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Comment by lifeformed | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays, you don't need to hide them anymore. Everyone is recording everything and uploading it to everyone.

I wonder how many videos I have appeared in as a background character of someone's Facebook video. All that data is waiting to be processed one day so the schedule of my whole life is pieced together statistically from the mountains of raw data accumulated over the decades by companies.

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I was thinking about this today as I went through my browsing history from half a year ago. I'm not too worried. If anyone had access to that data they still wouldn't know what I was up to, what adventures I had, or even anything significant about me as a person. Cross-referencing to any posts I had made wouldn't help much, especially as I'm a big troll and write whatever nonsense I want. Maybe they would know some of my preferences back then, but those have changed by now. I think the problem is a lot of people lead ritualized, static lives, carrying around the same identities and ego structures for years and years. Such people are easily predictable, and controllable.

I miss Flickr. I had an idea to do a regular scrape of Flickr using their geo API endpoint, based on where I had been on a particular day - to see if I ended up in any background shots.

But it's just not used often enough anymore for public photos; everyone's shots go to the Google Maw or the Apple Pit, never to be seen by the public.

I assume you already avoid google products, because they know where we are all day regardless of video.

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