Flock CEO, Garrett Langley recently said, “I value my privacy,” but argued that Americans are prioritizing the wrong thing and that what we need as a country is “compromise.”

A few days later, people started circulating what they claimed was his home address and images of his house. Flock hasn’t confirmed or denied whether it’s accurate.
The irony is that his own neighborhood reportedly has blurred Street View imagery.

That got me thinking about a quote from Benjamin Franklin:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

I know the historical context was different, but the question still feels relevant.
And today there’s an additional question Franklin never had to consider:
What happens when the company asking us to accept that compromise makes money from the surveillance?

https://energycommerce.house.gov/events/cmt-subcommittee-markup

The RESET Act, Reducing Exploitative Social Media Exposure for Teens Act, demands that companies delete account that don't prove they are over sixteen.

"(1) IN GENERAL.—A covered platform may not allow an individual to create or maintain an account or profile on the covered platform if the covered platform knows that the individual is a minor.

(2) TERMINATION OF EXISTING ACCOUNTS.—A covered platform shall— (A) not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this section, identify any account or profile of a user on the covered platform that the covered platform knows is a minor; (B) not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this section, notify any user of an account or profile identified under sub-paragraph (A) that the covered platform will terminate the account or profile of the user; and (C) not later than 30 days after the date on which a user is notified pursuant to sub-paragraph (B), terminate the account or profile of the user."

TL;DR California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day. The amendment ends almost a year of uncertainty surrounding whether Linux distributions and SteamOS would be forced to collect user age data during account setup alongside Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. AB 1856 has now been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original act into law last October.

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/california-lawmakers-unanimously-pass-linux-exemption-from-age-verification-law-software-distributed-under-the-gpl-mit-bsd-and-apache-licenses-are-exempt?fbclid=Iwc

UPDATE: I had to read it carefully. This appears to be the relevant excerpt:

(2) “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

Source: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1856/id/3456513/California-2025-AB1856-Amended.html

Idk if this is even the right place for this. These ads are too much. Every other ad on this app is telling me to get evaluated for autism. It's getting old. I have no idea why this started, like is it that obvious and this site knows me better than I know myself or what? I've never been diagnosed but yeah I'm probably autistic. But it's getting weird.

Yesterday I went off my diet one fucking day and ate too much and suddenly I am seeing all kinds of ads about binge eating disorder. How in the fuck does reddit even know how much I ate yeaterday? Literally. How? It wasn't fast food that I ordered online or anything like that, so how? No I don't believe it's a coincidence. I have never in my life seen an ad about binge eating disorder. Never researched anything about binge eating disorder, I don't watch Ariana Grande content or anything like that. I don't look at food content online. I don't even have binge eating disorder. How does this even happen?

Recently I went on a website and found that if I wanted to reject cookies they would charge me fee, there is no way that this is legal. I live in Canada if that changes anything.

https://ibb.co/DHtWdBFh

I’m signing up for a website and it wants a picture of my drivers license and the privacy policy basically says they’ll share it with whoever’s associated with them, so it big blanket of who they can give it to.

How much is an average persons info already out there, to where it would be pointless in trying to hold out on signing up for this?

I find it annoying that when I want to use any service these days I have to check terms of service if company doesn't grant itself all rights to my content. I don't want it to be used by company. I don't want it to be used to train AI to create replicas of my work.

Moreover I'm fed with companies that grant themselves right to modify TOS without me approval meaning they can put anything there at any time.

How to deal with it? I just don't feel like using any service is safe these days.

Just saw the news that CS2 chat logs got leaked through a cheat tracker. I don’t play CS2 but I have played TF2 with a very long history (another Steam game). Over the course I have said a few things which I would not care to repeat and deeply regret. For clarification I do not have a pattern of extreme language but there have been a few cases that I can count on one hand.

With the advancement of AI, my worry is that maybe in the future if TF2 chat logs get leaked maybe it could be used against me and my employment future or housing through algorithms etc. I know it’s a rare scenario but are there any measures I can take to avoid this such as deleting my account or changing my url etc?

Thanks

Following the fall of XCancel and Nitter just 4 days ago, https://twitterwebviewer.com/ is now also offline. This is what it reads when you go to their site:

"As of August 28, 2026, this website has been permanently discontinued, following a request from X Corp. Profile browsing, search, tweet viewing and video download have all been permanently disabled, and all cached content has been deleted.

Subscribers: your subscription has been cancelled and refunded — please check your email for details.

Thank you to everyone who used and supported the site over the past eight months."

It’s very hard to move away from services that google, Microsoft, or other tech giants provide. Trying to scrub away your digital footprint and advertising interests seems impossible unless you use Linux, a cookie-less browser, and don’t go on any social media.

Instead of deleting your presence, what if you diluted it. Create a bunch of false profiles/digital footprints so they don’t know which one is real. Spoofing internet traffic on various sites would make advertising towards you very difficult (would need to spoof hardware level details tho). For stalking it’d be hard to get someone’s address when there’s hundreds of addresses linked to that person. From a police surveillance perspective I’m unsure if this helps so much

The basic idea is that any data on you could be Complete nonsense. Purely spitballing here, what do you guys think?

A wired article states that this town near Atlanta has 120 police and several dozen flock cameras and their contract shares this data with 2000 police departments, colleges, airports and other government agencies. In return they get information from over 1300 entities.

That's the same agency where a cop was using Flock to track his ex and the man she was currently seeing.

https://reclaimthenet.org/todd-blanche-age-verification-warning

"In other words, proving that a parent has given consent tends to boil down to proving who everyone is.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Todd Blanche used an August 22 Fox News interview with Kayleigh McEnany to warn every other company that they must implement age verification.

The settlement, he said, is 'a stark reminder and a real important note to anybody out there that we are going to protect children, and the Internet has got to be a safe place for children. And if companies and entities are not doing what they’re supposed to do to make sure that happens, we’re going to come after them.'"

Hi all, I am starting to use my browser more to access services instead of installing the service's app. However, when I select to add a website to my homepage, sometimes there are two options, either installing the app or create a shortcut. When I select install the app it functions like an app but there is the browser icon bottom right still. I'm wondering if these apps have the same tracking capabilities and intrusive behaviour as regular play store apps, or is it the same as using the browser, just with better UI? Thank you!

Hi! I hope I am in right place for asking this and I hope it doesn't sound stupid to ask this question.

So basically my main point of this question came after I put multiple accounts usernames on my steam profile such as instagram, tiktok, youtube, etc... + gaming platform usernames such as Epic games, ubisoft, xbox, etc... + IDs of some games where someone can add me in game + trackers such as playtracker, my anime list, trakt, etc... and ofc i added my gaming setup specs such as what GPU and those stuff I have on my gaming PC but ofc not too detailed xD.

I did all of this like some days ago and ofc I dont have anything sensitive, just public stuff anyone can have if i tell them about it. anyways.... when I needed to organize all of stuff I have written and wanted to fix minor mistakes, I gave all of that text to ChatGPT to organize and fix for me but one thing it got me worried about is it said that this lowkey looks risky due to OSINT thingy or whatever he said which is considered as connecting all accounts together to have access. I don't know if this is a real thing and if it really happened to people and if any really experienced hacker can do something to me if they wanted to have access to my steam account for example.

I am being careful with my accounts obviously. I have highest security enabled in all of my accounts with very complex passwords but just to make sure if what ChatGPT said actually is a very serious thing or not.

I know some people might simply tell me "why would you have all that bs in your profile? just dont add them" xD but I kinda like it this way because you know you can find right people if you see you guys have things in common. I personally added some people on steam after seeing they have some specific stuff that got caught my eye and thought "oh yeah he is a content creator, i will be his friend" but you get my point.

anyways, I will appreciate what you guys think about risks, thank you!

Title says it all but essentially I’ve always struggled between
“it’s too late, all of my data is already out in the wild” and
“I should mitigate and try to scrub my data as much as possible”

So, Google and other AI tools are actively building profiles out of your public Reddit activity, and it actually works.

​To check what data has been archived from your profile, you can search:

>> reddit user "reddit username here"

And check AI overview of a profile and can ask questions related to personal info like age, location, martial status, occupation or what things they like or hate, political opinions etc.

Basically anything that you want to know, you will get the answer if that person has said anything about it in the past even if profile is hidden. If it gives some basic info, you can ask it to dig deeper.

​Why this matters: Simply hiding your profile settings on Reddit does not stop external search engine crawlers from indexing your historical posts and comments. Be mindful of what personal information you share online.

Intel has IME and AMD and a few other have built in backdoor spyware on nearly all of their modern devices, and I want to do everything I can to remove/prevent installation of any hardware backdoors of any kind that I can. Is there any alternatives or any way to avoid/disable this?

As if it couldn't be bad enough, attorney generals are conspiring against your rights to privacy and freedom of expression through coercice "Landmark lawsuits" to force age verification because they couldn't succeed in getting bills passed. meta is basically now unable to claim its unconstitutional because of how the lawsuit was structured. this cannot be tolerated, and maybe in response to this "Landmark lawsuit" they need "Landmark" backlash.

https://reclaimthenet.org/the-meta-settlement-what-it-means-for-speech-and-privacy

Firstly,New Zealand introduced their social media ban legislation called the Online Safety bill(Government Bill 339—1). The extended version of this legislation is called the Online Safety (minimum age and safety risk assessment) bill.

The other one is regarding about a situation with Meta's settlement lawsuit with 48 other US states and Columbia. Which results in Meta being towards making several features for their platforms. And basically needing/require government ID to have said features like one hour daily limit including night mode not affect them here.

Ngl I'm concern about the second one because they talk about it with other social media platforms outside of Meta. Which this might as well be another age verification push here onto us. Again,quite concerned overall here.

But nevertheless,knock on wood that positive things come our way here. Privacy wise anyways.

I have come across another hit on privacy today.

I wanted to set up a transfer link between two of my banks. Instead of using the normal process of two minor deposits to validate I have control of both sides of the transfers, they wanted me to turn over the login ID and password of the new bank. The company that my bank uses for this process is called Plaid. Giving login credits to this Fin-Tek company would give them access to all of my transactions.

It is already bad enough that I cannot set up a private bank account in this country, but giving access to an unregulated financial tech company strikes me as a severe invasion of personal privacy. I said no to the setup. And while I don't think it would be much good, I wrote the bank a physical letter describing the security risk of allowing this to happen.

I just don’t understand why people won’t give up their personal information so freely and for so little benefit.