I ran into a strange scenario that peaked my interest with a coworker. I work with a guy who has a very unique name and has social media like FB and linkedin yet when I search for his name in Google it literally brings up zero results saying nothing was found. Interestingly enough when I go to another search engine like duckduckgo it will show all of his results including other websites like data brokers. How is this possible? To my knowledge there isn't an option in google to remove all results across numerous websites or is there?

If this isn’t the right place feel free to remove. I won’t be offended.

My local breakfast shop has a question of the month they ask and then they identify your order by your answer. This month the question was “favorite destination”. My answer was Thailand. This happened 24 hours ago. This morning I received a promotion from Airbnb featuring Thai villas.

I do not have the Airbnb app installed. I don’t have FB or Insta. The restaurant does not have a loyalty program, so no email or phone number on file. I have not googled Thailand or made any other searches. I have an apple with google associated apps installed.

Which app is the likeliest culprit?

Been messing around with a project that analyzes Reddit usernames to see what you can piece together just from public posts. It started as something aimed at intel/security use cases (where working with personal info is expected), but it raised a bigger question:

What about using this same kind of analysis to show people how much of a digital footprint they’re leaving behind?

Like, we all know Reddit isn’t private, but:

• You can often guess someone’s job from a few niche subs and phrasing
• Time zone and sleep patterns are easy just from post timing
• Regional slang, relationship talk, or even income-level cues show up more than you’d think

When you put it all together, it doesn’t feel like a username anymore, it feels like a person.

So my question is:

Is it okay to show people how exposed they are, if the goal is to help them understand their digital footprint?

How to remove outdated search results for myself from Brave search results?

Any ideas?

Browser Fingerprinting is creepy and scary.

What options do you have against it, and what circumstances call for what options?

For example, Tor Browser is well known for spoofing an common fingerprint amongst all of its users. This way you can hide in the crowd.

However, if you cannot use Tor Browser for some particular website, what other options are there? Is there another mechanism by which you can spoof your fingerprint to provide an identical fingerprint that Tor Browser gives?

In addition, would it ever make sense to spoof a unique fingerprint, instead of a common fingerprint? For example if you have to log into some website anyways, I was thinking that perhaps you could spoof a unique fingerprint for website A, and then spoof a unique fingerprint for B.

Finally, a lot of websites with two factor authorization use browser fingerprinting to determine if they need to ask you to sign in with two factor. Is it not a security issue if you use a common tor-like fingerprint? In this case, I would assume that anyone who knows your password and who can spoof the same fingerprint would be able to bypass the 2FA.

Looking at getting a robot vacuum, between a quite busy work schedule, and my current manual vacuum starting to decline they seem like a good option.

Localy they have some good deals on Dreame units, and they seemingly do a great job in the vacuum/mop department. But it seems they (and a lot of others) as good as require an internet connection to communicate with a cloud.

I am fine with them needing LAN connection, but would like to block their internet connection for daily operation.

If there is a decent one that does not need an app or internet connection at all while doing a good job, that would be great as well. Hope this is ok for this sub? More Vacuum-oriented communities does not seem to care or really know anything on this topic.

Long story short, I've been doxxed a few times, I have a stalker after me and I need to protect my family. Are there any good sites or apps out there to help me remove mine and my family's data from data brokers? Getting sick of having to make 100 individual opt out requests every 90 days.

I only have reddit for now, but what about when I no longer use reddit?

I don’t know if to stay in the dark about news about the services I use, because once a privacy-friendly service goes rogue, then I’d have to change, and that’s too much of an effort for me, but that depends on what type of service it is. As an example: I don’t know if to stay in the dark about DuckDuckGo, because then I wouldn’t have to check news about it, but then I wouldn’t know that they have gone bad. Imagine if a service changes their TOS? Then I would have to change services until they correct themselves, or I no longer trust them. How do you guys handle in knowing on what can a privacy-friendly service change itself, or break user trust?

(What I mean is when they get no longer privacy-friendly, or something happens that breaks user trust).

I prefer getting positive/uplifting news related to privacy, not negative.

If you were to create an account for a service in which to get news about privacy, and the services you use, would you give out your real email address if the service is privacy-friendly? I can’t imagine the struggle for when a service is privacy-friendly, and then they go rogue, the info that they have about you is at risk, then you would try to delete your account with them and they would still keep the data. What do you do then?

so I am not on social media posting stuff, however I recently saw that I was on a social media account(facebook and instagram). How do I get those posts, pictures, and stories of me removed/deleted from their account permenently. I do not want my face on their social media. Asking them is not an option and neither is getting a lawyer. Is there a way like reporting or some sort of form or something? If i do report what do i report it under.

I don't quite understand how it works, it just seems like you post and your data is shared everywhere, so any server can collect it, and since meta has threads, they have access to all the data.

But if you're on a centralized server, it stays on that server. And if they decide to create a walled garden it's relatively private, no one can collect it unless the people who own the platform decide to share or sell it. And you only have to trust one entity over many entities.

Either way it seems that your data is basically controlled by whoever is running the server(s).

I'm currently using Proton and have it setup for my family with a custom domain.

I want to move away from Proton, as it's too expensive and I regularly get complaints about how slow it is, and they want to be able to use their preferred mail app. Just not worth it imo.

What options do I have?

We all use Apple products, so Apple Mail is an option.

What other companies are there? (except Microsoft and Google).

I use a password manager and I had never used the security check up features until this weekend.

I had a large number of accounts with the same password.

As I started to go through the process of changing passwords, I realize more than half of them were accounts I don't use. So I changed the password then deleted the accounts.

Curious how often others do this. Also, what other periodic maintenance should I do regarding my online presence?

For instance, a homeowners’ association wants to put “security” cameras on public streets. This seems like it would have huge opportunities for abuse of privacy as well as flimsy data security.

Police would have access “after the fact” when a crime has been suspected of being committed in the area. Unknown who would have technical access the rest of the time to provide info to the police—Do police have constant information of comings and goings on these public streets? Does a neighbor/the HOA management/property management?

Do you have any experience of this? What is your opinion? This seems like a privacy overreach at people’s homes that would never be pulled back from. Why would this be needed in a public space as opposed to private choices, such as camera doorbells or GPS bracelets?

Why is the privacy online lifestyle so complex? One has to stay on top of data breaches, TOS or privacy policy changes, new privacy-friendly services etc.

I mean, why is it so difficult to change email providers and the hundreds of accounts under a Gmail address? Why is everything so difficult to do? As soon as I share my real email, then all hell breaks loose and then I maybe have to create a new email providers account, just to start over and with every account. I can’t just share my real email address and be with peace of mind.

As soon as one starts to understand what all of this privacy online stuff is all about, one gets into a rabbit hole that apparently no one else cares about nor understands, because they are too busy with Google. Its as if I am on my own now, and there’s no support for this lifestyle. The lifestyle that society moves forward with is privacy-invading at every corner. It’s like I’m alone in this world just because I’m trying to do action on something that most of society just doesn’t care about. I don’t have any help on this.

Why isn’t this topic as prevalent as work, school, the internet, or anything else that’s “normal” in society? No one reads the TOS or the privacy policies of the services they use. I believe this is more of a societal structural problem than an individual problem. If TOS and privacy policies weren’t as LONG and legalese, then people would read them and NOT use their services because of privacy invasion.

Everything I know so far about privacy online is because I somehow found out about it, and no one else told me about it. This topic is one of those things that no one talks about, yet is as important as something like work.

There should be an institution that everyone is obligated to attend that teaches about online privacy and security. I bet that if privacy online were as forefront as other stuff, then it would be way easier to do privacy and security online. Sadly, this is a minority thing, so we are on our own on this.(Although I don’t know how did we come about to know about the existence of online trackers).

Companies, nor society, don’t talk about privacy-online as much as other societal stuff, yet we, as a society, ended up glorifying physical privacy with the concept of a house.

Why didn’t we, as a society, put as much emphasis on the importance of privacy online as much as physical privacy?

I wonder what other concepts should society hold in high regard.

Thinking about going through the effort to set up a domain I own for aliasing with SimpleLogin. But is it worth it to swap all accounts to a per-vendor alias like netflix@mydomain.com?

Are there any success stories where you discovered a breach or data sale this way?