[PLUG] IP Tracking

Mike C. mconnors1 at gmail.com
Mon Sep 23 21:34:12 UTC 2019


As a tech user and non-tech worker/researcher, Rich, makes a very salient
point about personal data privacy / security.

In the words of comedian Roy Moore, "Ain't nobody got time for all that"
reading the Terms of Service, researching apps, monitoring security
vulnerabilities, etc.

I've worked in IT most of my life, personal / public privacy / security
matters to me and mostly what I focus on is not making it easy for
companies to profit from my personal data. Not too mention the revelations
of Mr. Snowden.

I'd like to re-frame Rich's car analogy a bit. We are with the Internet,
where we were with the car before the seat belt.

It's fun, useful, convenient but also very unsafe. Many people were killed
and seriously injured along the way to seat belts being required to be in
cars and then be used.

Most people use the internet with a seat belt and the focus continues to be
on features / functionality for profit.

As another Plug'er mentioned, IP tracking is baked in and privacy /
security is not. When I was doing IT / Network Security work almost 20 yrs
ago it was mostly after-market, bolt on stuff. I've read that this is
changing slowly as young sw devs are being trained to write more secure
code and I think privacy from surveillance is probably on more people's
minds these days.



One thing I've noticed is that EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guide
continues to evolve and now has things like "Personal Threat Model" and
"Limitations of this Guide."

Clearly if you're a journalist, activist, lgtbq youth, you're going to have
a different thread model than your average internet user.

I did a quick search of Ghostery found an article that it was acquired by a
Germany based browser company, Cliqz. According to the article, Germany has
some of the strongest privacy laws in the world.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3170574/browser-privacy-extension-ghostery-is-moving-to-germany.html

So I'm grateful that Rich brought up Ghostery and that a conversation
ensued. Now I get to "play" w. a new browser and maybe take one more small
step away from the Google empire.

I've been trying to get away from Gmail for years. I've Riseup and
Protonmail accounts but Gmail has more storage, features, conveniences.

Not that it matters with the PLUG mailing list as it's a publicly
searchable record.



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