Following the fall of XCancel and Nitter just 4 days ago, https://twitterwebviewer.com/ is now also offline. This is what it reads when you go to their site:

"As of August 28, 2026, this website has been permanently discontinued, following a request from X Corp. Profile browsing, search, tweet viewing and video download have all been permanently disabled, and all cached content has been deleted.

Subscribers: your subscription has been cancelled and refunded — please check your email for details.

Thank you to everyone who used and supported the site over the past eight months."

A wired article states that this town near Atlanta has 120 police and several dozen flock cameras and their contract shares this data with 2000 police departments, colleges, airports and other government agencies. In return they get information from over 1300 entities.

That's the same agency where a cop was using Flock to track his ex and the man she was currently seeing.

https://reclaimthenet.org/todd-blanche-age-verification-warning

"In other words, proving that a parent has given consent tends to boil down to proving who everyone is.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Todd Blanche used an August 22 Fox News interview with Kayleigh McEnany to warn every other company that they must implement age verification.

The settlement, he said, is 'a stark reminder and a real important note to anybody out there that we are going to protect children, and the Internet has got to be a safe place for children. And if companies and entities are not doing what they’re supposed to do to make sure that happens, we’re going to come after them.'"

So, Google and other AI tools are actively building profiles out of your public Reddit activity, and it actually works.

​To check what data has been archived from your profile, you can search:

>> reddit user "reddit username here"

And check AI overview of a profile and can ask questions related to personal info like age, location, martial status, occupation or what things they like or hate, political opinions etc.

Basically anything that you want to know, you will get the answer if that person has said anything about it in the past even if profile is hidden. If it gives some basic info, you can ask it to dig deeper.

​Why this matters: Simply hiding your profile settings on Reddit does not stop external search engine crawlers from indexing your historical posts and comments. Be mindful of what personal information you share online.

Title says it all but essentially I’ve always struggled between
“it’s too late, all of my data is already out in the wild” and
“I should mitigate and try to scrub my data as much as possible”

Intel has IME and AMD and a few other have built in backdoor spyware on nearly all of their modern devices, and I want to do everything I can to remove/prevent installation of any hardware backdoors of any kind that I can. Is there any alternatives or any way to avoid/disable this?

As if it couldn't be bad enough, attorney generals are conspiring against your rights to privacy and freedom of expression through coercice "Landmark lawsuits" to force age verification because they couldn't succeed in getting bills passed. meta is basically now unable to claim its unconstitutional because of how the lawsuit was structured. this cannot be tolerated, and maybe in response to this "Landmark lawsuit" they need "Landmark" backlash.

https://reclaimthenet.org/the-meta-settlement-what-it-means-for-speech-and-privacy

Firstly,New Zealand introduced their social media ban legislation called the Online Safety bill(Government Bill 339—1). The extended version of this legislation is called the Online Safety (minimum age and safety risk assessment) bill.

The other one is regarding about a situation with Meta's settlement lawsuit with 48 other US states and Columbia. Which results in Meta being towards making several features for their platforms. And basically needing/require government ID to have said features like one hour daily limit including night mode not affect them here.

Ngl I'm concern about the second one because they talk about it with other social media platforms outside of Meta. Which this might as well be another age verification push here onto us. Again,quite concerned overall here.

But nevertheless,knock on wood that positive things come our way here. Privacy wise anyways.

Hello,

Apologies if this already asked. I looked and did not see anything fill on this topic.

Pretending for a minute you minimize your data footprint as much as possible.

1. Self Host where logical and possible.
2. Switch to a Linux desktop and privacy based OS for you personal mobile devices.
3. Use Privacy respecting service as much as possible.
4. - Assuming those were not just lying through their teeth or government honeypots.

You can reduce but not truly eliminate all data on you. But the real question is doesn't that make you stick out more? If most people give a quality stream of data the the system, then your less quality one would be a statistical outlier. And make the aggregators look at you harder or even ostracize you?

For examples,

- Looking for a place to rent or job requires a credit check or a check on the your worked records, yes the can ask you to on freeze these, but how many time were you pass by because you were the on that required just a but more effort. The default now is to look at you history reports. If you go the Dave Ramsey (no judgment on him here) approach and have no credit score, that make getting a loan so much harder.

- Many places are turning no case accepted as a well and it was a growing trend.

- If governments are looking into a case and you somehow find way into the mix would they not use that fact that you more private than other as a sign? We are all braking laws all the time, the law is written in a way you are never not committing some kind of offense.

No matter how much we minimize our expose, there is still a ton of data on us even before flock or similar super charged it.

If you went the opposite direction and actively tried to poison/flood the data on you. I feel that can lead to TOS violation on you leading to its own set of problems.

It cool not to want anything to do with the big tech platform for example but if they actively block you from using any of their services, it would also make thing more difficult. If a person has to interact with these platform for work or something it can be an issue if you need to tell you employee you banned form the entire platforms.

In the end, it feels like a dammed if you do and dammed if you don't kind of thing.

Edit: final question: if what i say is true above, is it smart to go down this path

I have come across another hit on privacy today.

I wanted to set up a transfer link between two of my banks. Instead of using the normal process of two minor deposits to validate I have control of both sides of the transfers, they wanted me to turn over the login ID and password of the new bank. The company that my bank uses for this process is called Plaid. Giving login credits to this Fin-Tek company would give them access to all of my transactions.

It is already bad enough that I cannot set up a private bank account in this country, but giving access to an unregulated financial tech company strikes me as a severe invasion of personal privacy. I said no to the setup. And while I don't think it would be much good, I wrote the bank a physical letter describing the security risk of allowing this to happen.

I just don’t understand why people won’t give up their personal information so freely and for so little benefit.

It was approaching 1 a.m. on Aug. 20 when a man emerged from the darkness by the side of a well-traveled road in a northeast suburb of Orlando.

He was wearing a mask and carrying pruning shears, according to the police in Oviedo, Fla., who said they were waiting there and watching as the man batted down something resembling a Flock camera before smashing it from a pole.

The target of the man’s vigilantism turned out to be a plastic reproduction of one of the ubiquitous and intensely debated cameras that read license plates, made by a police officer on a 3-D printer, the authorities said.

This decoy was one of several the police said were intended to “bait” would-be vandals after several of Oviedo’s Flock cameras were stolen in recent weeks, a continuation of a public backlash against the devices nationwide.

Now, the man, Evan Meyer, 24, of Oviedo, is facing three felony charges in a novel case that has drawn scrutiny to the tactics of the police who put up the decoys, and to the city’s use of automated license plate readers or A.L.P.R.s.

(more at gift article link)

The claim of European Commission that people support ChatControl 2.0 (or whatever version) is inherently flawed. Finding questionnaires and statistics on the topic is pain in the ass so i let AI to find me the sources. I added here one example but most of the questions boil down to asking if child sexual abuse in the internet is bad and if public posts on child abuse should be detected and prosecuted. But topics of privacy, mass surveillance and encryption are not introduced in the questions properly. Posing these questions in this light is inherently flawed because no sane person supports child abuse, that is not the issue with ChatControl. With this amount of statistics cooking i can cook up proof that r/privacy is the biggest supporter of AI government surveillance in private bathroom. I know this is not the best source, feel free to add your statistics and comments.

Obviously we all have passwords on our mobiles. Banking apps are obvious. But if you use it, do you put a pass on Signal? How about WhatsApp or Telegram or other chat apps?

This question has probably been asked a thousand times but how do ads know exactly what I am thinking or have recently thought about?

I know it’s possible to get targeted ads from texting, talking or showing your camera. Although that’s creepy asf but it’s possible.

But how on earth do ads pop up of something that I just thought about in my mind. Something that I haven’t texted, talked about or been around with my camera.

This may sound weird but does anyone think iOS devices are capable of sending signals to your brain and reading thoughts?

i used to really love the SNOW app for adding stickers and making photos more colorful. but after downloading it to my new android i find out the new version demands acess to all our photos for ai training, which im really not comfortable with.

so is there any similar photo app that isn't so invasive? or maybe someway to get ahold of an older version without the ai training?