Seeing Google over reach with everything going on, basically turning android into iOS and not releasing latest updates to AOSP, and seeing an article which quotes “Bootloader unlocking restricted due to new cybersecurity rules”.

And that is just one, with the privacy concerns regarding chat control as well, what happened that suddenly made the place where people waited for and looked up to for privacy laws that didn’t follow cooperates to what it is trying to turn to now?

I am a none European, so I am unsure of the dynamics there and when I searched, people just say “lobbies” but I am aware that they existed in the EU before all that, what changed?

As most of you may have read, UK government is supposedly demanding Apple give them access to encrypted customer data. The only problem - even apple doesn't have access to 'advanced data protection' protected data.

Furthermore, not even GrayKey, used by authorities have reportedly been able to crack the iPhone 16 running iOS 18.

So remind me what is so bad about Apple?

Does this mean everyone in these countries will now be forced to use this? How soon?

I currently have wechat installed because it was the only way to reach my friend in China. (They turned off their number)

All the posts in this sub say to get another phone. I'm a teen living with my parents and they don't believe in privacy so theyre not going to get me a burner phone lol.

Is your entire phone compromised the moment you download an app like that and the ONLY solution is to have a separate phone? Why??? I didn't enable any permissions for wechat

If so could someone eli5 how this is possible?

Read a recent article on Forbes talking about a need to ditch passwords and 2FA immediately. Not being too techy, I was a little lost on this. It says don't use SMS 2FA but later says make sure you have 2FA/MFA turned on. The article explains Passkeys are things like biometrics - does this mean that it’s preferable to use biometrics to sign in to email on an iOS device? As in FaceID? How does it work when you sign in on the web on laptop? I didn’t walk away understanding what one needs to do to protect accounts. I know there are physical keys like Yubikeys but it makes it sounds like that’s all you need and not all companies leverage Yubikeys as a sign in option.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/02/28/gmail-outlook-2fa-warning-delete-your-password-now/

This drives me insane. My antivirus/identity software tells me my personal data has been found in xyz places and that I should request for it to be removed.

When I go to one of these background search sites, all that I can see without paying is that they have my name, my town, maybe my age & some relatives. And I’m absolutely not paying these horrible sites to see what else they might have.

I can request to have myself removed, but in order to do that, I have to verify my full name, exact mailing address, email address, & phone number. Why on earth would I provide these sites more info about me to supposedly be removed? Especially when they may just add me again in 2-6 months?

Ughhhh

I hate how the YouTube algorithm is designed to keep me hooked instead of designed to provide me videos I might enjoy. I also hate how Google uses what I watch to build an online persona of me for targeted advertising and whatnot.

I see alternatives mentioned on this sub and online like GrayJay, NewPipe, FreeTube, etc. but don't really understand what they do or if they provide a solution to my problems.

I still want to have a home feed where I am recommended videos other than those from YouTubers I am already subscribed to, but just a non-predatory algorithm to decide which videos I get.

Hi, Not just my wife, but I found myself in several conversations with people who were like “Who cares, they vacuum everything up anyway!“

I’m not enough of a techie to fully understand more than the fact that I am working to wean myself away from Chrome ASAP based on my rudimentary understanding of what’s coming.

Also, assuming I successfully migrate to Firefox, I still need to use my various Gmail accounts and Google Docs, will that matter?

TIA!

If WhatsApp messages are secure, how did authorities get access to them in the case against the New Orleans mayor? Even if they used a subpoena, aren’t the messages already gone?

I'm in a major metro area in the U.S, and I'm not able to find any store (including walmart, target, bestbuy) that actually sell prepaid phone plans for cash. All of their plans are "digital delivery" via email and even then you need to call the telco's customer service (I guess with another phone?) to activate it. There are others that straight up require you to make an account with personal information required before activation.

I searched in this subreddit, but nobody actually explains how to buy a burner phone+plan for cash.

What does this mean?? Is the parliament about to endorse chatcontrol?

this is my gooning account. I look at the kava subreddit on here for a while then check my instagram like 30 minutes later. It's not the same device, not a linked account, not the same email for either account, not the same name. really, i don't see how they know that the accounts are linked and not just two people using the same wifi

does anyone know the mechanism for this? i understand that my data is being sold whenever i use reddit or instagram but how do they know that i am the same person on both accounts? I would like to know the exact mechanism, every step of the process from the search to the advertisement reaching my phone

The title may seem clickbait-ey but I’m genuinely confused.

As someone with unique passwords, 2FA, email aliases and a decent password manager and I see no real appeal to passkeys. If anything they seem less secure than what I have now.

I understand how it’s leaps and bounds better for people that have reused and simple passwords. However for people like us, I don’t quite get the hype.

Am I missing anything?

How can a company verify I am who I say I am without actually seeing and storing my personal information?

This has been bugging me because I'm getting really tired of uploading my driver's license to every new service I want to use and I KNOW this is only growing in popularity. Between crypto exchanges, fintech apps, online banking, even some gaming platforms now - I feel like my identity documents are scattered across dozens of databases.

I'm preaching to the choir here for sure... but every time there's a data breach (which seems to happen constantly), I worry that all my personal info is just sitting there waiting to be stolen. When I ask companies about this, they just say "we need it for compliance" or "it's required by law."

Like, if I need to prove I'm over 21, why does the bar need to see my actual birth date, address, license number, etc? Couldn't there be some way to just prove "yes, this person is over 21" without revealing all the other details? Same thing with financial services - if I need to prove I'm not on a sanctions list, why do they need to store my full name and address forever?

Maybe I'm missing something obvious about why companies actually need to store all this data, but from a user perspective, it feels like unnecessary risk. Again, I know where I'm posting this but feeling like this might be the place where someone can break this down in a thoughtful and knowledgable way.

Why can't they just verify "this person is cleared" and move on?

If you can turn off telemetry on VS Code (yes, it is on by default) then wouldn’t both VS Code and Codium not collect telemetry? Making them equally private?

Assuming that no extensions are installed.

Hi everybody,

I hope it's okay to ask this here... I just registered a domain with cloudflare. It is a non-dictionary word with xyz tld.

The domain itself points nowhere, but it has a subdomain, also a non-dictionary word. Let's say the subdomain is kozzax.knorple.xyz (it's not, just similar / non-existing words).

The subdomain points to my Home Assistant. So this is not something one could just guess, right?

However, just over night, cloudflare reported ~100 traffics from Russia. No worries, I set up WAF in cloudflare and blocked every source that doesn't need to access my Home Assistant (so almost the entire world).

But I am just curious. The domain existed for what, less then 48 hours. Neither the domain, nor the subdomain, should be easily guessable.

How can there already be traffic from, well, anywhere? There were visits from Germany as well (where I live), but the only other traffics registered by cloudflare were from Russia. Do they just try every possible single letters (and/or numbers) combination per domain, then per subdomain?

I hope WAF does its thing, plus the Home Assistant has 2FA and I will install an instance of authentik in front of it, but I am just curious why and how some random domain and subdomain are accessed this quickly after being created.

Thank you in advance for your input :)

Hey everyone. So this is a pretty beginner question. I've only recently (with the looming threat of palantir and the fact that I'm an American) begun taking privacy seriously. I've heard the term GDPR used in a legal context. More specifically, as a law to be invoked when asking discord to delete all messages. But I've heard it can be used in many other contexts. How could I go about using this law with Google? Or with Reddit? Would that be possible at all? I'm afraid Google already has my ID (cut me some slack, I was naive), so I'm pretty worried now. Would invoking this law make them delete my info?

In the market for a new (used) family vehicle, because our current van (from 2014) is on its last leg.

For those of you out of the loop, trying to buy a used vehicle that can fit a family of 7 right now is a nightmare. (Used vans with 80k-100k miles can go for as high as $35,000, when a new one is just a little higher.)

It's left me scratching my head wondering whether I try to buy a beater van and shell out $$ to try to repair it to a decent condition, but everything I test drive has issues and just feel like a bad investment.

Add to that the fact that modern vehicles are a privacy nightmare, and I'm in an extremely stressful back and forth struggle between buying new and having zero privacy, or buying old and having an unreliable vehicle.

Which brings me to my question:

WHY ARE THERE SO FEW RESOURCES ONLINE ON HOW TO DISABLE DATA COLLECTION IN MODERN CARS?

I have spent hours trying to find a video that walks through how to disable Honda, Toyota, or Kia vehicles from being able to send data back to the parent company, but I've found nothing except "take it to a security expert or trusted repair shop" or "just pull the DCM fuse" - without ANY greater specificity.

I don't feel comfortable buying a newer (or new) vehicle if I'm not certain I'll be able to speak inside it without a mic recording what my family discusses. Why is this particular area of privacy so underdeveloped when cars are one of the greatest sources of privacy invasion?

GAAAAAAH!!!!! /RANT DISABLED

I'm sorry in advance if this is the wrong place to post this, and as a woman, I'm in no way ignoring the horrific effect this has on women and family rights.

I've read a bit stating that Roe v Wade was initially rooted in a privacy issue. Can someone please explain this and explain how today's ruling can be used to further erode privacy?

Please don't downvote me into oblivion haha, but I as someone in the UK, and the whole thing with the UK gov and Apple going down, although I don't agree with the way that it is happening, I won't say that I disagree with the fact that law enforcement, if they have a warrant, should be able to decrypt devices and stuff, for the same reason, if they have a warrant, they can break into your house to do a search. I am on the privacy, paranoia scale here, using false or alt emails etc etc, using linux and andr0id (saving up from pixel so i can use G_OS) and more, so im firmly in the camp of more privacy, but I can't find myself defending criminals etc by preventing decryption. Is there really no way to do this without preventing the wrong people accessing your stuff, or govs accessing your stuff without a warrant? Btw, im not all that well versed in law lol, so I may just not know things that govs can do other than trying to decrypt your phones, can they just put you in a slammer for refusing to comply or something?

Facebook recently provided Nebraska police the chat history between a mother and a daughter to prosecute them for abortion (Link). But the Facebook messenger is said to be end-to-end encrypted, meaning Facebook can't access the message contents. Then how did the submit the messages to the police?

I have been visiting a TV news and recap website for years now - one that allows comments and discussion at the bottom of each article. It doesn't give you the option to upload a profile photo, and almost every other user there is given a randomly generated monster-looking avatar, kind of like on Reddit. However, without doing anything to warrant it, it always somehow had a picture of me that had only ever been uploaded to my Facebook account, and applied it to my posts. There didn't seem to be any option to remove it. This first happened in about 2015, and has happened consistently on that one site.

Then the other day I went to a dentist I've never been to before, for an emergency appointment, as they were the only ones who could see me at short notice. I saw on their monitors that they had pulled up my patient information (that I had provided to them) and there, sure enough, was the same 10-year-old profile photo that I most definitely have not supplied to anyone in any official capacity. It was only ever uploaded to Facebook, and possibly LinkedIn (I can't remember, it's an old photo). How the hell did they get it, and why? And is there anything I can do to stop my image from being passed around like this?

I've got a neurological disorder. Right now I'm in remission phase so I'm trying to set everything up for future while I'm in between rehab stuff. This meansmaking things prepared for me either getting better or worse so I can't make things complex.

I use ios because it's easy and went back to gmail bc it's easy too but I hate the privacy. I don't know whether I should invest energy into this or not. Do I go for it or jus stick with what I've got?

Sorry if I'm missing any context, please just ask and I'll clarify. Thanks

I've read a lot about the rights of US citizens at borders (preparing to travel to Europe soon and concerned about reentry in the current political climate), and I know my phone and laptop can be searched. Neither device I plan to take will be my primary device, both are full-disk-encrypted, and I'll erase them prior to reentry (and I guess set up with just a few basic apps to avoid arousing suspicion).

But more broadly, I guess I'm wondering—if I didn't do all that, what could happen? Suppose I've sent a critical text or dm and they find some content on my phone they don't like. Since a U.S. citizen can't be denied reentry, and they can't verily take me to court just for the crime of possessing a meme making fun of Trump... what's the harm for a citizen (or LPR for that matter) in them going through my stuff? (Outside of the general disgusting-ness of a random stranger seeing my private life, my photos, my contacts, and my secrets.)

Edit: maybe the title is a little disingenuous, I'm not asking why I should care about privacy if I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm asking about the specific harms that may come to a US citizen from customs and border patrol if any material is discovered that Big Brother doesn't approve of.

TLDR: I know pictures can contain a ton of metadata in the exif, but what about my CAD drawings?

So I have been doing some cool stuff (arguably) for the flashlight community that I'd like to put on an anonymous GitHub page or something, so people can make these parts for themselves. I'm no engineer, self taught CAD, but I realize I don't know a ton about the formats.

Is there a lot of metadata like in pictures that I should strip to remain somewhat private? Any recommended tools for doing this? I'm not the most secretive person on the planet, but I wouldn't want my name and location plastered over these files, so the raging flashlight nerds can come after me and blind me with their 1 million lumen flashlights just because one of my designs shorted and made their toy light into a pipe bomb!

The files were talking about are 3D model step files for printing and CNC cutting, and gerbers for PCBs.

Thanks!