Instead of using all those privacy-oriented services I just... fake my digital life.
I did this for my entire life, save Apple, a company I chose to trust (or rather I trusted Jobs). Since 2006, Apple always got my real name, full details, etc. Last year, that all changed. I pulled out everything. Everything is fictional or as obfuscated as I can make it. I’m sure they still know as much as before (hell, even more probably) but not willingly.
Additionally, I used to want the same name across all my accounts for continuity, but that too has changed. My online persona shifts across every platform (tho admittedly I bailed on most social media). Stories are twisted. If something happened to my brother, well, he’s my sister now. My mom, my uncle. I was 7 is now 9, 11. Not me, my “friend.” Every detail I share online is adapted from a true story, with as many fake details as possible so bots can chase their tails. We went camping in Australia. No wait, it was Canada. No Mexico. Oops. It’s gotten to the point that I really hate sharing pictures online as some bot will unequivocally triangulate my location thru some obscure tree in the background just by the way it’s shaped. Don’t believe they can get that level of detail? I have some bad news for you. They have been lidar scanning the planet. Arguably Pokemon Go became the biggest high fidelity map of the globe; all crowd sourced by its player base. And I hate that. I hate that some bot is continually building data points in some database somewhere. Often controlled by private equity.
I watched
a video on YT showing just how easy it is to continuously track you just thru your weather app, nothing more. Most of your lifestyle can be deduced. A stationary location of 7-9h means that is your home. A visit to a location 3-4x a week for 1h is likely a gym. Then they work outward. How many grocery stores are there around that one stationary location. What kind of clientele do they service (high end, low end, etc. which indicates socioeconomic status). As a statistician, you can easily build up a working model of anyone’s life with a high level of certainty given enough data points. Sprinkle in some serious compute power and it becomes child’s play. Full autonomous. Get their CC number and boom, you tie it all together with a bow.
All of Apple’s apps have unique identifiers now. Every single one. They constantly ping back daya every second to various domains (news.apple.com being a big one that is tied into almost all their apps). Their promise of privacy means next to nothing when you learn that anonymization has been circumvented mere months after being deployed with accuracy levels exceeding 95%. It also doesn’t help that all this data is outside the governments reach and in the hands of private actors or contractors that don’t need to adhere to the same level of scrutiny and due process.
I don’t think people realize that your images sent to the cloud as being scanned. Apple has a legal responsibility to not only block but report CSAM. They can say it’s all anonymously gathered, but the image still has to be looked at. Same applies across the board. Google. Amazon. They routinely scan images and should any get flagged, they are sent in for review and then dealt with. There is no metric to false positives. As a society we don’t hear much about people who get railroaded. Every company that promised ID scanning was locked in a vault or deleted after time, lied. 100%. All lied about how it was stored and for how long.
Marketing is doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to “privacy.” Read Apple’s own details on the matter. This is from their Apple Music and privacy link inside Music’s settings page:
Preventing Fraud and Other Malicious Activity
We compute a device trust score on your device when you attempt a purchase using information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive. The submission is designed so Apple cannot learn the underlying values on your device. The score is stored for a fixed time on our servers. Apple may also use information about your historical business relationship with Apple to process Apple Music subscription renewals and determine whether to provide ongoing access to your subscription in advance of authorization by the payment partner.
While nothing is pulling from identifiable material with your express name on it, their little bots
are combining and sifting through
everything under your nose. Don’t mind me, just going thru your trash. I see you like Raisin Bran. Interesting. Noted.
