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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Someone (Eric Schmidt? not sure) once said, "If you really want something to be private, don't put it on a computer."

Still the best advice. Rather than storing it and then worrying about where it goes, just don't store it.

Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.

I'm not minimizing the dangers of someone else recording you. I don't think Schmidt was even thinking about that, probably because smartphones weren't so ubiquitous then.

However, you CAN control what you do yourself. Your to-do list can quite easily be on a paper notebook, as can your journal. Another thread here talks about self-hosting your location history -- why TF would you even want that? You can leave your phone at home when you go places where you don't need it. You can talk to people instead of texting them. All these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for some of your friends. But you'll survive it.

Maybe you can't shut off the flow of data about you, but you can at least refrain from adding to it.

> All these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for some of your friends. But you'll survive it.

The entire point of such self-hosting is to achieve a similar level of convenience provided by the megacorps' products without them being able to profit off of your usage of them. People who will consider 'not tracking location' and 'only talking to people face to face' aren't the ones considering self-hosting their location data (unless their only reason for doing so was the megacorps' profit model).

I'm more talking about your own devices recording and spying on you, without your consent.

> Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.

I predict an increase in the number of golfers and boat enthusiasts in my lifetime.

>boat enthusiasts

Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile internet is good enough to make this viable and things like Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years.

I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and turn everything off you can hide from the world pretty effectively.

I hate to break it to you all, but there are computers in the sky now, too.

I'm fairly sure you'd have to piss off an intelligence service for them to bother spying on you personally with a satellite though, which isn't exactly part of the threat model for people who simply want to avoid "casual" privacy invasions from things like mobile networks.

Yeah sure, that was some great intel from computers in the sky during our last drone strike in Kabul that killed a humanitarian NGO and his family. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/us/politics/pentagon-dron...

Cheers! And when you come to port for a round of 18 it's perfectly normal to just leave your phone in the car or on the cart. Easy to have a great one on one conversation away from everything while standing around on the putting green.

Makes sense why so many business and political deals are made on the golf course when you start thinking about the meta aspects of having no paper trail or being vulnerable to eavesdropping secretarial eyes & ears or some all-listening tech-panoptican.

> I predict an increase in the number of golfers

You mean people who think they're safe because they don't realize they're in the earshot of another player's/random jogger's smartphone?

(I'm totally thinking of a scene from Person of Interest, 4x12, when a character hides in a park and makes a call over satellite phone, to talk out of earshot of a malicious AI surveilling everyone, only to be spotted by it through a smartphone of a passing cyclist. Can't find any video clip of to link here, though.)

Boats are increasingly tracked by satellites.

How do I turn off my existence?

Psychedelics?

You just suggested what could be an interesting idea: what if we could give "the google database/engine" the equivalent of a psychedelic? What would that even look like? What could the results be?

telepathic critterdrug?

Eric Schmidt also said in a interview back when Google was starting up that they wanted to get Google right up to the "creepy line" but not cross it. This interview was also put in a documentary called "The Creepy Line." I'll see if I can find the interview though and link it to this comment.

Edit: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=mpmOL-MT5lQ

https://i.imgur.com/YSjsxB2.png

Nice, yt-dlp is able to download that video.

It must be someone else because Eric Schmidt’s quote was more akin to victim blaming: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

This really handicaps your ability to use it as the powerful tool that it is though. I wish this was a real option.

Sadly this reads like 'Yet you choose to live in a panopticon.'

Where’s a startup selling Kaczynski shacks when you need one?

So there's a record of everyone they sell a shack to? Come on. You gotta build your own Kaczynski shack. Amateur hour over here.

Your non-proffesional bulk purchases of wood and/or logging equipment, as well as subsequent reduction of general consumer goods consumption has registered you as a 'potential kaczynski shack owner'.

If you pay cash and get it from out of town I don't see how they'd track you, unless the lumber store is doing facial recognition and uploading that data somewhere.

Maybe we need straw buyers for lumber?

You think LEO only asks Google for location data, and not, for example, On-Star or auto OEMs?

Serious question: are there links about the data your car keeps on you (if any)? I'm not talking about if you use Google or other web location services.

I've done some cursory asking around and found nothing. I would think the real problem is that every car manufacturer and every model year is different.

Try starting with these people.

https://cccis.com/

Follow the insurers.

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