r/DigitalPrivacy

This might not be relevant to many people, but I just got an email because I invest in US Treasury bills. Safe investment with decent interest. (I can't afford to risk the stock market casino.)

Up until now, the UST website has required a password and an emailed code to log in. Good enough for me. No one can do anything with my account, anyway, unless they want to invest in my name.

Starting next month, UST is going to require ID.me. I looked it up. It's a private company that's somehow captured nearly all government contracts for identity confirmation. They'll apparently require uploading a video from a cellphone with their own app installed, along with drivers license and SS number -- all going to an opaque, private company. That means that they'll probably be able to track and potentially sell the location of most people who take part. There's no other reason to require a cellphone and a special app to make a video. But I'm even more worried about the privacy/security risk in general. Right now it would be extremely hard for anyone to hack my account. But it wouldn't be so hard if someone hacks ID.me and they're the sole arbiter of my identity.

A while ago I found a bunch of my personal information showing up on people search sites, so I used some random removal service I found online to get rid of it. I checked again after a while and most of it seemed to be gone, so I figured that was the end of it. Recently I searched myself again out of curiosity and somehow some of the same information is back.

Do I not understand how this works?? What's the point of removing it if these sites can just add you again later? Has anyone actually managed to keep their information off these sites long term?

how is lunaris aosp privacy wise ? I'm using nothing 2A, i want a customizable os and also want to avoid google's lockdown happening in september 2026,is Lunaris AOSP a privacy friendly ROM ?

I saw someone say the yt video links you share have expose your channel and IP. Is that true?

Admittedly Vanity Fair has devolved into irrelevant celebrity sycophancy these days, but Andrew Zucker's faux-guileless piece on the Flock founders is particularly pathetic. If that wasn't paid placement, it might as well have been. Zucker is a featherweight, but he and VF destroying their wafer thin veneer of credibility over Langley and Todd is a head-scratcher, unless a sliver of that 8.5B valuation was somehow involved.

Other than maintaining 10 different tools, I don't think as a normal citizen there's any (dis)advantage of de-googling. All the emails we receive by banks or organizations are already using Google/Microsoft or any such unencrypted tools. So your emails are already exposed.

We all mostly use social media platforms and we also give our details at many places who sell our data. So from our face to the phone number, nothing is private anyways.

As a normal citizen, I don't see a point of being so secretive or paranoid about the privacy and encryption for emails, drive and all.

Of course, we need to preserve our passwords and private chats and that's fruitful too.

What do you guys think about this opinion?

Residents did not speak at a City Council hearing this week merely to express discomfort with new technology. They presented an evidence-based argument that the current system is inadequately governed, vulnerable to abuse, and capable of uses far beyond the narrow public-safety examples emphasized by its defenders.

I'm sorry if i venting about this.Actually there's something i'm scared and want to ask about.i know that one of the best ways to protect your privacy is to degoogle,but i just make i huge mistake which is share all my google account access/permission to claude.i have deleted all my claude account and this is what im affraid of.

I'm afraid that all my google account that i use for learning to protect my privacy and the practice of it get flag by AI and same for my online activity and prevent me from maintaing my privacy in the first place to the point where everything i've done feels pointless.I know this may sound like a small thing,but information leakage/OPSEC violation often come with small things.

For example Dread Pirate Robert aka Ross Ulbricht once accidently revealed his email and get caught all because of bad OPSEC.
So i wnated to ask is there anything i can do about my situation,or am i just overthingking it?Or is it there simply no solution?

My main goal is to be able to chat anonymously without letting my real identity related back to me

Hello!

Yesterday, I received an unexpected WhatsApp message: "XXXXXX this is your Facebook confirmation code."

The message was sent from an official Facebook profile, but its telephone number was registered in the UK.

I was stupid enough to click "I didn't ask for code," so the code was sent as a quotation in the reply message... maybe that was the point of this potential fraud?

I checked my Facebook and WhatsApp accounts (both have 2FA) — I didn't find anything suspicious.

The strange part is that when I wanted to log in to my FB account, I received the 2FA code from the same profile on WhatsApp, as well as security info. So it seems that, in fact, this British profile is official? Therefore, replying to them should be dangerous, right? Maybe someone just used my phone number by mistake? What do you think?

What else can I do to secure my profiles, number, and data?

Thanks for your support!

Best wishes!

So i have recently decided with all this AI everywhere, scanning my emails, and probably my text messages, social media usage, online bank accounts, debit/credit cards, and the WiFi knowing who’s home and what they’re doing.
I feel like I have zero privacy and the world is headed in a weird direction.
I personally want to mitigate my digital foot print. Obviously you cannot 100% delete your digital footprint especially since I’ve had an iPhone since I was 12 but I would like a fresh start, I would like to see ads that aren’t personalized to me and I would like my phone to not track everything I do. Like I used to be able to google something and my phone wouldn’t know. But now I google something and I see it on instagram, TikTok, ads, google suggestions, EVEN IN MY PREDICT TEXTS!

I want to start slow and slowly get to a point where it’s very hard to find my digital footprint.

So what are easy, inexpensive things I can do to protect my privacy?

Keep in mind, I am a college student and I also recently started a 9-5 as a Financial Advisor so my privacy isn’t just important for myself but also my client and peers information.