Personal Privacy

A blog about personal privacy – tools, tips, and tech

In a shocking move that surprises no one, LinkedIn is also using all of your personal data to feed and train its artificial intelligence. You can opt out for future information sharing with a double opt out, but anything you’ve already posted has already been sucked into the board. If you don’t opt out, it’s being shared.

Opt Out

The only way to keep your information from being absorbed by AI is to not give it to AI to begin with. Anything you have put out on the internet is already lost. But you can stop the bleeding. Use false information. Alias. Disposable email addresses. Leave from blank. It’s hard to do, but worth it.

establish a internet identify for yourself that protects your personal information while you still can.

In what is a shocking revelation to no one – or at least anyone paying attention – Meta companies have scooped up all of your personal information and fed it to its AI model. A spokesman has confirmed to Congress that both Facebook and Instagram have engaged in this practice. If you post is or ever was “public” at either Facebook or Instagram, it is now part of the Borg and being reviewed by the almighty algorithm thousand of times a day. Pictures of your pets, kids, spouse, best friends. Drunk posts, happy posts, angry posts – now all absorbed into AI to be analyzed, parsed, and regurgitated to strangers … forever.

Thank God there is a way to opt out … or maybe not.

Prepare to be absorbed.

Lesson: Stay away from Meta Products. Can not be trusted.

I have discovered Micheal Bazzwell and all the privacy information he has to offer. I bought the 3rd and now the 4th edition of is book. He is a little extreme – I would expect he would be given the title of his book – “Extrema Privacy”. He has a lot of good advice though – well worth checking out.

Here’s the website and podcast.

https://inteltechniques.com/

Dig in. There is a lot of infor…

In are you have not seen this yet, Forbes has an excellent article on how to disable Facebook and Instagram’s data harvesting of your personal photos that you upload to them. It should be no surprise to anyone concerned about privacy, but Facebook and its sister company, Instagram, stripes your personal location data from your photos when you upload them to their service, then reinserts its own data into the pictures it posts.

Does it delete your personal data its removes? Of course not. It save and stores it. As Forbes States:

So, does Facebook delete the location data after it has been stripped? No, of course not. Why would the world’s most avaricious data harvester throw away valuable information that it can use to monetize you even further? Facebook stores the data in its multi-billion-dollar data vault, against your profile.

The solution is to not give it the data to begin with. Thankfully, for those wth iPhones, Apple is making that easier to stop not just Facebook, but others.

Here is the excellent article form Zak Doffman at Forbes.

Here is how you can stop it . . or at least slow it down. . . maybe

The Washington Post recently ran a test on data flows from some popular iPhone apps. Even the ones that were not tracking you, in fact, were. Well, technically it wasn’t tracking, but “fingerprinting” – the process of obtaining enough infomrtion about your device that a the device (and presumable operator) could be easily identified. Although this is usually used by law enforcement against criminals,the techniques being used more and more against websites visitors.

On your iPhone, you can now tap a button that says, “Ask app not to track.” But behind the scenes, some apps keep snooping anyway.

You can find their investigation here.

After 9/11, the United States united in a way not seen in decades. In the rush to gets the terrorists who did this to us however, American citizens began to accept more government privacy invasions in the name of national security and public safety. It should not be a surprise that this is also when Big Tech rose to power and you became the product.

So you think you can trust the social media companies to do what you ask with your data . . . think again. In yet another “mistake” due to a “bug,” it turns out that those pictures you deleted from Instagram are not, in fact, deleted.

Shocker!

According to a recent Wired article, a user discovered that data he specifically asked Instagram to delete was still saved on their servers over a year later. He had requested a copy of his data and found that long deleted pictures where still stored on the site's servers. Instagram said that this was an “oversight” because usually they delete data within 90 days . . .

yeah right.

Remember, do not trust any social media company with your data. Your are the product. No company is going to give away their product for free. There is always a cost – in this case it is you – your information, your privacy, your control.

Instagram is also owned by Facebook; a notorious privacy violator. But don't worry, it is just a “bug” or an “oversight” – they clearly do not have any intent to violate your privacy and keep your information to sell to others . . forever. Not them.

Last month, users discovered some disturbing behavior in the Facebook App on the iPhone – it is secretly recording you.

Facebook called it a “bug” and vowed to fix . . . we will see.

See the article here.

Follow Up:. Facebook says it fixed the “bug”

Yeah . . . Right

Never forget that Facebook wants your data and does everything it can to maximize data collection from you. It makes millions from personal data, which means you if you are a Facebook user.

FaceBook Financial Results - Revenue Per User

Our advice - delete your Facebook phone app now.

What does the Federal Government, Local Law Enforcement, or even Congress need to obtain your phone records? They just need to ask for them. And you will never know that they did and they have your call records.

Here is a link to an excellent article by Leslie McAdoo Gordon, looking at the history at court cases and statutory authority for these searches.

Be aware. Be afraid. Protect your Privacy.

Enter your email to subscribe to updates.