Privacy

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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.

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Investigators seek push notification metadata in 130 cases (go.theregister.com)

submitted 8 months ago by baernhelm@feddit.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"App developers can encrypt these messages when they're stored (in transit they're protected by TLS) but the associated metadata – the app receiving the notification, the time stamp, and network details – is not encrypted."

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[–] miss_brainfarts@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Many services and companies argue that metadata is not personal data, but even if that were true by definition of the word, the means to correlate metadata to a real person have existed for how long now?

Just knowing that I receive messages, at certain times, in a certain app, might not be a lot on its own, but as soon as you cross-reference that with other users, it becomes a surveillance goldmine.

And that's what many people seem to miss, I think.
Individually, there might not actually be much, depending on how you use your device. But the word individually gets thrown out the window in our world where everything is interconnected 24/7.

[–] AnarchistArtificer 8 points 8 months ago

I was talking to a friend recently about how the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism reminds me of a dark and a hollow version of how communities work. Earlier in the conversation, she used the phrase "communities are when 1+1 = 3", i.e. when the collective output and capacity is greater than the sum of its parts. Data works a lot like that — you're completely right that overemphasis on the value of individuals' data misses the point