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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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How to demonstrate to people the importance of privacy by showing the data collected about them? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I wish to convince my friends and family to avoid using privacy-invading ad-based services and apps. Seeing people discuss how much data these companies collect off of us, I want to know if there is a way you could get a sample of that data by yourself and show it to them for them to realize the gravity of the situation themselves.

The closest thing is Google's ad personalization panel in the Google Account Dashboard. It literally lists out the information of the account holder by the things they've browsed, including their gender, age, occupation, interests etc. I could've used it to show to my family but I turned off ad personalization for all their accounts a few years back so they aren't even aware of it.

The next closest thing to this could be browser fingerprinting tests but they wouldn't be able to understand the tech jargon from the results anyway. Also I am not planning to go to the 'deep web' for this. Is there any other way I could get this done, like a website/app specifically designated for this purpose, for opening some sort of userlog in the accounts page?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I used to have a plugin that mapped how many companies were getting data from the website I was on. I'm not sure if it still exists.

One eye opener that's easily accessible is going into their Facebook third party data agreements. If it's not turned off they'll probably be shocked about how permissive the data is. Just visiting a website can result in a Facebook agreement to share data with that company. It's one of the reasons apps suddenly know random things you were just talking to somebody about. It gets keyed up instantly and they start that whole analysis of shadow profiles stuff industry experts talk about.