this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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Privacy
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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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^ This.
I’m a software engineer, and I’ve worked for the big tech giants. I’m familiar with how they track you. VPNs are worthless. Unless you’re trying to hide your activity from your own ISP (like if you’re pirating stuff), the VPN does next to nothing to cover your tracks. And it’s not like they’re gonna advertise their VPN by saying, “you can pirate stuff without your ISP catching you!”
If you want actual privacy, you’ve gotta use something like Tor browser or Tails. Of course, I’ve gotta wonder what you’re up to if you need that kind of privacy. Usually a privacy window is good enough.
Privacy on the Internet is certainly necessary and often synonymous with security. But privacy depends 80% on the user himself, who too often publishes sensitive data on the Internet too easily.
I know that every page I visit knows my public IP, the OS and Browser I use, my screen resolution and other technical details. This can of course be avoided and falsified, but this can have negative consequences for myself, for example that the page does not present correctly, that it does not fit my language or does not work at all.
What we must avoid is that pages load identifiers in the browser or in the system to track our activities on the network in order to sell this data to third parties for commercial reasons (as Google does among others), since we do not know how these buyers process and protect this data, which becomes, apart from a privacy problem, also a security problem, as several leaks in the past of hundreds of thousands of user data, including banking and medical data, already show.
I sometimes use a VPN, or rather a proxy, but only for the sole purpose of being able to watch videos and channels with country restrictions, not for other reasons.
100% privacy does not exist on the network, not even using the TOR network and VPN, we can only avoid the worst abuses and invasive surveillance of large corporations, the rest depends on our common sense and discretion with our data as the best tool, not a tin foil hat.