this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
58 points (82.2% liked)
Privacy
31981 readers
265 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
what do you mean by you can get into trouble for using a phone without a SIM card? A WiFi only phone is just a smaller tablet.
And yeah, cities with extensive camera vigilance can be a problem impossible to solve. There's not much you can do about that other than protest.
Your cell provider might track you via triangulation, but this is solved by either plane mode, turning your phone off or a Faraday bag. Of course those would render your phone useless (except plane mode and WiFi activated).
it's a problem quite difficult to solve right now. if you want a working phone, at least your cell provider will track you. But by using open street maps you don't give your data to Google too, so you minimize who has it.
get into troubles? f.e. someone from my relatives can call me not in Signal but through regular cellular network, just forgot about this nuance, maybe he/she will need to say something important. also, no mobile internet situation is weird. i use my local maps provider yandex so data is going to one place from all sources, to government, so it does not really matter.
oh okay, I thought you meant legal trouble. Of course that you won't be receiving calls without a SIM card.
There's a way of receiving calls without a SIM card, and that's using VOIP numbers, like Twillio. But you'd need to be connected to WiFi of course. So there's not real solution to this problem other than letting your cell provider track you.
I suggest using Tor or a VPN (with jurisdiction outside of your local government claws) at all times so even if they get your location, they don't know what are you doing with your phone.
Also, Yandex might sell the information to other third parties that your government might not sell to, so I would still use open street maps unless the difference in comfort of using Yandex is a big deal for you.
always-enabled switzerland self-hosted VPN user here 😃👋
our government is awful in terms of data handling so my geolocation is already sold on darknet for small amount of money, does not really matter. yandex is more convenient because of connection with bus, train schedule, f.e, so i use it and contribute to OSM :)
Nobody pays money to buy your location. Why should anyone do that? At the same time while you are that on the fence, you use Yandex? That does not make any sense.
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibillion-dollar-market-for-your-phones-location-data
because my geolocation is sold anyway, if i use yandex or not. but day-to-day life becomes worse without it.