Says the person with a Lemmy profile. Do you pay bills online? Do you search things? Use maps?

Congrats, you have a shadow profile out there logging all the data about you.

You didn’t keep shit private if you’re carrying a GPS tracker on you at all times, which you are(your phone). You are VASTLY misunderstanding digital privacy and how statistics works. You don’t have to type a single foreign language word for them to know you speak it. Just go to places and hang around people that it knows speaks it and it’ll make the assumption. Every person you interact with who shares EVERYTHING is, congrats, basically a snitch on you as well.

It’s statistics, like I said.

You have your phone on you, right? And he has his phone on him, right? And your phone’s are constantly near each other, riiiiiight? Do you maybe see where this is going?

Your “Internet profile” is being linked to his “internet profile” because they can see you are constantly together. So they assume friends/relatives/coworker. But they also see that you’re together at times people who are couples are(late at night while asleep, for example). So with basic time and location data, they’ve determined you’re a couple. And that becomes another metric in your profile. Things that he likes, it will assume you like or are at least interested in, and same for him. All you had to do was type in the other language a few times and your profile got “speaks X” added to it. And him, by dating you, now has “knows someone who speaks X regularly” attached to his profile.

It’s really very easy. Now imagine that everything you do is being catalogued like that. Then cross referenced with other people they know more about to flesh out more inferences about yourself(“you like x and y? 98% of people who like X AND Y also like Z, so let’s advertise Z to them”.

It seems like magic but it’s just advanced statistics in action.

You are a disgusting person who no one wants to be around. We deal with it by avoiding people like you

All these people “rediscovering” old tech like we didn’t abandon it for a reason. No, I don’t want to build a PC out of old Commodore 64s that barely works and needs to be coded in assembly when I can literally get a mini PC that’s 100x more powerful for $120.

“Hey bro! Here’s some 20 year old program! We should totally reinvent it today! It’s not like anyone has been working on this exact thing for the last 20 years!”. Wtf is with the younger generations obsession with “retro tech”?!? “Look bro, I can do the same thing we can do now, but slower and worse!”

Also Matrix. If you’re gonna suggest something, maybe make sure it doesn’t already exist.

Many users don’t log in. After the fall of the 3rd party apps, I only use the rdx webapp if I want to view reddit. I don’t log in with an account at all anymore. So all of my data looks like some anon browsing from the same VPN server as hundreds of other anons. Yes they can analyze all of that traffic and individualize it, but that takes work. I’m glad to make them expend more effort, even if they get the same data in the end. Every step that makes it less cost effective for them is better, even if not perfect.

Checked my pixel 6 and it’s on mine. Might not be in the store for everyone, but it’s installed on my owned device.

In another posting of this, it was pointed out that this is just a game of telephone that started with someone saying “I dunno, maybe they used electric toothbrushes?!?” basically. There’s no concrete evidence of this actually occuring and is just being reposted over and over as fact now that it’s been picked up by bigger sources and now those sources are being pointed to as proof.

I forget the name of it, but it’s when the original source is lost and all current sources are just an oroboros consuming itself. You have the original, shakey source, its picked up by a reputable source, then everyone starts sharing that as the source, giving the story credibility. Eventually everyone is just referencing a copy of a copy(sometimes with one of the copies even being credited as the OG source).

Most outrage media is this. One person said something on social media, it gets repeated by a source that “matters”, and eventually it is “fact” with “thousands of supporters”. The Starbucks Holiday drama is usually just a handful of people on Twitter being spread around, for example.

EDIT: FOUND IT. Was an old XKCD comic. “Citogenesis”. When people don’t pay attention to the original citation anymore because it’s been replaced by “better” citations that validate it in a weird catch-22 way.

Which is EXACTLY this. Melroy(Mbin dev), was a Lemmy dev that was “ignored”, then he was a kbin dev who was… “ignored”. But then he ran his own instance, which was again, ignored. So then he started Mbin, which of course he named after himself(Melroy Bin). In between each of these attempts, he’d go to numerous communities and post long rants trying to call out the other devs about how terrible everyone else was and how no one is listening to his brilliance and he’s the One True Savior of the fediverse.

Dude is pathologically egotistical and is exactly the kind of person I don’t want admining anything.

I sometimes leave some IDs in

Keep up with yourself?

If anything that just makes it easier to map your social circle. Probably even intentional to see who you share links with.

Well, if it’s using WiFi, then anything you do will also kill your WiFi signal. So, bare minimum, no WiFi router, only LAN lines.