this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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Even if you never went online, heaps of data about you is collected and sold.
And if you are online, the "be as anonymous as you can and don’t share your personal data over the internet." statement makes it sound easy, which is far from true. It's a constant game of whack-a-mole where one needs incredibly disciplined to compartmentalize and segregate login sessions across browsers and devices. If one isn't technically skilled and constantly vigilant, it's a losing battle. That's why awareness and campaigns that support privacy focused regulation are important.
As I said "as anonymous as you CAN", which is better than posting the photos of your birthday on Instagram or whatever people do these days.
That'll protect your data from random stalkers or smaller companies, but Palantir has so many data brokers and the cooperation of the government that you can't function in society without giving them data.
Unfortunately, most road cameras in the US are owned and operated by private companies who are perfectly welling to sell that data in real time. Your license plate is very easy to read, and it's a number that's uniquely identifying. If police want to use it in courts they usually need to prove you're actually the driver, but if it's an entity not really concerned with that it'll do a great job tracking you. I try to bike wherever I can, they generally don't have any personally identifying information.
Have you heard of Invidious? Or the Duck Player? You can use YouTube without giving YouTube your data, though it might not work quite as well.
I do a lot personally to increase my own privacy, from running GrapheneOS (usually with airplane mode on, which actually fully disables cellular (I used an RTL-SDR to check, and nothing with my IMEI was broadcasting)), to not using social media (besides Lemmy, I guess), to running Arch Linux w/ LibreFox as my primary browser, to not using Amazon, to getting my friends and family to use Signal as our primary means of communication.
But letting privacy be a personal thing just means that the vast majority of people will have their privacy completely compromised, and that it'll be very easy for privacy-concious people to slip up. Privacy should be a right, not a privilege, and the only way to do that is to go to the source: explicitly targeting, sabotaging, and campaigning against data brokers and large private companies that collect peoples data. Until we force them to stop, there is no privacy, just the illusion of privacy.
Ok, but it's one thing to give them my name and face, for example, and it's another to let them know my political orientation.
I don't know, it seems a good compromise to me, but it's true that I don't have any need of more privacy than that to live in safety (for now at least), so maybe my point of view is too limited.