I'm at a stage where I have the time and resources to think more about the data that's collected about me, what I choose to make available, and how this might impact my life (perhaps all of our lives).
I really enjoy being able to use Google Maps and similar services, but suspect that even with certain features turned off, my location is likely being recorded. I also use Google suite for many things (e-mail, calendar, and so on). I have a mostly blank Facebook profile, but several years worth of use on WhatsApp. I'm vaguely aware that there is probably a tremendous amount of my data between several companies that is being stored and sold for advertisement, or perhaps even other purposes.
The question is: is this something I can avoid through clever personal choices, or can this only be addressed through more collective action and legislation? Am I wasting my time by installing an obscure Linux distribution and nagging my friends to join Diaspora rather than Facebook?
Have any of you found a "sweet spot" of compromise between privacy and practicality?
Honestly the older I get the less I care. I don't know if I'm just giving up, because I still bristle at the idea of companies having this data on me, but at the same time I feel like they already have nearly two decades of digital information on me, if they were paying any sort of attention. I was not nearly as privacy conscious at 15 as I was at 20-odd, and it's waning again now. The horror of the google maps timeline showing me every location I've ever visited in the last ten or more years is balance by the luxury of being able to go meandering and just have it all recorded for my leisure later. Same goes for being able to search for something like "passport" in my photo archive and a scan of my passport I used three jobs ago showing up. Horrifying, but delightfully convenient. Is that convenience worth the price I pay for it? Almost certainly not, but it's really hard to quit. I suppose that's the point.
Sorry to not help at all, there. I think there's a lot you can do to easily become more infotight, but perhaps a lot of that's negated if you still want to drive on a UK road or carry a mobile phone, or use a debit or credit card.
I tried reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I don't think I've read anything as waffly and tedious in my life. Yeah, I get it Shoshana, your house burned down. You don't need to spend 50+ pages telling me about every single aspect of that.
I, too, have read the book in the picture and I, too, did not enjoy it. I wanted more anger. I wanted it to be more accessible. I wanted it to have been written by Malcolm Gladwell.
Anyway, I try my hardest not to create new profiles for anything. I do not use apps which replace things I already have (I don't walk outside to an unknown location and trust Google to direct me; I take the A-Z with me that I already own). But there is only so much you can do: I try not to use Google websites in a lot of situations, but in those situations, there are often other services which you can't use unless you do a Captcha, for Google, for free, to train their self-driving car software. So Google do own you. But I keep refreshing the Captcha until I do not get a "keep clicking till there are none left" or one of the big pictures split into 16 segments; I refuse to do those and have been known to just try again later if I can't get an acceptable Captcha. But you can't just refuse to use any services they're involved in, because they are the gatekeepers of the entire Internet.
>>27919 Every time I try to screw up their Captcha by giving slightly wrong answers, it can tell. What's the point of the training aspect if the machine already knows if my answer is correct?
