What are some privacy mistakes you've made?
What are some privacy mistakes you've made?
All of us have made privacy mistakes at some point in our privacy journeys. In an effort to help those earlier on in that journey, please share some of the mistakes you've made, and how you could have prevented it.
If you decide to use Google Messages on an Android custom OS, set up Contacts Scopes (if you can) or else it it will have access to all of them around the time you first open the app.
Not me, but my mother sent her dna to 23andMe. I was not happy to hear that.
I bought a two year sub for proton.
I pay monthly but I migrated everything to their platform and now I need to calm myself a little bit and think about which services I will migrate to
Posteo is something you should check out for email.
Used Facebook for years.
I knew Instagram was privacy invasive long before I ever started using it. Still decided to use it for some reason. Anyways, glad to have my dopamine receptors back.
Using a VPN for torrents and forgetting to set it up to kill the network connection when VPN is lost. Got a couple "love letters" from my ISP that way.
After getting those nastygrams myself then having to troubleshoot some other issues, I've ended up using solely a private tracker (iptorrents because I couldn't get an invite elsewhere) for torrents which I only use for manual search in radar/sonarr to minimize seeding space. Automatic downloads go through Usenet if I add something to my watchlist. I did have torrenting bound to PIA as a VPN in the past, but with Usenet and a private tracker I never felt the need to renew it.
I taped my latest DMCA letter to the wall to remind myself of this. I also wrote a small script to kill torrent processes and eventually break the software adapter if needed if certain gateways are reachable.
True story:
When I was a kid I wrote a review for Dexter's Laboratory on the internet. I wrote "I think the show fuckin sucks!". I don't know why. Again, I was like 10. AOL ratted me out to my parents somehow and I got banned from the dial-up for a week.
99’s kid detected.
stood in my balcony with my pp out and someone saw me
Well depending how old you where that's fine or creepy
I changed the user-agent of my browser to "Error: No browser installed". Can't be more unique than that, I guess. That was 30 years ago, though, I don't think it will hurt me today 😆
Just make it your username
😅
It's been quite a journey:
- Posting accurate personal info to my Google+ account when I first signed up
- Signing in to Google on my phone and browser
- Using an Android phone from eBay of dubious origin
- Sending confidential info via email
- Using the same gmail address for everything
- Signing up for things with my real info when it wasn't necessary
- Handing out my phone number to loyalty programs
- Running hacked game APKs without checking for malware
- Using the User Agent Switcher extension on MS Edge, which was subsequently updated to include an infostealer
- Using browser extensions of unknown provenance
How to avoid:
- Ironically, Windows 10 started me on my privacy journey. Microsoft was in my face enough with privacy offenses that I began moving to Linux and investing time into my privacy.
- Don't post unnecessary info to social media.
- Never email confidential info.
- Use a password manager, or at least some organized text file if you have an encrypted disk.
- FOSS software is more available and user-friendly than ever, always look for a FOSS alternative.
Using the same username ober multiple platforms
Last year I purchased a domain name for our farm business as a place holder knowing I'll eventually get around to putting together a website when life allows.
Well the domain registration site had a "privitize my infomation" button...which I forgot to check...for the first 12 hours.
EVERY web and app developer from here to Pakistan now has my phone number and I get about 4-6 calls a day asking if I want help developing an app for our website.
I've had to block entire area codes with an installed spam blocker just to slow them down and get some small bit of peace back.
Moral of the story, Never forget to hit that privitize button.
Before really learning about the implications, I had used the same alias on dozens of sites. I had hoped for serendipitous interactions.
Its taken forever to track down and clean up all of those old accounts.
I forgot to tap the "location" button on my phone to set it to "off" for about ten years.
Recently I got conned into giving a couple websites my email address for an alleged discount thinking, well I'm going to give it to them with the purchase anyway. Only for them to then request my phone number.
Couple lost sales for them.
I use Discord, though only in a web browser and only for semi-public chats. I might be using Discord less if I had gotten some friend groups onto something like Matrix.
Same, I can recommend vesktop to at least have a dedicated window for it, + some customization. I used discord-sandboxed before, but that stopped working.
Wouldnt you like to know
- I used to have an Xperia SP. One day, I decided to swap out all of the AOSP apps that came preinstalled for Google's own offerings.
- I also used to use Yandex as my main search engine. I thought it was better than DuckDuckGo...
- I also used to use Yandex.Browser, Yandex.Mail, and Yandex.Disk. I'm also not sure I deleted my account...
- Just three years ago, I was using Opera. I had no idea it had become a Chinese Chromium fork. I also used to use Maxthon, on occasion.
- I used to use Opera VPN.
- When I was about 7, I ended up with a bunch of malware on my laptop (turns out McAfee is shit). I recently discovered that my IP range briefly ended up on some blacklist around that time, so I assume I had become part of a botnet.
- Around this time, I used Hola VPN.
- Until fairly recently, I had multiple ad and tracker blockers installed at the same time. This is obviously overkill, and increases your fingerprintability.
- I also used to manually change my user agent to Chrome on Windows 10, despite the fact I was using Firefox on Linux. The mismatch also made me more fingerprintable.
- I used to have Do Not Track enabled, which can be used to fingerprint users.
- I used to use my browser fullscreen, meaning my screen resolution could be calculated and used for fingerprinting.
- I used to use Outlook.com as a client for my email, which was privately self-hosted by my dad.
Yeah, I used to be pretty insecure, huh. My privacy journey was quite fast, and began around 2020. My uncle had given me a ThinkPad and a DVD of Linux Mint. I was stuck at home for most of the year, I started watching a lot of sociopolitical comedy videos, and eventually one thing led to another and before you knew it I was wearing the metaphorical tinfoil hat.
Nowadays, I'm doing much better.
I'm gonna cut this short and say all of them.. 😂 its a marathon not a sprint.
Using an Android phone and Google Chrome. Never again.
Advice my parents to use outlook. They were using an ISP email service which we had to get rid of. I wasn't sure if tutanota was ready for them yet and they already were a bit familiar with outlook. It was a bit of a trade off back then.
I still have digiaids from Limewire back in the day. I also regularly type "magic" between a certain you and a tube and I have no idea who operates that site.
Being born