Ask Lemmy

I think the best example is for women. Imagine they can figure out, with 95% accuracy or something, that you are pregnant, that could be valuable data.

Now imagine you are a woman at a large corporation who just got pregnant, but aren't telling anyone yet. Too early. Your corporation buys a batch of data and discovers there is a 95% chance you are pregnant. They don't want to pay for maternity leave or make reasonable accomodations during pregnancy or pumping breast milk. They fire you for "unrelated reasons", before you ever tell them you are pregnant.

Nothing illegal happened there really. You never told them so you have no way to prove they fired you for that.

It's called microtargeting, all big tech companys are sorting people in groups, just by their use of the service. It starts with simple things, for example: cats or dogs? And this goes deeper to your religion or sexuality, politics etc. Created mostly for advertising it got used by political parties. Check the Cambridge analytical scandal. If you easily able to sort the people for your target you are able to manipulate your targeted people.

Newest scandal for microtargeting came from the EU-Commission with the chatcontrol.

People don't realize how much data is collected, how it's analyzed to determine things about you, and how it's given out to nearly anyone. Here are some concerning examples that hopefully speak for themselves.

Data from fitness app Strava was used to locate secret US military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq by some random guy on Twitter. He did this by pointing out people running in squares in the middle of the desert. Imagine what America's enemies could do with this information that this company will sell to anyone.

Ad company Xandr allows you to target audiences with labels like "Recently purchased a pregnancy test", "Has a large gambling debt", and "Has depression". Once again, this is freely available for anyone to purchase. These tracking companies find out things that are very personal to you and then sell that info to people who might not have your best interests in mind.

Last but not least. Governments and law enforcement can access this information at any time for any purpose. Do you really want the government and police agencies to have a database of people grouped by their religious and political beliefs or their sexual orientation?

Hopefully you can see why the information being collected and given out to anyone is concerning. As to how to avoid it, I'm not sure there is any way besides government regulation. Maybe someone else has some answers!

I don't like the idea that if history repeats itself, a powerful entity can force the data vaults open and see who they should send to the showers. I could be on the "correct" side at that time yet something I did or said last year has the system deem me unfit for the noble breed.

Here's a good example why you should care

https://gizmodo.com/signal-tried-to-run-the-most-honest-facebook-ad-campaig-1846823457

The US and UK have both used data from period trackers to spy on women and monitor for "suspicious" miscarriages.

An example of this I use on occasion is:

You date someone years ago and no longer are. You've moved on, but that person then goes and commits a heinous crime. The police decide that since you dated years ago, and that record of your personal info is stored on some database they have somewhere, they no-knock warrant into your house, and shoot you dead in your own bed (Brianna Taylor - Louisville KY.) because they think there's a possibility he was there.

I think if people knew the extent to which these big-data algorithms can figure out things about you just based on the links you click and posts you upvote then they would be more concerned. If it was just that they knew my location, age and interests then I wouldn't really care much but the reality is that they probably know stuff about me, that even I don't.

I simply don't like the fact that this database exists somewhere because it can come back to bite me one day. Just imagine what a fascistic government could use data like this for. Or maybe not even that, but remember how we first didn't have chatGPT and no one thought we would for years but then it just appeared and now it's there. Well what if tomorrow someone comes up with an equally fun tool that you can put any person's name into and it'll give you access to all this data. I want my page on that app to be very brief and inconsistent.

I'm perfectly aware that it's impossible to use the internet and not leave any tracks at all, but I want to make sure that my tracks are incredibly difficult to follow and preferably that they don't lead anywhere.

Corporations are scummy motherfuckers. Once they have this data they will keep it forever. Even if they don't have a use for it now they can come up with something in the future and will have no qualms about fucking you over with it. The technology available to analyze it is only getting more powerful as time goes on.

My worst imagination is labelling you and selling your label to the companies they supply to, and how wrongly those companies can use that data, example: google search "prostate cancer" or searching for symptons associated with prostate cancer - label telling probable prostate cancer developing with this user - insurance companies denying insurance to you or making it too expensive. Now extrapolate this to what your searches probably tell about you or your state, and multiply by the websites you visit, the time you spend reading article/tweet/forum/post about a certain subject, where and how you comment those articles, etc, and being labeled according to their perceived likes/hates/problems about yourself.

When you have enough personal info about a population you can engineer advertisement so effectively that you can convince that population of almost everything. See Brexit.

Here's one example of how your data can be wielded against you: https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2?op=1

The biggest concern is that even if you are innocent, your data can and likely will at some point be used against you. This was proven by the Snowden Leaks. There are more than enough of these unfortunate cases, here are some examples:

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-location-data-avondale-wrongful-arrest-molina-gaeta-11426374

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html

I can recommend Privacy Guides, it's a website created by volunteers to teach people about digital privacy and security. It's great for beginners.

If you are interested in the topic, join [email protected].

Because then the authorities can get a warrant to access that information if they believe you are guilty of something.

In the case where a law is unjust or puts peoples' lives at risk, say like abortion laws in some US states, the government can use this against you as proof in a court of law.

Edit: here's another post about how this information is used against people:

https://feddit.uk/post/4030393

From what I understand and not trying to read any of the answers to this.

For the large part of the picture, it's about marketing. To market specifically to you that is based on where you've been, what you've bought before and what your interests are. So they know that you don't want to buy or subscribe into things you've no interest in at any capacity. So why not try to goad you into it by using things you're into because of the data collected that's filtered from your interests?

That's probably the only not-so worrisome thing I can think of. It's just a giant distraction and tool to get you to spend and subscribe.

A lot of people don't like to be tracked and having data collected because, we feel it isn't anyone's business in what we do. So, why should it be the business of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Firefox .etc to be concerned in what we do?

Aside from marketing, it'd be a lot easier for all of them to pinpoint exactly what we do to feed data to authorities for easier prosecution. Which depends on how you look at it, I just think that if you don't want to attract the attention of authorities who've been given a tip on you without you knowing, don't be a criminal.

All in all really and I'm starting to derail my own explanation, it's a big wiry issue with privacy.

To put it plainly, it's largely for marketing and we really feel it isn't the business of corporations to know what we're doing, if we're knowingly not breaking any laws. Also now that I've thought of it, harvesting so much data increases risk of security breaches that hackers can take. Which means it's going from bad hands to worse off hands because now hackers can just sell our data around in the black market and we wouldn't even know it.

It's not for your personal privacy, or to spare you personal embarrassment. But rather because large-scale demographic data collection is dangerous.

The Nazis used such collections to locate Jews. America used such collections to locate Japanese-Americans. The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal affiliation being printed on ID cards. In none of these cases were the data collected for the nefarious purposes it was eventually used for.

Information is a form of knowledge, knowledge is power, and power in the wrong hands is dangerous.

All my life I give up all my data to any product of any company I use. I accept all cookies to track me, send auto-reports and telemetry, try to join all beta products and gladly report bugs that occur. I use one nickname everywhere it is available, my home address and phone number and all social network pages are easily googlable, all my profiles are public. I always say what I think. I'm from Kyiv, Ukraine, and I have never had a single negative occasion due to my Internet behavior. AMA.

This whole thread makes me want to quit using the internet right now…

I'm sure there is a LOT of additional information about "what you can do", but here are some very simple starting points. You can do these today if you want.

1. Only use Firefox with uBlock Origin installed/active for web browsing.
2. Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). https://protonvpn.com is considered one of the best.
3. Turn off location services on your phone (this will probably be controversial but I think it makes a lot of sense).

For more, subscribe to @privacy and read and support eff.org

Best wishes!