I wish to convince my friends and family to avoid using privacy-invading ad-based services and apps. Seeing people discuss how much data these companies collect off of us, I want to know if there is a way you could get a sample of that data by yourself and show it to them for them to realize the gravity of the situation themselves.
The closest thing is Google’s ad personalization panel in the Google Account Dashboard. It literally lists out the information of the account holder by the things they’ve browsed, including their gender, age, occupation, interests etc. I could’ve used it to show to my family but I turned off ad personalization for all their accounts a few years back so they aren’t even aware of it.
The next closest thing to this could be browser fingerprinting tests but they wouldn’t be able to understand the tech jargon from the results anyway. Also I am not planning to go to the ‘deep web’ for this. Is there any other way I could get this done, like a website/app specifically designated for this purpose, for opening some sort of userlog in the accounts page?
Show them exactly what the company says the collect in plane language not legalese.
Haha plane language. Like whats up my Airbus?
Not much my Cessna.
Comac C919 here, what is this “Privacy” you speak of ?
I guess not everyone can be an SR-71. I’ll give you a transcript of everything they’ve been saying for the past 9 hours, hopefully it should bring you up to speed.
But at least with plane language it’s not Boeing anymore.
I personally like to show how easy it can be to cyberstalk someone.
I pulled up a friend’s LinkedIn and pasted their bio text into Google line-by-line until I got a trail to a very old LiveJournal which had links to a NSFW Tumblr (before the purge). What led me there was a phrase that they used frequently in conversation and on the bio. It was their “bone apple tea” moment that made it VERY easy to pin down. I also followed the username trail to some fanart on DeviantArt, and a snapshot of an old website on archive.org.
I present that, then tell them if I can build a profile like this with less than an hour’s work, imagine what data processors can do with the amount of data harvested from voluntarily accepting an “invasion” policy, especially if they (the data processors) are able to automatically match speech patterns to users!
Have them open Google maps if they use it and show them the timeline. That usually freaks people out a bit. Then you can say sites are doing this same tracking with their digital information or something.
If it’s worth $3 to you, I recommend “Take This Lollipop”.
It used to be free, but I guess they gotta eat too.
It’s basically a creepy interactive movie that uses a person’s own personal data to scare them about privacy and what they put on the net.
If you’re willing to spend 40$, various data brokers will sell you all the information people in this thread have mentioned
Disgusting that we need to pay for it
You can use it to search for information from data breaches.
Wdym? You can’t directly access the data from the data breaches from the site
The site doesn’t exist as a portal to stolen data. It exists purely as a way to see if your data has been stolen in a data breach.
If you want to find said data. The site tells you in what breach it occurred and you can find it from there.
John Oliver’s Edward Snowden interview where they talk about the fact that the government collects people’s dick pics. If that doesn’t make them care, nothing will.
Amiunique is a good one that demonstrates how just with the specs of the device you are using (os, browser, screen size, browser version, user agent, color pallette, js engine, language, keyboard type, etc) you can create a totally unique fingerprint that can be used to track you without ever knowing your name, or who you are as a person.
Most people aren’t going to care anyway. I do not care whatsoever and I build ELT and ML systems.
Have them install duck duck go on their phones and turn on the app tracking protection and then they can see the data collected by companies they have never heard of. It will show how they try to collect your full name, email, and exact gps coordinates.
