Or have to go through great lengths to escape.
In my country you can’t buy any medicine without showing your ID… I mean, you technically can, but if you are registered they “give” like an 80% discount, so everyone thinks it’s a great deal, not realizing that’s the normal price, they are just pretending you can still go and buy a simple cold medicine without sharing your ID, phone, email, and street address with the drug store and whoever they decide to sell that information to, you just have to pay absurdly more. Yeah, you can lie about all the other information, but not really about your ID number. Probably soon, to get the “discount”, you are going to have to verify your email or phone number as well.
If Europe doesn’t fight back strong enough, Chat Control will be one such thing. All your messages being scanned by a “black box” system. Hopes are on the European Parliament and societal pressure to cancel this now. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/reality-check-eu-council-chat-control-vote-is-not-a-retreat-but-a-green-light-for-indiscriminate-mass-surveillance-and-the-end-of-right-to-communicate-anonymously/
In my country it’s just KYC, mostly services, banks and government. The rest is pretty private. Sure, there are cameras all over the city, government and private, but nothing like the Flock bullshit in the US. The cameras here are centralized in the 911 HQ, and no government institutions or police have acres to private cameras.
You can’t escape when you currently appears life in one of the millons cams anywhere and even with this life in YouTube, additional to the surveillance of big corporations, banks and the own ISP. Privacy nowadays is relative, you can only patch the biggest holes. 100% privacy is stay at home and reading a book with the smartphone turned off.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=live+webcams+around+the+world
https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam.html
etc… adding millons more used by police and govs with face recognition soft.
- credit cards, debit cards, and now cashless vendors
- flock cameras
- google, fb, and amazon scooping everything I do online
- license plate readers on cop cars and on random parking lots
- my work computer taking screenshots, listening, and even scanning how long I spend reading an email to make sure I am not ignoring the nonsense the company directors send us about how great AI is and that we all have to use it EVERY FUCKING DAY
- membership cards
- I can’t think of more right now, but there are more
You can escape the big tech tracking by installing uBlock Origin in your browser, and if you use their services, disabling personalised ads and search/activity history in their accounts.
escape the big tech tracking by installing uBlock Origin
Cloudflare and AWS say “Hi” 👋
UBO is a very good tech that I strongly recommend too though. Just gotta be aware of its limits.
I’ve effectively excised fb from my life and i’m becomming kinda proud since so many people still struggle with that one.
Which company if I may ask? Name and schame… Honestly I would leave such a invasive company. It is not worth it.
Japan just hooked up the national health insurance to the national ID.
- You have to hand over a huge amount of personal info about yourself & others to estate agents when renting a property - which they then sell to advertisers & you have no opt-out
- Similarly, landords can require you to use a proprietary app for rent payments, which of course collects & sells your private data too
- Burner phones are effectively illegal (telcos are required to collect & retain ID of every phone number they register)
- Telcos and ISPs are required to collect & retain logs of all your activities for a minimum of two years
- In some cities police can detain & search you & your property for no reason, and require you to remove any facial coverings
- It’s illegal to refuse to hand over passwords to cops (6 years jail is the max term I think)
- Police can hack your device, take over your social media, delete or modify your data for an investigation, or survey any digital device if they “think it is likely to be used by someone subject to a warrant” (this particular bill was announced and then rushed through parliament in less than 24 hours to give the public as little time as possible to protest it
- Some social media sites (including github(wtf)) are now required to age-verify all users beginning next month. Which will obviously lead to mass leaks & breaches of private data which the gov will turn a blind eye to
This is Australia. I hate it here
being punished for not giving your phone password to police sounds insane
Over the ditch here, New Zealand isn’t much better and like many countries only getting worse. The insane amount of personal information that essential companies (e.g. electricity, property managers, etc) is getting out of control and our digital privacy laws are still in the dark ages.
Our president, House leader, Senate leader, head of FBI are all owned by a foreign government, and the ones who aren’t, are blackmailed, or paid off to support them at all costs, even if it’s committing a genocide. There’s no way to escape it, we are a nation under blackmail.
Sorry, *your* president, not mine. I don’t live in the US.
(If you’re ashamed to explicitly point out your country, then… I think you have to deal with that anyway. I don’t know if fighting against the bad actors in your country is a feasible strategy; it’s too easy to give poor advice from far away, imagining yourself an expert where in reality you’re not, so I’m not recommending anything.)
