One of the main reasons I moved to GrapheneOS was to avoid the impending push for Gemini to be everywhere and I don’t trust Google not to use some subset of my data by not making a setting for it and not making it clear that it’s being used. They started doing that in way too many places the last several years.
If it is a pay once and you own it kind of thing and never requires internet access for anything, then you may be able to back IP the all and use it later. But most games have some online component that requires a periodic login to use. Same goes for a lot if software on desktops, though.
There are many places that have those rules as I mentioned. For private property, it’s not uncommon, but mostly only in secure locations that you buy tickets or otherwise pay or that have other restrictions to enter. Especially artistic venues where artists don’t want their works recorded. This is mostly for protecting financial interests over privacy, though. It’s not common for stores, gyms, and other locations that are open to the public, even if on private property, where taking photos isn’t a financial concern of the location. That’s pretty rare because it was too difficult to convince people to leave behind their phones or trust a worker to keep track of who’s phone is whose, so it kept people from coming to those places. Instead people often voluntarily keep their phones secure in lockers or keep them in their pockets or otherwise don’t take them out in plain view due to social pressure for privacy, especially in public showers, bathrooms, and changing rooms which were the places some politicians insisted it would end up being a major issue without laws.
That’s cool. I wish there were alternatives in the US. The banking apps seem to have all removed their tap to pay features even. I don’t want something like Curve that sells your purchase history in exchange for a few features. I just don’t want to carry a wallet just for credit cards anymore.
Yeah there’s a lot that apps are doing to uniquely identify you. Not just the apps themselves, but the advertising systems and unfortunately, the telemetry systems which were originally meant only for tracking errors and how apps are used so they could be improved. And often you can’t block those systems without blocking the app from working, usually by design, but sometimes more because developers don’t understand how their customers’ data is at risk by using those systems. Often because their told it’s not used that way, but actually is, just in a convoluted way so it’s technically true. It’s quite confusing as someone who used to develop apps myself.
I don’t think it’s a big deal most of the time if in public. And private places are always allowed to ban cameras. If you ban smart glasses because of the camera, then you have to ban phones and that was tried and failed in most places. And banning cameras in public or requiring a license to carry one would be a huge hit to freedom overall. All of those things were already tried when portable cameras and then cell phones with cameras were new if you want to research why.
The idea is to allow social pressures to deal with these things. And most of the imagined problems never actually pop up. Like there wasn’t much of a significant increase in illicit photography in changing rooms when cell phones were allowed. The only difference here is that the smart glasses may end up being difficult to differentiate from ordinary glasses eventually. But companies like putting their brands on things, so that may not end up being an issue.
And there have been illicit versions of these things for ages and that isn’t going to go away just because it’s illegal to wear it. It’s already illegal to do a lot of the things people are using them for that you’re likely worried about. Having an additional law for possession is not going to change that very much and definitely won’t balance out the harm caused by disallowing all cameras in public.
Only because you are the product with the others, pr your information anyway. Without selling that info, they need to do a lot to make up the lost profit. Assuming this is real and not just a sting op or something.
I’d guess they would give the data to government agencies as it comes in through backdoors that most communication companies have these days. Likely they just don’t store the data for future requests and don’t have your data stored to sell. That’s about the only way I could see it working without them getting shut down.
But that’s assuming they’re being truthful at all. Only way to be confident would be if someone can trace the money used to make the company to see what their possible business plans are and wait and see. Based on the current government, I’d be more likely yo assume they’re actually just a government agency doing a sting operation for which they aren’t legally required to tell any truth at all, but time will tell.
Well, they have to be accused of something to be detained. Immigration violations of some types don’t get a court hearing to be “convicted” of those violations by a judge by default.
What kind of device are you using? There was recently there was a leak that Meta is using technology to have web browsers talk to the Facebook and Instagram apps on your phone without your permission and link your identity to every website you visit that has any Meta plugins. I’m sure other companies are doing the same or similar like Amazon and Google. I’ve been using GrapheneOS on my Android Pixel phone which isolates apps. There are other ways to do this as well if your phone is unlockable. And I use IronFox web browser wherever possible to reduce the capabilities of the browser to do things without my knowledge. And use ReThink and a pihole to reduce the cross site communication where possible. I also left all Meta platforms, but still am migrating away from Google, Amazon, and some other platforms. And make sure your advertising ID is disabled at the OS level.
Those are where I’ve found most of the targeted ads were coming from. Not from the IP address alone.
Strongly recommend reviewing the compatibility of apps you can’t live without, especially finance ones. And you won’t be able to use Google Wallet with tap to pay. Those are often not happy about you having any amount of security or privacy in the name of security, but really usually because they’re too lazy, or want to violate your privacy themselves.
I never really used it so it was fine with me. And the few apps I had to dump I mostly found open source alternatives for other than finance ones which I just use the websites instead now.
Really the first issue is your IP address. How does your ISP hand out IP addresses IPv4 and/or IPv6?
If you have an ISP that gives a static block of IPv6 addresses that simplifies things immensely. But also consider that many legacy, monopoly ISPs have not implemented IPv6 for their customers, especially in the US, and so domains without an IPv4 address aren’t accessible from people’s homes that use those ISPs. But it means you could assign static IPv6 addresses to each service if you wanted to and add subdomains for each. Then you just need to deal with security on that system.
Otherwise you’ll likely need to deal with dynamic DNS. If your router and your domain registrar’s DNS can work together for DDNS that’s ideal. For example, my OpnSense router updates my cloudflare registered domain directly when my ISP changes my IPv4 address (I have one of those ISPs that doesn’t assign IPv6 still but I don’t have any choice if I want > 5-10Mbps upload speeds).
Then you need to deal with routing. The best way is with a reverse proxy like Caddy or I actually like Traefik a lot because it works well with my complex setup with docker and kubernetes among other things. Basically your router needs to route all the inbound traffic on the appropriate inbound ports to the reverse proxy to it to then route to the appropriate service based on the subdomain and/or port of the request.
Once you route the subdomain to the appropriate service you need to deal with security. Once a service is exposed, it’s going to eventually start getting hit by bots trying to access it. Best to implement something like fail2ban to stop them from wasting your processing power with failed logins and 404 errors and such.
I set up separate VLANs for devices that do or don’t get filtering with different DNS servers assigned. And I have two different wifi SIDs on my access point for the different VLANs as well as having ports on my primary switch aligned to one or the other VLAN. I did end up having one other switch that has devices from both VLANs in a different area and had to set up one port on the primary switch with a couple of MAC-based filters for assigning the VLAN for just devices on that remote switch, but those are static devices, so that wasn’t an issue. I don’t attach any other devices to that.
This is the real issue. It’s not so much the intentional sale of your info for profit, or, for the majority of people, the threat of surveillance states finding out you’re one of their enemies of the month. Most people are hit by criminals using the info to target them. For example, if they know your adult child’s information and have samples of their voice data from social media, they can make an AI bot to impersonate them and ask for money. Or, if robbers happen to be targeting a neighborhood, they can use your location information to determine when you aren’t home. These are much more complex than most of these scams, though. Most are much simpler, but using some combination of info from social media, security breach data, location data, etc. All of that data is being bought and sold now. Mostly by “legitimate” companies. Things like that are the major consequences for the majority of people.
My servers that have been around for a while get thousands of scans per day. In fact I am going to move away from crowdsec because I exceed the free limits on log entries within the first day of the month usually, sometimes just an hour or so. I mean it still works and blocks stuff, but the web portal is basically useless for any research into what I need to give attention to. That and the fact that you can no longer delete decisions on the web portal with the free account.
If she has an Android, you can use the DNS blocker in ReThink to do something similar to pihole outside of your LAN. That’s what I use. There are others, but ReThink is pretty good and has lots of other stuff it can do as well, or just use the DNS option.
Yeah that can make a difference in some cases. Are they media files? Android tends to do more scanning of those as each is created. You can also set a .nomedia file in the directory that you’re unzipping to on order to reduce sone of that, though not sure if the new AI stuff obeys those like Android itself does.
Pixel 9a has some issues with performance, currently. They used older storage tech for the 9 and 9a than other devices and not enough memory for all the “AI” features that are tracking everything you do to make things more convenient. There are a few articles out there related to some ways to improve performance a bit by disabling some background apps that you may not be using. It’s also possible future updates from google may fix some of whatever is causing the issues for many users.
But it’s not an endemic Android issue, at least not modern versions in my experience. I use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7 Pro currently and just grabbed a couple of 10+ GB zip files I had on an old dropbox account and unzipped them with the fossify file manager. It was basically instant. Took longer to download them than unzip.
As I mentioned, your best bet is to use ADB or similar and monitor what applications are eating up resources and try to free some up. Especially any apps thrashing the storage or filling memory. That’s assuming you have already uninstalled any bloatware and rebooted recently to make sure no bad apps are stuck.
TL;DR: You should have both due to the explicit breaking of the robots.txt contract by AI companies.
AI generally doesn’t obey robots.txt. That file is just notifying scrapers what they shouldn’t scrape, but relies on good faith of the scrapers. Many AI companies have explicitly chosen not no to comply with robots.txt, thus breaking the contract, so this is a system that causes those scrapers that are not willing to comply to get stuck in a black hole of junk and waste their time. This is a countermeasure, but not a solution. It’s just way less complex than other options that just block these connections, but then make you get pounded with retries. This way the scraper bot gets stuck for a while and doesn’t waste as many of your resources blocking them over and over again.
…worse for users. Better for them…in the shirt term. That’s the real issue. Short term Profit overrules everything in modern corporations.