Overview
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General Paradigms
- Provide as little personal information as possible. Apply Principle of least privilege to your own life
- Value anonymity and pursue it wherever it can be lawfully achieved, even at the cost of convenience
- Protect root credentials with aliases unless it is absolutely necessary to provide real information (medical, government, etc)
- Be wary of true name association with home address and root phone number
- Never allow your ID to be scanned or uploaded to networks
- Avoid products and services from big tech companies that practice Surveillance Capitalism
- Avoid products and services that sell your information to third parties
- Prefer open-source software
- Read privacy policies or have AI summarize them for you
- Know your rights in relation to data, privacy, and surveillance
- Prefer managing your own data (as opposed to cloud services), prefer transferring by wire (as opposed to over network)
- Assume devices will be lost or stolen and encrypt them
- Assume important data will be lost and back it up
- Manage sensitive credentials securely with a password manager
Privacy vs Security vs Anonymity
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Threat Models
Broad threat models !TODO
Privacy Rights in Decline
Power Centralization
- Big tech
Online Anonymity
Data Mining and Sharing
- Behavior
- Location
- Biometrics
- IoT
Personal Security
- Identity theft
- Account hijacking
- Financial accounts
- Reputation / slander
- Data breaches
- Compromised devices
Authoritarian Governments
Surveillance Capitalism
Surveillance Capitalism is a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff to describe the prevailing business model of technology companies since Google unlocked the value of personal data with its AdWords platform in the early 2000s. The core of this model is the collection and commodification of user’s personal data, and the invention of new technologies and products to mine untapped domains of human experience. This data, also called “behavioral surplus”, is valueless in its raw form, but can be fed to machine learning models to produce extremely accurate predictions of human behavior, which are sold to advertisement companies in a behavioral futures market to guide ad targeting.