They don’t have a social media service, right? So where do they get the data to train their AI models ? Surely they need a lot, right? It would be nice if the public knew who cooperates with them (other than governments) and just boycott their services, or at least pressure them.
If company X doesn’t offer your data to governments officials, but offers them to Palantir which makes a profile of you that it offer to the same officials, isn’t that even worse ?
That’ll protect your data from random stalkers or smaller companies, but Palantir has so many data brokers and the cooperation of the government that you can’t function in society without giving them data.
I drive a car that cannot be easily tracked (has no electronics, outside a radio), I anonymize my credit card transactions by using a proxy (I should use cash more, but I’m getting better about it), I wear glasses that block infrared cameras from fingerprinting my face in public, I use a VPN as much as I can, and I never participate in store loyalty card programs. I don’t bring WiFi- or Bluetooth-enabled devices into major retail stores. I don’t participate in Meta’s services at all, and I don’t shop at Amazon unless I’m really in a major pinch (it’s my “in case of emergency break glass” option).
YouTube is my privacy vice, I admit.
It’s not perfect, and I’m not perfect, I still have data leaked about me; but privacy isn’t a binary button that you have to turn all the way on or all the way off.
It’s a valve; a valve that you can turn more and more towards privacy, at the expense of convenience. The more you turn, the more friction you encounter in life. But, the more friction you introduce for data brokers as well.
So, yes, do what you can by introducing some friction for the data brokers - make them work harder to build a profile on you. Don’t make it so easy for them.
And don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And don’t give into despair because there is no perfect privacy anymore. It’s still a worthwhile struggle. Just do what you can, with what you have, bearing in mind what’s important to you, with every little bit of resistance here and there that you can do.
More privacy is better than less privacy.
Unfortunately, most road cameras in the US are owned and operated by private companies who are perfectly welling to sell that data in real time. Your license plate is very easy to read, and it’s a number that’s uniquely identifying. If police want to use it in courts they usually need to prove you’re actually the driver, but if it’s an entity not really concerned with that it’ll do a great job tracking you. I try to bike wherever I can, they generally don’t have any personally identifying information.
Have you heard of Invidious? Or the Duck Player? You can use YouTube without giving YouTube your data, though it might not work quite as well.
I do a lot personally to increase my own privacy, from running GrapheneOS (usually with airplane mode on, which actually fully disables cellular (I used an RTL-SDR to check, and nothing with my IMEI was broadcasting)), to not using social media (besides Lemmy, I guess), to running Arch Linux w/ LibreFox as my primary browser, to not using Amazon, to getting my friends and family to use Signal as our primary means of communication.
But letting privacy be a personal thing just means that the vast majority of people will have their privacy completely compromised, and that it’ll be very easy for privacy-concious people to slip up. Privacy should be a right, not a privilege, and the only way to do that is to go to the source: explicitly targeting, sabotaging, and campaigning against data brokers and large private companies that collect peoples data. Until we force them to stop, there is no privacy, just the illusion of privacy.
Ok, but it’s one thing to give them my name and face, for example, and it’s another to let them know my political orientation.
I don’t know, it seems a good compromise to me, but it’s true that I don’t have any need of more privacy than that to live in safety (for now at least), so maybe my point of view is too limited.