this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2022
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Privacy

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[โ€“] PythonGuy@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

Another one bites the dust, google got sued a while back for tracking cookies even when incog and now apple is most likely going to get sued for this.

[โ€“] ThreeHopsAhead@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

So the anonymized data might not be anonymized after all. That is as unexpected as a pot of milk boiling over on the stove when you leave the room. Expect this to be the case with all telemetry as the default. They always claim it is only for improving the products, but in reality it is very often an extremely detailed log of all user activity comprising sometimes of essentially every click and even other data about third party programs other device activity unrelated to the program or data about other devices in the same network, proximity etc. and the way your device communicates with them.

Unless software is open source and transparent about what data it collects for telemetry on a truly voluntary basis, openly asking you about whether you want to send telemetry and giving you equivalent yes and no options without any dark patterns or opt outs, always reject telemetry where possible, go into the settings and turn it off, opt out of hidden data sharing settings and block telemetry and other tracking at the network level e.g. with DNS filtering.

Supposedly anonymized data is very often not really anonymized at all. That is often just a claim to bypass privacy regulations. There are data brokers identifying supposedly anonymized data and aggregating it with other data sources for a business.