spies on everyone, and nothing can be done" is a stronger sentence than the public record. The record is enough on its own.

In April 2015 Der Spiegel reported that NSA selectors were run through the BND station at Bad Aibling against officials at the Elysee, the French foreign ministry and the European Commission. Jean-Claude Juncker asked Berlin to explain it.

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bnd-affaere-kanzleramt-in-erklaerungsnot-gegenueber-partnern-a-1031565.html

In May 2021 DR reported that Danish defence intelligence helped the NSA collect on Angela Merkel and other European officials. The Guardian's account:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/31/denmark-helped-us-spy-on-angela-merkel-and-european-allies-report

The domestic half is PEGA. Parliament adopted the spyware recommendation on 15 June 2023: use against journalists, politicians and activists inside the Union, and a demand for conditions before further use.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2023-0244_EN.html

Ursula von der Leyen can describe the EU as strategically autonomous. These three documents are still the constraint on that sentence. Autonomy would be published limits on what a partner may collect from European soil and from EU institutions, plus a PEGA follow-up that changes practice. It is a choice. It is not a law of nature that the collection must continue, and it is also not something a press-conference adjective has already fixed.

Summary: DropBox now scans the contents of your private documents to train A.I., shares your data with tech giants like OpenAI and Google, records all browser activity of Dash application users, and has humans manually reviewing data.

In my opinion, it is no longer suitable for private or confidential data of any kind.

Key quotes:

We may build models that identify keywords and topics from a given document. These models may be trained on your documents and metadata

We may review which of a given set of search results you click on [...] This can be done manually by Dropbox employee, or as part of a machine learning model

If you use Dash Answers, we may manually review questions you ask and the responses you receive.

When you use Dropbox Dash, Dropbox will import your browser history, starting with the previous 90 days, [...] The data collected includes the URLs of websites you have visited, as well as the contents of those websites (including page titles, images, and page content). [...] we may share your data with trusted third parties

In order to provide, improve, protect, and promote our Services, Dropbox shares your personal information with trusted third parties [...] Trusted third parties include:

• Amazon Web Services, Inc.
• CloudConvert (Lunaweb, Inc.)
• Concord Technologies Corporation
• ElasticSearch
• FileStack
• FullContact
• Google LLC
• IDnow GmbH
• Intercom, Inc.
• Mailgun Technologies, Inc.
• MaxMind
• Metrics Enterprises, Inc. (Kissmetrics)
• NG Communications bvba
• OpenAI, Inc.
• Oracle America Inc.
• Salesforce.com, LLC
• Stripe
• Teleperformance A.E.
• Twilio, Inc.
• Voxbone, S.A.
• Zendesk, Inc.
• Zoom Video Communications, Inc.

Dropbox has collected and disclosed the categories described [below] to trusted third parties in the preceding 12 months:

your real name, alias, unique personal identifier, or online identifier, and it could also include other personal information like your postal address, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, profile picture or other similar identifiers

what you decide to store in your Dropbox account

identifying information about contacts that you’ve chosen to give us access to. It can also include identifiers such as a real name, alias, or email address

information relating to your use of the Services

device-specific information, such as an online identifier or Internet Protocol address, or geolocation data

Crossposted from https://infosec.pub/post/52518361

The TV world has been a pot of controversy thanks to a two-hour-and-15-minute video from Gamers Nexus claiming LG TVs are nefariously spying on everything you do. They can record and store audio even when they seem to be off, track everything you watch, and could even be hacked remotely and turned into covert surveillance […]

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1406865/whos-buying-your-personal-data-disney-gm-your-insurer-and-bank-heres-what-they-get

Easy to understand short explainer.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/71629767

This is unacceptable. And I’m sick of all the fucking workarounds to maintain basic privacy.