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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Got tracked down for my school reunion (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 7 months ago by minimalfootprint@discuss.tchncs.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Today I was contacted by someone at work. She graduated school with me and our 20 year reunion was coming up. Why did she contact me at work? It was the only way they were able to track me down. I was included in promotional material by name. She told me I "was the hardest to track down"and I had to smile.

This is just a small anecdote about privacy practices and their real life impact (and how your employer can undo all of it, I guess)

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[–] d3Xt3r@lemmy.world 60 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I have a Google Alert set up, so I get notified in case my name pops up on the web. A month after I joined a new company, I got an alert - turned out that their internal directory page was exposed to the public web. I was pretty livid - all this time I was proud of maintaining good anonymity, looking up my name never returned anything meaningful on Google. So I complained to my boss about this, and he said it was actually a bug/misconfiguration - which they were already aware of, but didn't bother fixing it because no one complained. I was super pissed and made it very clear that it was a violation of my privacy and I wanted it taken down ASAP. Thankfully my boss was understanding and got it fixed. Then I had to report the page to Google. It took a while, but it was finally gone from the search results.

[–] Preflight_Tomato@lemm.ee 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

To help with this in the future, you can also create several fake results sharing your real name. Stuff like a blogger with one post not in your writing style, etc.. This will dilute searches with disinformation. Removal of real data is important, but you can also confuse anyone looking.

[–] Natanael 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You could use an AI generated fake face and fake history too if your name is unique to make people think they either found the wrong person or make them unsure of the other listings mentioning you with only your name as an identifier

[–] LemmyRefugee@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

Calm down Dexter. We all know your secret!