They can have data about your past but if you care about privacy, you can limit data collection a lot and outdated data is useless in many cases. Sacrificing privacy is a questionable choice and won't give a conscious person peace of mind at all lol but everyone makes their own decisions.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.

Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they'll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which... defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that "Fred Smith in Afghanistan" is really "Fred Smith in North Carolina"

Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can't. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.

And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

TL;DR You need a realistic threat model.

Well that's true but ehh still it doesn't happen too often. If you want to keep your data away from the government then it is a danger. If you just want not to give the unethical advertising and data mining companies your data for free so they don't have profit (like I do), you don't need to focus that much. And if you're concerned about your partners and friends getting the data, you have to reconsider their role in your life ngl.

That's why you get a separate identity or device for everything that requires your real name and NEVER EVER tell your real name online (they even teach it in schools nowadays if you didn't know).

If you want a public life with posting everything that happens to you, you can't protect much except the metadata. Other than that there is some data you can't protect but my previous points help with it and, once again, it depends on who you want to protect it from.

GPS ftw.

[–] merde@sh.itjust.works -1 points 5 months ago

you don't need to use the server. You can set it to be triggered only by sms and there wouldn't be any "aggregated information"

[–] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you have an active cellular connection, you cannot really limit data collection, including the tracking and selling of your location data.

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

GPS on a secure device is the answer. Also read my long explanation. I recommend using 2 devices and identities to avoid similar issues

[–] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Assuming by secure device you mean one with a removable battery or no cellular modem at all.

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago

That's really overkill for my threat model. For me it's a device with a degoogled FOSS ROM, no proprietary software, no sim card and with correct settings