Surveillance and Tracking Matters

[Irrev-Black]

I'm subject to the relevant legal privacy provisions of the place I live, so I'm not doing things that invade any protected privacy.

As somebody who's preparing to take legal action in a matter involving a considerable amount of abuse in public, I can see the need for body cameras to record potentially nasty interactions.

As a matter of fact, I already use one.

ADD: I also support the idea that anyone interacting with a camera wearer, be they official, business or whatever, should have an equal right to record the interaction.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-16/ ... /102717398

[Irrev-Black]

It's always a good idea to check your surveillance gear before bed.

[Irrev-Black]

Old enough to remember the Google slogan "Don't be evil"?

Marcus Hutchins :verified:
@malwaretech@infosec.exchange

For anyone unaware, Google Chrome is currently rolling out an update that track your interests based on browsing history, then share them with 3rd party websites. The notification page makes it sound like they added a new privacy feature, but in actuality they automatically enrolled you into their tracking system and you have to go and manually opt out.
Sep 07, 2023, 04:29 ·


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[joele]

And yet people just keep on using google's shit..

My suggestion is Librewolf - https://librewolf.net/

[stylofone]

My suggestion is Librewolf -

Giving it a try now. After a recent upgrade, the multitude of manual privacy tweaks I usually make to firefox started to break each other, so I had scale it back a bit. I don't have the patience to go through each step and do a thorough test on them all to work out what the problem is. My old regime followed this guide from the restoreprivacy site.

https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/

Edit: Librewolf seems to work pretty well. Straight up when I go into options I find it's already preset the way I like it.

[joele]

Yeah the only thing I tend to dial back with librewolf are the amnesiac settings. I.e. I don't delete history every time I close the browser. I also add privacy badger from EFF just in case.

On phone I have switched to Mull browser.

https://f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/

[stylofone]

This should be no surprise - surveillance capitalism is a rich resource for old style surveillance including military intelligence and sabotage. I assume this sort of thing goes WAY deeper than just one exposé of an Israeli surveillance product. The question is, for every Optus hack, how many undetected or unpublicised privacy breaches are there? How many has China done? Russia? Who is targeted? Government employees? Journalists? People who support environmental causes on facebook? I think it's best to just assume everyone is a taget.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/202 ... df2fb60000

[stylofone]

Non paywall link to the above article, paste into address bar if needed, I'm having trouble posting it with the http bit

archive.vn/Vkxt1

[joele]

Not sure about that Israeli tool, I see it is injected through tracking and advertising but if you block both of those things does that make you somewhat immune?

It is actually a subject I was going to raise in this thread.. So I previously had a virtual-machine at home running PiHole, it is a self hosted DNS server with lists of known trackers and advertisers. When your computer does a DNS lookup for say "sdk.fra-01.braze.eu" or "*.imrworldwide.com" who are known trackers, it returns an IP address of 0.0.0.0 so the call is never made out from your computer.. One of the more common ways advert blockers work, but done at the DNS level rather than in your browser.

The problem with PiHole (great open source app) is 3 fold

1) Generally it only protects your home network (unless you VPN back into your home from your mobile devices)
2) You need to maintain it
3) It isn't hard to set up but it isn't trivial either

There are paid for services that offer the same service and takes all the maintenance away and offers a number of advantages like easy to set up DNS-Over-TLS which encrypts your DNS lookups so they cannot be monitored, but more importantly they cannot be intercepted pushing you to an even more nefarious IP address without you knowing..

I have been trialling NextDNS for this and decided to shut down my PiHole server and move across as of yesterday. They have a long list of tracking/advertising lists you can enable and also have 1st party tracking block lists i.e. for Windows, Apple, Samsung etc etc

They also have logging options, you can turn it off completely so all DNS requests made are immediately forgotten, or chose to log (only you have access to said logs) and you can even choose which country your logs are kept in (I chose Switzerland as very strict privacy laws), I also only keep logs for 1 week. I may eventually turn it off but it is useful to see what is blocked.

Interestingly, currently 12% of all DNS requests from my home network and mobile devices are being blocked. I discovered, for example, that the comm-bank app on my phone is trying to dial home with log details once every MINUTE even when not opened.

You can even choose to allow affiliate requests, so marketing email links, but have it anonymise your personal information in those outgoing requests.

Costs AUD$29 a year for unlimited usage (both unlimited devices and requests). https://nextdns.io/

[stylofone]

Not sure about that Israeli tool, I see it is injected through tracking and advertising but if you block both of those things does that make you somewhat immune?

That was the gist of the comments too. I think the headline "no defence exists" is wrong, unless you are looking at the level of national defence, imposing large-scale implementation of the sort of defensive measures the likes of you and I take as individuals. For example the government could make it compulsory to offer things like end-to-end encryption, anti-tracking browsers, and no-log VPN type connections. But governments are invested in the system in too many ways, including avoiding the threat of an all-out war with the likes of meta and alphabet when the election campaign comes around. I can imagine that the mining industry's bullshit about the super-profits tax would be a firecracker compared to the nuclear force of surveillance capitalism's attack if governments declared that ALL of them were a security risk, not just like tiktok on government phones, but google, facebook, twitter, apple, Amazon etc. on ANYONE's phone.