r/PrivacyTechTalk

Title says it

Last year, I was forced to switch to a new phone number (long and unrelated story), and I immediately saw a huge uptick in scam calls and texts compared to my previous number. I'm used to the occasional spam, but lately I've been regularly getting through days with 10+ spam calls. I get spam texts asking me about a piece of property I do not own. Phony and inflammatory "political alerts" that, without getting into it, do not align with any of my own politics. Apparently I've even got a free Margaritaville cruise waiting for me. I'm completely over it and feel like I'm being driven insane.

Is there anything I can do to exorcise the former owner of my number? If it's of any use, I believe I've been able to piece together his identity from the invasive messages (some of which have contained his full home address!). Obviously won't be sharing any of that, but I will say that he passed away in 2019 (if I did my detective work right) and seemed very prone to giving out his phone number to some very disreputable people.

Will a service like Incogni be of any help? Does it take a one-time scrub, or will it be an ongoing fight? Will anything help at all? I'm at a loss and don't know where to even begin. Not even looking to stop all spam, just desperate to reduce it even a little bit!!

I’ve noticed that a lot of businesses, freelancers, agencies, and even legal professionals still use regular cloud storage links and email attachments for sensitive file sharing, even though privacy and cybersecurity concerns are becoming more serious every year.

Things like contracts, onboarding documents, invoices, financial records, and identity verification files are often shared through links that can stay active indefinitely or get forwarded without much control.

Recently I started researching secure file sharing platforms and encrypted document sharing tools that offer temporary links, private access, expiring downloads, and browser-based encryption, and honestly it feels like this approach makes much more sense for confidential document exchange.

Now I'm curious, what other people are using to share sensitive files?

Update: Someone recently suggested Mboxly a privacy focused file sharing tool with encrypted delivery and temporary password-protected links. Are more people switching to tools like this for sensitive file sharing?

i’ve been spending more time lately looking into personal privacy and data broker exposure after realizing how much information about me was publicly searchable across multiple aggregator sites. once i started checking, i found old addresses, relatives, phone numbers, and other details mirrored across way more sites than i expected.

that led me toward services like deleteme, although before subscribing i started looking for a deleteme promo code and comparing long term user experiences. what’s interesting is how divided opinions seem between people who think ongoing removal services are worth paying for and people who believe manual removals combined with better privacy habits accomplish nearly the same thing.

my main concern is sustainability over time. even if removals work initially, data seems to constantly get recopied and reindexed through different brokers and aggregation pipelines. i’m curious whether paid monitoring services meaningfully reduce long term exposure or mainly automate a process that eventually becomes repetitive anyway.

for people here who actively manage their online privacy footprint, have services like deleteme actually made a noticeable difference over time? and if you prefer self managed removals instead, what workflows, tools, or habits have been the most effective for keeping your information from resurfacing repeatedly?

whats the best chat app to use for privacy and extremely low data cosnumption?

Google is going to Bake Age verification into the OS itself this is Very dangerous as there are multiple Android smartphones out there that will have android 17 as last update! once you install android 17 and its the final update for the phone the age signal API will be on your phone till the day the hardware dies! you cant even downgrade or the efuse trips! if you still have android 17 after at least 5 to 10 years and you accidentally factory reset it and verify your id again it will fail to send as device is old and might not connect to google servers and will send to hackers instead