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?
Just send them the new report on Nissan of the Mozilla foundation 😂
IMO the problem is rather “What they gonna do with my data? Show me better ads? Nice.”
I’ve met a ton of people that just don’t care. The problem often isn’t that they don’t know companies are collecting a shit-ton of data. That’s really not new or isolated to tech companies.
“If I get better ads and it saves me time, what do I care?”
“I’m getting something for free. What does it matter if they know?”“It’s too much work to avoid”
If you’re willing to spend 40$, various data brokers will sell you all the information people in this thread have mentioned
Buy Congress data weekly and make it public. Watch some privacy laws happen damn fast.
If it were that easy, someone would have done it already.
Can dou you name some? I highly doubt that you can buy data from a specific person.
You would need a lot of data and the know how to trace that data back to a specific account/user
Maybe with good targeting it can be done with buying less data
Disgusting that we need to pay for it
Facebook Offline Activity page. It displays the activity you have performed on external websites. This was the trigger for me to disable my FB account
but now you can’t see what they collect about you 😐
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.
Show them the consequeces. You might scare a few people who are already anxious by showing data collected, but most people will be apathetic. Illustrate why its bad. Be systemic about it.
The stunt outlined elsewhere of texting someone with their info is good, but “we all know google isn’t going to threaten us” is the prevailing attitude. Demonstrate what google is going to do and how it hurts people individualy and directly. Until there are personal consequences, peopae won’t really care.
Way back in the early days of Justin/Twitch, if people wouldn’t listen about their data security being important, what I did was simply look up their home addresses and phone numbers and texted them the information.
Had them get on fixing their digital footprint quite fast.
Honesty I’ve kinda given up trying to show normies that privacy is important. And have started to focus on making my own digital life as private as I can. Some will wake up and come ask you, and then you can share what you know with them and help them switch to privacy respecting tech and practises.
For example I recently converted a friend to Linux and they even bought a System76 laptop and has been very happy with it( I’m an old Thinkpad lover).
Or they will simply suffer the eventually inevitable consequences due to how little people care, and how much big companies and governments are willing to take advantage of that.
It’s not that I don’t think it’s a worthy fight and won’t continue to at least get called crazy for mentioning that it matters. But don’t be surprised how little most people care.
I used to have a plugin that mapped how many companies were getting data from the website I was on. I’m not sure if it still exists.
One eye opener that’s easily accessible is going into their Facebook third party data agreements. If it’s not turned off they’ll probably be shocked about how permissive the data is. Just visiting a website can result in a Facebook agreement to share data with that company. It’s one of the reasons apps suddenly know random things you were just talking to somebody about. It gets keyed up instantly and they start that whole analysis of shadow profiles stuff industry experts talk about.