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 We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.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
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Depending on your threat model, your best bet would probably be to purchase a burner phone at Walmart or something with cash. Then only use the phone for verification purposes.
I couldnt find any sim cards that didnt require a CC to activate. I brought one that came loaded with $40 and still asked for a CC to activate which sucked. My threat model is not existent I just believe think every service I sign up to needs to know who I am.
Yes. That's it. They want to know you're a person.
It prevents a lot of scammers and only a few "privacy enthusiasts" are hurt.
It sucks that privacy enthusiasts have to mix with actual criminals trying to hide.
How else would you propose they cheaply confirm that you're a person? Get a picture of your ID card? That's more invasive and unnecessary.
There are more modern methods that will identify you without a phone number. In the near future you will not need to enter a 6 digit code. Your phone will be able to be identified by its sim card and location (even if you have GPS off). Do you like that more or less than giving your phone number and receiving a text?
My issue isnt them texting my number and seeing if im a human. I dont like that they store my phone number and email because if I use my phone number and a random email on 1 site and my phone number and a random email on another site I can be tracked via my phone number in the dataset that these sites sell.
Yup. Exactly this. Telephony is reasonably good (but not great) as a way to filter out the minority of high-risk users. You can learn a lot about a phone number through well-known resources. VeriSign's business is booming for a reason.
There's a list of credit card test numbers that you can try to activate the account with.
Not sure about SIM cards but you can still use cash to buy prepaid phones along with an amount of minutes/text to activate. Like the kind of prepaid phones that you you see the vendors sell x minutes/text/data. e.g. I've never been asked for a credit card to buy a Tracfone. Some places like Best Buy will ask you for other information to sell it but none of it needs to be real (ironically Best Buy asks for a phone number to buy a prepaid phone, LOL). You do need to set up a Tracfone account online to actually activate a phone + plan, not sure about the other prepaid vendors.
Have you tried prepaid sim cards?