Remember the NSA director back when all the Snowden stuff happened? Keith Alexander? He joined Amazon’s board of directors in 2020. Not to mention Bezos is a particular fan of the DoD and was on the Pentagon’s advisory board.
Why anyone would trust Amazon is beyond me. And I don’t like feeling so damn watched just for walking down a street with a bunch of Ring cameras. I can’t believe it’s so normalized to constantly watch your neighbors with a corps eyeballs.
I mean, do it? No reason to announce it here, and no one will care about your plethora of cameras. Why would what someone chooses to add to their property be something that “pisses you off” so much?
Not everyone has the luxury of owning their own home. My apartment neighbor has a doorbell camera pointed directly at my doorway that activates every time I open my door to go to work, get food delivered, etc. Huge privacy violation, but our doors face each other, so I guess that’s legal…
You’re not alone. This isn’t normal and you’re not crazy for not wanting to be spied on just for making the mistake of going outside and walking past someone’s house.
Large scale “online therapy” companies are a pox on the therapy profession. All the therapists who work for them are made contractors, they pay poorly, and the turnover is high, so the quality to the consumer is poor. Between companies like Monument and Better Help and private equity buying therapy practices left and right, access to high quality therapy is harder to get than ever.
In addition to the ban on sharing data with third parties for advertising, the proposed order with Monument, which must be approved by a federal court before it can go into effect, also prohibits the company from misrepresenting its data collection and disclosure practices and imposes a $2.5 million civil penalty for violating OARFPA, which will be suspended due to the company’s inability to pay.
They didn’t make enough money with this data selling to pay this fine ? Right.
You get a fine you can’t pay? Sorry that’s illegal. Jail or seized assets. If you have no assets, just jail and garnished wages. Good luck paying your fine on 23 cents a week (minus taxes)
This company gets a fine it can’t pay? “okay you don’t have to pay, just pinky swear you won’t do it again, now here’s a bailout go play with the other rich kids (and leave the poors to me cracks knuckles)”
Maybe I’m just not getting it, but if we’ve mostly transitioned to HTTPS and encrypted DNS… what exactly can the ISP learn other than the address they serve and MAC of your gateway? Is this report for those who use their ISP’s DNS?
I’m going to need a source on both those claims to better understand how they can happen.
For an ISP to mitm, they’d need to sign and send the website certs themselves, and that’d show up in most browsers as a big red flag.
As far as Facebook goes, I was sure that’s just javascript and tracking cookies that they’re paying websites to use. No mitm there.
In 2017, Trump revoked regulations put in place by the Obama administration that would have compelled ISPs to obtain user consent before selling their browsing data.
And this is why you never ever use ISP DNS, run DNS over HTTPS in the browser, and always use encrypted networking.
And use VPNs appropriate to the activity, when appropriate.
Oh, and never turn on ISP-supplied WiFi, as that gives them full access to the traffic from every device on your LAN, what physical hardware you own, and even where it is located in your home (and when it leaves and comes back to your home).
You can get your own modem (what plugs into the wall) or your own wifi router (you’d plug this into the isp modem). Your own modem is better, but ISPs can give you grief about “supporting” them.
A wireless/ethernet router as access point, a personal proxy server, or pihole, between your devices and theirs. Or, if possible your own modem and router.
[ISP modem/router]<–LAN–>[personal wifi router]<wifi>[cheap pc proxy @ 192.168.x.x]<wifi>[all your devices]
Proxy could be ssh(socks5), tor, shadowsocks (not microsocks), dnscrypt, tinyproxy, nekobox, whatever. They’d all have the same internal address from the proxy (if set up that way) and then again one address from the router to their device. (Router and proxy order could be reversed : or just router for some basic device identity privacy - it doesn’t encrypt your data though. An encrypted proxy will. And tor or a VPN will mask your external ip) Some proxies/VPN are more secure than others.
And,RTFM. A bad configuration can be worse than no configuration.
All good! It’s about the use of free VPNs and how they may impact user privacy and security. But I do mention that VPNs is a one of the reasons as to why some people choose to use them in the first place. And this is a good source to have as it shows exactly the reasons as to why people flee to VPNs (be it paid or free).
Spoiler, in the majority of the cases free vpn’s are not good to use, but there isn’t too many documented articles on the topic, only some. So wanted to contribute on that field :)
This information, although not new, sheds light on the misconception prevalent even amongst industry professionals today that ISPs only retain customer usage data related to IP address assignment.
Which is why good vpns are hosted in countries with extremely high privacy laws. And some can even be bought and used without giving any personal info. And why most vpns are RAM only and literally can’t log any records.
ftc.gov
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