I found myself wondering, "but why?" more than once reading this.<p>>I realized that Signal is located in Mountain View, Calif. So I downloaded Burner...<p>So, Signal is compromised because it's physically near Google? Okay.<p>>and went to Amazon.com<p>A company you can't shop at without leaving a digital trail? Okay.<p>>seeing the 7-Eleven location listed there along with almost everywhere else I’d been in the last seven years<p>You didn't turn off location services before trying a Faraday bag? You're still using your Android smartphone?<p>I guess I can give the author credit for looking around and trying, but most of the privacy benefits likely come from things like: using Signal (or similar end-to-end encryption), using privacy-focused email (or a private email server), not logging into social media, turning off location services, using a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo or StartPage, and blocking ads (and possibly JS if you're that bold).<p>If it's still not enough for the non-technically-minded, then I'd suggest doing some more research into more advanced techniques like network adblocking, Tor, VPN, or virtual machines.
It is impossible to hide from big corporate. People tried (1). There is no was to block all tracking unless you go full luddite and unless every single person you know or simply met randomly does so too. Otherwise big corps would just create tracking profiles for you based on activity of others. Small recent example - remember that russian spying app FaceApp (iirk) which made aged pics out of your photos? Even if you avoided it there is rather high chance that your friends uploaded pictures of you instead. Or that phone caller ID app (which is a spyware inside too) - even if you never used it they still know your number probably because others filled it in for you.<p>(1) <a href="https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five</a>
Since this was about devices and ad-blocking, I expected the Pi-hole to make an appearance. But alas, the author used Brave browser.<p><a href="https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/README.md</a>
I'm tired of hiding from the big techs in a pile of privacy gadgets.<p>How so?<p>They fight back, with dark patterns. Ruleset works today may not work on the next; you can update the rules; they can make your update break things. I can see that on some major Chinese e-commerce sites, blocking tracking scripts may cause search function to stop working, or you cannot comment because the submit button failed to load.<p>It's difficult to know, I use uMatrix, and often run into questions like what is this <cryptic.cloudfront.net> domain doing? Sometimes it's almost 'first-party'; sometimes it can be something else.<p>Domain names are too broad because I don't see why a site owner can not add trackers under the domain, or some related domain names that were 'trusted'.<p>There's an option to do this as those anti-virus software do, have a database of hashes of the scripts and css, and audit them. But you know rapid things are changing on the web, it is next to impossible to keep track of those. Eventually, we'll run out of passion and energy, just unplug it already.
When using smart watches I have found Gadgetbridge [1] useful, to keep my smart band conveniently connected to a phone but not to send my data to Xiaomi.<p>Gradully going fully F-droid [2] on my devices.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/</a>
[2] <a href="https://f-droid.org/" rel="nofollow">https://f-droid.org/</a>
Funny how they don't mention uMatrix. Or maybe the editor just removed that part seeing how this page loads 36 different scripts from 9 different domains and sets 16 cookies.
Whoa, i had never heard of Reflectacles[0]. Beyond apps, these are the kinds of physical gadgets that we need nowadays to help protect our privacy! Certainly, more growth in this area will evolve these products to be more...subdued and subtle. Nevertheless, I'm encouraged to see that this type of thing exists.<p>Beyond rfid wallets, these glasses, and the clothing/jacket the author mentioned in the article, are there any other cool apparel-related gadgets out there, which a privacy-conscious person could look into (without spending the equivalent of a 3-letter agency budget)???<p>[0] = <a href="https://www.reflectacles.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.reflectacles.com</a>
While activities like this may result in the author being less visible to a particular algorithm, I imagine that the instant dropoff from most networks and instant arrival in new networks would be a very strong signal of who they are.<p>The more bizarre tricks you try to stay hidden, the more identifiable you (probably) are.
I've been working on this since the early Web sites (starting with publishing a popular blocker ruleset), and also ongoing exercises with all kinds of measures, including compartmentalizing with a dumbphone when all the smartphone options turned out to be travesties.<p>One thing I've found is that it's already clearly impossible to do perfectly, and looks like it will be getting even more difficult and limited in what privacy one can have.<p>(Obviously, were my own privacy the biggest concern, I wouldn't be talking online in places where creepy companies scrape. I mainly dabble in privacy exercises out of a vague sense of public-interest obligation as a techie.)
Huh? A "pile of privacy gadgets"?<p>I do a pretty good job of hiding from everyone. And I don't use any "gadgets". Indeed, not using smartphones is a major boost to privacy. Otherwise, it's just multiple VMs, nested VPN chains, and Tor. All running on ~old i5 boxes that I bought used, for cash.