You might have old accounts especially cloud accounts that are just idling abandoned while still holding personal information. They might have old weak passwords just waiting to get compromised. Same goes for old email addresses that you do not use anymore but are still linked to other accounts. This is a reminder to check those, delete your data from them or to delete them altogether (delete private information manually first before deleting the account as many companies do not actually delete the data from deleted accounts and just mark the account as deleted). Some examples of this could be: * old Google accounts from old devices * old iCloud accounts * old Microsoft accounts * old Aol or similar email accounts * old accounts from smartphone vendors like Samsung, Huawei etc. that often have their own cloud services Make sure to set a strong passwords on accounts you want to keep and of course use a password manager. Besides the security password managers have the great side effect of giving you an overview over all your accounts so that you cannot just forget old ones.

just that the TV commercial looks back at you through the TV and the TV follows you around everywhere, wherever you go, whatever you do, taking note of everything to get to know every single detail about you, every interest, every prejudice, every weakness of yours, to get to know you like no person, no matter how close to you does, like not even yourself do to use that information to influence you most effectively to the TV channel's and the advertiser's advantage, to manipulate you, to sell this information about you to other companies like insurances who use the power that this knowledge provides over you to extract every last cent of money from you, to sell you.

I've used Yandex and it seems to be a crazy echo chamber. I searched on it and I got results for a niche subreddit that I used to visit without using [libreddit](https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit) before I started caring about my privacy. The results don't really have anything to do with what I was searching but I guess the algorithm just puts a lot of points in familiar websites. And I don't know how they've got that data anyways, probably either Google or Reddit sold them the data. I only wanted to see what the internet was like without big tech and western media. The best way for this would be to have my own [Mwmbl](https://mwmbl.org/) instance once it has user crowdsourcing, but for now I could only think of trying [marginalia](https://search.marginalia.nu) or [Yandex](yandex.com). Yandex doesn't seem to block either big tech or western media anyways, so I didn't found the experiment interesting.

##Some general background Discord is a privacy and security disaster. They do not make their money through ads and tracking (as of now) but they do not care about privacy or security just the slightest bit either. Discord messages are not end to end encrypted. Discord, their employees and their infrastructure partners like Google Cloud Messaging have access to your messages at all time. Do not ever send anything sensitive over Discord! Discord also does *not* delete your messages when you delete your account, leave a server or delete a channel or group. When you delete a channel or group or get removed from one your messages still stay on their server. You just lose access to them and have no way to delete them anymore. If you delete your account without deleting your messages first they will stay on their servers forever without you having any way to access or delete them. There is no official way for deleting all your messages. I am not a lawyer, but I am very sure that is a violation of the GDPR and highly illegal. They claim they anonymize that data when you delete your account, but all your messages are still tied to an account ID and there is no way to anonymize private messages that can contain personal information. Using client mods to automate deleting messages is even against their TOS. They do not comply with laws that require them to delete your data and reserve the right to ban you when you try to do that yourself. You should absolutely regularly delete your messages anyways. Make sure to have another mean of contact for your Discord friends so you do not rely on Discord as they can and do of course ban you for any or no reason whatsoever. Discord also has extremely extensive telemetry that is *not* anonymized. They basically log every click you make in the app: when you click on a profile, when you join a voice channel etc. You can see this data when you do a GDPR request. Included in this logs is your IP address, your rough location and device information for every single event. You can block some of this with uBo in a browser or with client mods. ##Settings in Discord * Opt out of personalization and other data sharing. * Set yourself to invisible/offline. Everyone on every server can see when you are online otherwise and there are bots collecting this information. ##Modifications * If you can, use Discord in a browser with uBlock Origin. * Regularly use a script like [this](https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages) to delete your messages. * Consider using a VPN to hide your IP address and location. * If you use their mobile app do not grant it storage permission and instead share files from your gallery or file manager with Discord. ##Usage Assume that absolutely everything you do on Discord – every message you send every word you say in a voice channel, every click you make – gets permanently recorded by Discord and secrete services, gets sold to advertisers either right away or in the future and breached to the public in the future. That is exactly what you risk when using Discord. Use it accordingly and do not share anything sensitive. If you need to discuss something private shift to another platform.

Reposting from https://mastodon.social/@zackwhittaker/109744489763168924 New, by [@carlypage](https://mastodon.social/@carlypage): LastPass parent company GoTo says intruders stole customer backups for several of its products, including Join.me and Remotely Anywhere. The hackers also obtained GoTo's encryption keys for scrambling customer data.

Brave new tech-totalitarian world

I don't know if I am missing a point or not but I don't exactly quiet get the hype as to me, it just chrome with poor man's uBlock Origin and their own crypto in the mix. Like how it that different from me using ether Librewolf or even Google Chromium and install uBlock Origin compare to Brave?

Beginning in the second half of the 1970s, the world witnessed the birth and affirmation of so-called Big Tech – the five largest companies that operate in the field of information technology, which are also known today as “GAFAM” (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). In the roughly 50 years since then, these companies have been able to build empires of intellectual property of technologies and systems – primarily through acquisitions of other companies both small and large, which allowed them to center technological innovations within their walls. “The GAFAM Empire”, a project developed by DensityDesign Lab and Tactical Tech, collects the information of more than 1,000 acquisitions made by these companies, in order to look back on the history of the industry through the limited data publicly available on the web. The information visualizes a landscape of acquisitions to identify common interests, which are then broken down into a deep analysis of GAFAM’s history. The project visualizes the data in different shapes and through different focuses, allowing the reader to understand a complex system of relationships that is constantly evolving and that is redefining the concepts of competition and monopoly.

The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology. And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes. Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls. Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested. Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir. One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never actually offered such services. Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool, The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general. One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service. “A lot of people are doing it,” Mr. Ton-That shrugged. “Facebook knows.” Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebook’s board. Mr. Nancarrow declined to comment on Mr. Thiel's personal investments. Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the app’s legality. Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them. Mr. Clement did not respond to multiple requests for comment. “It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”  if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down “We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”

Crawl, rank, language, location... Loads of progress.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/smart-tvs-sony-lg-cheap/672614/

public research suggests that encrypted material may eventually be unlocked by powerful computers.. Shor’s algorithm would make a quantum computer exponentially faster than a classical one at cracking an encryption system based on large prime numbers — called RSA after the initials of its inventors — as well as some other popular cryptography techniques, which currently protect online privacy and security. But implementing Shor’s technique would require a much larger quantum computer than the prototypes available. The size of a quantum computer is measured in quantum bits, or qubits; researchers say it might take a million or more qubits to crack RSA. The largest quantum machine available today — the Osprey chip announced in November by IBM — has 433 qubits. In the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, they claim that it could break strong RSA keys — numbers with more than 600 decimal digits — using just 372 qubits. In an email to Nature on behalf of all the authors, Guilu Long, a physicist at Tsinghua University in China, cautioned that having many qubits is not enough, and that current quantum machines are still too-error prone to do such a large computation successfully. “Simply increasing the qubit number without reducing the error rate does not help.” while Shor’s algorithm is guaranteed to break encryption efficiently when (and if) a large-enough quantum computer becomes available, the optimization-based technique could run on a much smaller machine, but it might never finish the task.

The documents include children's SEN information, child passport scans, staff pay scales and contract details, taken in 2021 & 2022.

I would like - private who is - least amount of data given to provider - website builder is welcomed

For me, I currently use Firefox on my computer and phone, uBlock Origin and YouTube Vanced. What else is fairly easy to do that I can add on?

An investigation into the powerful spyware Pegasus, sold to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group. This two-part series, part of the Pegasus Project, examines how the hacking tool was used on journalists, activists, the wife and fiancée of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and others. Edit: Part II of the series is out to whom it may concern.

I saw Axbom sharing this ever-expanding bookmark collection with over 5k bookmarks regarding Digital Ethics earlier today and I was thinking perhaps others would be interested too. All credits for making the collection obviously goes to Axbom, I'm just posting the link to it, as he shared it publicly.

Instead of enjoying a late Thanksgiving meal with his mother in Georgia, 28-year-old Randal Reid spent nearly a week in jail in November after he was falsely identified as a luxury purse thief by Louisiana authorities using facial recognition technology.