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 We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.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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I’m interested in this topic as well. I know I’m being tracked on my phone, but I’m much more confident my phone manufacturer is not selling/giving my data to police or insurance companies. Those are who I’m concerned with tracking me.
It’s not just the phone manufacturer, but the mobile carrier, and apps with access to your location (like weather apps, or map apps)
Without a doubt they are absolutely doing this.
Apple is the manufacturer who makes the biggest hoo-ha over privacy, yet they gave user data to the police 90% of the time (Google was surprisingly lower at 80%)
Plus if you have a subscription to a mobile cellular network, as basically everyone with a phone does, that will also be constantly tracking you (and I believe also directly available to the police).
That's all without going into whether you trust every single third party app on your phone and every website you visit.
You sort of left out a lot of context with that statistic that the article did include. Apple gets significantly fewer requests because the data they have is far less useful, that is generally a plus.
Cellular location data from the provider generally requires a warrant unless there are exigent circumstances. There has been a lot of controversy recently about warrants being granted that are too broad, the “every phone in this wide area” thing, but they are still warrants being granted by courts vs direct access.
That sort of “tell me every phone in the vicinity of this location” is the sort of request that Google typically has the data to fulfill and Apple generally does not (though the cell provider might).