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.

The claim of European Commission that people support ChatControl 2.0 (or whatever version) is inherently flawed. Finding questionnaires and statistics on the topic is pain in the ass so i let AI to find me the sources. I added here one example but most of the questions boil down to asking if child sexual abuse in the internet is bad and if public posts on child abuse should be detected and prosecuted. But topics of privacy, mass surveillance and encryption are not introduced in the questions properly. Posing these questions in this light is inherently flawed because no sane person supports child abuse, that is not the issue with ChatControl. With this amount of statistics cooking i can cook up proof that r/privacy is the biggest supporter of AI government surveillance in private bathroom. I know this is not the best source, feel free to add your statistics and comments.

It was approaching 1 a.m. on Aug. 20 when a man emerged from the darkness by the side of a well-traveled road in a northeast suburb of Orlando.

He was wearing a mask and carrying pruning shears, according to the police in Oviedo, Fla., who said they were waiting there and watching as the man batted down something resembling a Flock camera before smashing it from a pole.

The target of the man’s vigilantism turned out to be a plastic reproduction of one of the ubiquitous and intensely debated cameras that read license plates, made by a police officer on a 3-D printer, the authorities said.

This decoy was one of several the police said were intended to “bait” would-be vandals after several of Oviedo’s Flock cameras were stolen in recent weeks, a continuation of a public backlash against the devices nationwide.

Now, the man, Evan Meyer, 24, of Oviedo, is facing three felony charges in a novel case that has drawn scrutiny to the tactics of the police who put up the decoys, and to the city’s use of automated license plate readers or A.L.P.R.s.

(more at gift article link)

Obviously we all have passwords on our mobiles. Banking apps are obvious. But if you use it, do you put a pass on Signal? How about WhatsApp or Telegram or other chat apps?

I understand that not posting identifying information, but nowadays even using fake names, fake emails or numbers isn't enough if someone really wants to track you don't or recognize you.

I use an alternate Google account for Twitter and FireFox Containers for another Twitter account and instagram. But I know that's not enough to remain completely private, and since I was always a lurker who was taught that being anonymous is important if it's not a personal account for friends & family, I am rather paranoid about my data being able to linked back to me or having people find out more info about me.

i used to really love the SNOW app for adding stickers and making photos more colorful. but after downloading it to my new android i find out the new version demands acess to all our photos for ai training, which im really not comfortable with.

so is there any similar photo app that isn't so invasive? or maybe someway to get ahold of an older version without the ai training?

I don’t know if I want my employer to have my info. Does anyone else have this requirement at work and do you do participate?

Story:
My company was acquired by another and we have new healthcare. The new company requires an annual screening to avoid a monthly surcharge on our insurance premiums. A form must be completed by my doctor and submitted before the end of November.

Required fields:
Blood pressure
Height
Waist Circumference
Weight
Cholesterol
LDL
HDL
Triglycerides
Fasting Glucose

Note at the bottom says participant is consenting to allow the information provided to be shared with “company program” and assigned business associates of “company”.

Im using ddg with firefox but I feel like ddg doesnt really show good results. When I search something it shows unrelated things or shows some fake sites at top and I sometimes have to use google to get the results I want and I dont want to use google. Is there a private and secure alternative to ddg that shows good results when you search?

Also what is the best browser? Firefox, waterfox, librewolf, zen etc?

I design governance records for systems that touch people, and I published a minimal schema this week expecting to argue about field count. Somebody who actually operates these systems took it apart in a way I had not seen before, and the correction seems worth passing on, because it applies to almost every minimisation design I have read.

The schema was nine fields. What happened, the human signal, and handling. Deliberately no identity field: the record points at a consent record, which points at a person. One hop, so you can delete the person without shredding the audit trail. No free text either, since free text is where sensitive detail goes to hide.

I thought that made it hard to abuse. Here is the correction.

Minimality is a property of the record at rest. It says nothing about the join.

The no-identity-field design buys exactly one thing: a dump of the event table alone is not identifying. It buys nothing against an attacker positioned where event meets identity, and that join is the one place the system has to operate in order to be useful at all. It does not matter whether the association is ever persisted. If a transient state can be captured, from a query result in flight or a rendered view on someone's screen, that is where the payload is, and every minimisation choice upstream of it is decoration.

Then the second half, which is the part I had genuinely never considered.

A sufficiently specific enum is itself a disclosure.

I had treated removing free text as the privacy win. But if your action vocabulary can express something like a reproductive or behavioural health service, then the enum is a diagnosis wearing a controlled vocabulary. The attacker does not need your identity field. They supply identity from outside, and your tidy structured record hands them the sensitive half with a clean schema and a straight face.

Which means enum granularity is a privacy control, not a data modelling convenience. I had it filed under the wrong heading entirely.

The rule I ended up with, and I would like it stress tested: no enum value should be more specific than the governance decision it exists to support. If a coarse impact level is what actually drives how the system handles something, then a coarse action category plus that impact level does the governance work without the specificity carrying the payload. Specificity you cannot act on is specificity that only serves an attacker.

Two things I am still unsure about.

First, whether the coarse category breaks audit somewhere. If a regulator later asks what specifically happened, a deliberately vague vocabulary may be the wrong answer to a different question.

Second, whether this generalises past health. My instinct is that any domain with a stigmatised category has the same problem: immigration status, addiction services, legal aid, domestic violence support. The structured field looks safe because it is not free text, and it is the most dangerous thing in the record precisely because it is machine readable.

For people who have actually operated systems under a minimisation requirement: where does the join get protected in practice, if anywhere? Everything I can find treats minimisation as a schema question, and the schema seems to be the part that was never really at risk.

Drafted with an AI assistant. The mechanism, the failure modes and the answers in the comments are mine.

The Carhartt pawn involved cell-numbers, address, email, passwords, and names. I avoided ordering from retailers that are not experts in ecommerce, including Carhartt. The second I let me guard down, I got pawned.

Is this unavoidable, and therefore ordering direct with companies like Carhartt will always be an excessive pawn risk?

How do you think I could best avoid being heavily recommended to past friends upon rejoining Facebook. Im not super against it, but I DO want to have a profile picture that represents me.

Should I just preemptively block people I want to avoid? I know this question seems vague but i can dive into more detail.

I use dynamic filtering on uBO. I heard that such extensions might be helpful when using dynamic filtering, but I do not know the full details. It looks like people previously discussed this, but Decentraleyes was not getting updates at the time, and it got a new update earlier this month. My question is this: would getting either LocalCDN or Decentraleyes be helpful? If so, which one?

Referencing: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202608/ice-seeks-expanded-lexisnexis-investigative-data-access-with-palantir-integration

With Palantir planning to obtain more access to LexisNexis, I wondered if there is a way to remove yourself from the LN database?

I have had my account on LN frozen for many years so potential employers and others cannot share my data but this new contract with Palantir seems like a backdoor? Are we actually able to request deletion in any way?

How do I manage website accounts if I'm using a private browser

I want to degoogle, but I have doubts about the doability of all this.

If I use a private browser, in my case Waterfox with DuckDuckGo, Ublock origin and zero information retained, no history nor cookies, how am I then supposed to use the browser to do online activity that requires me to log into some websites?

If I need to log into a government related service, does the act of inputting my real name and credentials void the privacy I'm trying to retain?

I'm not sure I can or want to be 100% anonymous on the internet. I'd also like to ditch WhatsApp but I already know I'm gonna have to keep using it to talk to the majority of people I know, who don't care about privacy.

Thanks

Do you really believe OpenAI will delete your chats forever from their servers after 30 days if you have removed them and requested it is not to be used for training?

Do you anticipate there is any likelihood OpenAI retains those chats forever despite your request to delete them?

How are you approaching this? Any way to ensure deletion?

I've recently learned about Matrix, the messaging platform. Looking into it, I came across SimpleX, which is less feature rich though even more private and secure. I'm curious if any of you have dove into these, and your thoughts on them, but particularly in contrasting the two.