I have to second this. Even if none of that was true, they find you through the “you shaped hole” in the lives of the ppl around you. That’s the best you can hoped for IMO

I know this to be true at some level, because it can be measured, and there are laws around it. Government publications have to be written for a certain grade level. I know military manuals are 8th grade.

This is pretty interesting, thanks!

What paper specifically are you referring to? I couldnt get the paper from the url that was provided, but I am reading the paper from 2017 linked on their github and this project forked ublock, adding additional features, which is pretty interesting actually. Such as detection of visual ads out of the blocked objects, with a series of checks to see if they are “legitimate ads”, then simulated clicks through ajax, with blocks on all response content, preserving security from any malware that may have been masquerading as a legit ad.

Granted this is from 2017, but its a pretty interesting idea. https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Published-Papers

The code itself was updated three weeks ago, so its clearly still being maintained at some level.

Combine this with containerized user accounts, and seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Traccar was they best solution I’ve going so far. Have you found others?

im not a proton shill, but they have a wallet. wouldnt any paid secure wallet option work? and yeah, i wouldnt trust google either

this was great! I hadnt considered leaked passwords. I already use uniques, but damn if this isnt a great reason to. Thanks

Check this out, its a pretty good view into good practice, beginner, intermediate, and advanced, with recommendations. https://digital-defense.io/

There is so so so much, and they do get caught, and when they do we keep a peek into how invasive they are. As someone who has had to worry about being targeted by intelligence agencies and nation-states, I was completely blindsided by corporate/capitalist surveillance.

for example, look at this action by Meta, where they broke out of security sandboxes and exploited protocols in order to tie your browsing history (even private browsing) back to your identify saved in their databases back in meta land

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_tracking_tech/

the amount of data that is being harvested and sold, and resold, is absurd, and the greater threat is not just that they are exploiting you, its that they dont care who the data gets sold to. Bad actors (criminals, etc) can and will purchase information they can use against you.

So, consider the unintentional ramifications of all that info being harvested and available in addition to the intentional ramifications of hyper greed, and couple that with the amount of available compute and you will see that you do not need to be a person of interest, everyone is a data point that can be and will be exploited.

I would encourage everyone to take their privacy seriously.

Just saw this. Feel like the alternate title could have been “When digital privacy went mainstream”, “I was into privacy before it was cool”, or finally “No I am not wearing a tin foil hat!”

hahah, nice. try and message me when you get a chance and ill share my notes.

Think im ahead of the curve on this one, but I applaud you! keep doing it.

or XMPP would work as well

There is a lot, and there are a lot of levels. I am working on this now as well. Escalating from where I was, its a learning process. Too much to type in a single comment/response.

If you would like more info on removing your info from the internet, reducing the amount of spyware on your android phone, de-googling yourself, or limiting how much info you spill while you browse, we can connect and I can share what I have been doing. Ive got plenty I still need to do beyond this, but I am happy to share my lessons learned as it were.

you are not kidding, this one is driving me crazy. no pun intended.

the two I heard about are mysudo.com and privacy.com. I think both are US only. Are they both based in the US? It didnt say on the privacy.com about us page

edit: yes, they are both based in the US.

any non-US based options that offer services to the US?

found it but was super limited. went into developer settings and enabled unknown sources but it didnt change the options. did some searches but cant find any way of really doing anything about it without rooting my phone. so meh.

amazeballs, thanks!

It didnt for me. I installed Comaps from fdroid the other day, and it didnt come up on androidauto. I guess I could try installing it from the app store and see.

I just got implemented it a yesterday. Let me check out pangolin. Im just running the traccar server instance in docker on an old laptop and connecting through tailscale at the moment. need to look into a FOSS vpn probably. WIP XD