this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Reddit started blocking VPN users on old.reddit.com (lemm.ee)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by lemmylem@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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At this point, I'm not even going to bother trying to go on there anymore.

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[–] electro1@infosec.pub 245 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Reddit taught me to never trust a silicon valley, centralized, proprietary service on the internet with my data and/or content

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 125 points 7 months ago (9 children)

Well you shouldn't trust a public, decentralized, open source personally hosted service either.

I don't really know who's hosting the Lemmy or other fediverse services I use and what access they have to the data that we post on there.

Basically, you shouldn't trust any online service with your data and your posts.

[–] RagnarokOnline@programming.dev 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Off the grid it is, then

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Or just use e2e encrypted services. They can be trustless and still useful.

[–] LemmyHead@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 months ago

Depends on how they're implemented. Signal and WhatsApp are e2e encrypted, but they track your phone number, your contacts and IP address. Maybe even metadata

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I went the other route. I am very noisy online. I post and comment all over the place but I treat all of that as what it is, content I have given away freely and publicly. Now, when I need to do something privately, you are going to need serious mojo to be able to dig it out. Plus, who would assume that I do certain things privately when almost everything I do is out in the open.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 11 points 7 months ago (1 children) 
SELECT 'ipaddress', 'username' FROM tables
WHERE (username.normalize() == "jomiran" 
OR post.links CONTAIN "jomiran") 
FILTER content IN _blacklist_keywords;

Or some such. Data is easy to mine if you have a target. It's finding unknown targets that is hard.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. Do a search for my username and get flooded with shitposts. IP? MAC? Same, plus some porn watching and way too much YouTube. Everything I want to keep private is done with as many degrees of separation as possible.

[–] pressanykeynow@iusearchlinux.fyi 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

IP? MAC? Same

Unique fingerprint? Most likely the same with your "private" stuff.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago

I use disposable hardware (one time use) and unique, pre-configured remote access points from third party locations for my work. In other words, many little headless Raspberry Pis everywhere.

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 3 points 7 months ago

I have 10 Facebook accounts, a few with my real name and about 20 google accounts.

The real accounts that I use are created and destroyed frequently.

[–] Artyom@lemm.ee 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You can trust that the service will persist. The fediverse is practically speaking unkillable since no one group holds all the strings. The trade off is that any data you post is shared freely with all. At least it's clear from the start and no one is profiting off of it. Unlike Reddit, you know exactly what's going on as soon as you sign up.

[–] Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

True, I am safest alone in my dank basement

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You...you realize you just posted right?

[–] Live_your_lives@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago

Just because you shouldn't trust them doesn't mean you're not allowed to interact with them. It just means you need to be careful.

[–] Crackhappy@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

What about a whiteboard?

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 1 points 7 months ago

You could message the instance admin on matrix and get to know them...

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Of course you shouldn’t but there is a categorical difference between the risk of a corporation exploiting you because of a power imbalance (you want to use Reddit, there aren’t alternatives in this hypothetical scenario) and the rando running your fediverse instance abandoning the project or being weird about your data.

The second category can definitely be problematic, but it just isn’t the same level of awfulness and systematic exploitation that corporations wield every day to extract a profit.

It sounds like a weird statement because we have been trained to think the average “other” we will encounter in society as dangerous, but if you actually think about the statistics then yes absolutely it makes way more sense to trust a random person or handful of people to run your instance than a corporation. Publicly traded corporations are legally required to be assholes in the pursuit of profit, on the other hand most of the time randos usually aren’t assholes, though to be safe you should always be cautious as you say.

[–] Windhover@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What’s to stop a data broker from running an instance?

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Sure it could happen, but I don’t understand what relevance that has when you compare it to the fact that you KNOW without a shadow of a doubt corporations are going to sell your data to the maximal amount they can, even if it is illegal.

Besides this isn’t about our data being sold or not being sold really (our data will be mined and sold by somebody so long as it is publicly available on social networks), it is about who has the power and who doesn’t. Does a single corporation run by a billionaire fascist-baby have the power or an imperfect constellation of developers, instance maintainers and moderators?

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Internet 101 if you want control, self host.

[–] electro1@infosec.pub 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If it was easy, I would have done it by now

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Hmmm, from a tech perspective there's lots of VPS hosts that provide dashboards to deploy a CMS in one click (Ghost, WordPress, etc.), in that way it's never been easier to get started. The hard part though is gaining visibility and publishing enough content to give people a reason to visit.

[–] electro1@infosec.pub 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In my opinion, one of the main benefits of selfhosting ( aside from controlling your data,) is that you don't have to pay for the VPS/CMS service, of course you pay for the infrastructure.. As someone who HATES monthly subscriptions it's one of the main reasons I don't have an online presence yet

I tried to run Ubuntu server and slapped something on top of it ( CasaOS ), which i didn't like, then I tried Ghost ( and failed miserably )..

It's not easy and YouTubers are full of shit ( they skip so many details )

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

To each their own, that can be a benefit but youll still need to buy hardware, maintain the server software and maybe rent rack space (if you need bandwidth).

My tiny slice of the web hosts a private image gallery for my family to upload and share photos. Going into it I wasn't really interested in administering yet another server. Instead I threw $6 at a VPS and had a publicly accessible, user friendly site with backups up and running in about 15 minutes.. and I haven't had to think about it again since. And Google/Meta isn't training their AI on my niece's birthday pictures. That monthly sub is worth it for reclaiming my time.

[–] electro1@infosec.pub 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That monthly sub is worth it for reclaiming my time

Yeah definitely, it's a small price for the benefit, but also to add to how I feel about subscriptions, I think their major flaw is they don't consider poor parts of the world like Africa were I live, while 6 $ is reasonable or even cheap for some people, here it's a lot of money ( x200 which means 1$ = 200 ), so it's not accessible..

Only few, very few websites change their pricing based on my IP address, or send me to a different domain, but for the most part it's not affordable

You might ask, does you ISPs have VPS plans ? Yes they do,

Tap for spoilerwaaaay more expensive than European VPSs combined ... LoL...

There's also politics and agenda involved but won't get into it, it's just bad news, and we have enough of that already

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The currency situation makes sense and I apologize-- I realize now I had a very western-centric perspective while writing my thoughts. I can absolutely understand hosting on your own hardware, as the opportunity cost in that situation is hugely different. I think the next best option is a good server OS and the ghost docker container but you are right it is not as straight forward or easy. Best of luck friend, trust documentation not youtubers :)

[–] electro1@infosec.pub 0 points 7 months ago

Best of luck friend

Thank you

trust documentation not youtubers :)

yeah, I learned my lesson.. (´･ᴗ･ ` )

[–] Tb0n3@sh.itjust.works 9 points 7 months ago

Could have learned that a long time ago. Everybody learns it somehow from some greedy company. Luckily you've learned it now.

[–] sturlabragason@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

Same.

I’m switching everthing over to federated, self-hosted, decentralized, open source…

It’s a brave new old school world!