Or have to go through great lengths to escape.
In my country you can’t buy any medicine without showing your ID… I mean, you technically can, but if you are registered they “give” like an 80% discount, so everyone thinks it’s a great deal, not realizing that’s the normal price, they are just pretending you can still go and buy a simple cold medicine without sharing your ID, phone, email, and street address with the drug store and whoever they decide to sell that information to, you just have to pay absurdly more. Yeah, you can lie about all the other information, but not really about your ID number. Probably soon, to get the “discount”, you are going to have to verify your email or phone number as well.
Sidetracked a bit but last week I was in the UK. I tried to visit a website (not porn actually, just private messaging on BlueSky) and it asked to verify my age. Initially I thought “Meh… OK… let’s see the process” which then lead to installing an app maybe (I’m not sure tbh as I was in rush). Clearly I didn’t want to do it because the DM was potentially urgent (scheduling to meet someone ASAP) … so what did I do? I switched from my browser to my VPN, connected from Austria, refreshed… no age verification. It took me a grand total of 5s to bypass the system.
TL;DR: maybe you can actually escape even though you are convinced you can’t.
Chat control. Whatever these fuckos who are pushing for this in Brussels are smoking, this must stop.
- You have to hand over a huge amount of personal info about yourself & others to estate agents when renting a property - which they then sell to advertisers & you have no opt-out
- Similarly, landords can require you to use a proprietary app for rent payments, which of course collects & sells your private data too
- Burner phones are effectively illegal (telcos are required to collect & retain ID of every phone number they register)
- Telcos and ISPs are required to collect & retain logs of all your activities for a minimum of two years
- In some cities police can detain & search you & your property for no reason, and require you to remove any facial coverings
- It’s illegal to refuse to hand over passwords to cops (6 years jail is the max term I think)
- Police can hack your device, take over your social media, delete or modify your data for an investigation, or survey any digital device if they “think it is likely to be used by someone subject to a warrant” (this particular bill was announced and then rushed through parliament in less than 24 hours to give the public as little time as possible to protest it
- Some social media sites (including github(wtf)) are now required to age-verify all users beginning next month. Which will obviously lead to mass leaks & breaches of private data which the gov will turn a blind eye to
This is Australia. I hate it here
being punished for not giving your phone password to police sounds insane
It’s the same in France at least
Our president, House leader, Senate leader, head of FBI are all owned by a foreign government, and the ones who aren’t, are blackmailed, or paid off to support them at all costs, even if it’s committing a genocide. There’s no way to escape it, we are a nation under blackmail.
Sorry, *your* president, not mine. I don’t live in the US.
(If you’re ashamed to explicitly point out your country, then… I think you have to deal with that anyway. I don’t know if fighting against the bad actors in your country is a feasible strategy; it’s too easy to give poor advice from far away, imagining yourself an expert where in reality you’re not, so I’m not recommending anything.)
Doesn’t matter he seems to have lots of power over the other countries. As everyone wants access to their money.
nobody wants their money, but we do want to be left alone by the empire.
- credit cards, debit cards, and now cashless vendors
- flock cameras
- google, fb, and amazon scooping everything I do online
- license plate readers on cop cars and on random parking lots
- my work computer taking screenshots, listening, and even scanning how long I spend reading an email to make sure I am not ignoring the nonsense the company directors send us about how great AI is and that we all have to use it EVERY FUCKING DAY
- membership cards
- I can’t think of more right now, but there are more
credit cards, debit cards, and now cashless vendors
FWIW in Belgium you can get prepaid nameless cards. The post and their bank partner know it’s yours (due to KYC) but not the shops and for online shops you can use drop boxes.
For membership cards I specifically reject because of that. It’s optional though so IMHO it’s precisely the easiest thing to escape, just say no.
I’ve effectively excised fb from my life and i’m becomming kinda proud since so many people still struggle with that one.
Tbh, me too, but funny enough I’ve tried to setup fb account just for fb marketplace but I keep getting banned because they want my DL license (lol nah bitch)
it’s so dystopian when I travel to countries where cashless vendors are a thing. Recently Germany took me by surprise, they have been a bastion of cash for a long time, and during my last trip there were many restaurants with “no cash accepted” signs. Just like in the UK or Norway where privacy is already a lost cause
You can escape the big tech tracking by installing uBlock Origin in your browser, and if you use their services, disabling personalised ads and search/activity history in their accounts.
escape the big tech tracking by installing uBlock Origin
Cloudflare and AWS say “Hi” 👋
UBO is a very good tech that I strongly recommend too though. Just gotta be aware of its limits.
Cloudflare just checks for bot activity and AWS is just a hosting provider. They don’t use data for ads or sell it to anyone.
Hahaha I got a sandbox to sell you in the Sahara. Everyone is selling data or ads they are not leaving money on the table.
The original claim was about tracking (“escape the big tech tracking”), so here AWS and Cloudflare are definitely relevant. The content, including input, also flows through them I think? It’s specifically unencrypted if I get it right.
Let them build a profile on me I never see their ads anyway. I can minimize but not escape it if I want to partake in modern society.
If Europe doesn’t fight back strong enough, Chat Control will be one such thing. All your messages being scanned by a “black box” system. Hopes are on the European Parliament and societal pressure to cancel this now. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/reality-check-eu-council-chat-control-vote-is-not-a-retreat-but-a-green-light-for-indiscriminate-mass-surveillance-and-the-end-of-right-to-communicate-anonymously/
Fight back they’re pushing for it. Keeps getting introduced and we’ll go through at some point. Unless by Europe you mean individual people but in that case it is already lost.
ID verification for phone numbers.
ALMOST every bank now forces you to have a phone application to authorize payments and each banks implements it in their own way, no standardized way like TOTP (RFC 6238) or Passkeys (WebAuthn), and sometimes those apps force you to use a verified phone (no custom ROM basically) because of security. So if you have no battery (or phone number, because some banks still send you codes trough SMS), you can’t authorize transactions.
Most banks use 3rd party, non local AI companies to verify your identify with your face.
Chile :3c
Makes me curious if there is a per country list of banks that provide an option NOT to have that. I know that if my bank were to do force such limitations I’d consider moving to another one.
You can’t escape when you currently appears life in one of the millons cams anywhere and even with this life in YouTube, additional to the surveillance of big corporations, banks and the own ISP. Privacy nowadays is relative, you can only patch the biggest holes. 100% privacy is stay at home and reading a book with the smartphone turned off.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=live+webcams+around+the+world
https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam.html
etc… adding millons more used by police and govs with face recognition soft.
Japan just hooked up the national health insurance to the national ID.
Hmm… so what does it change? Before you could have health insurance without using your ID?
Yes the “my number card” (national ID) was mostly a volunteer thing but now that it’s needed for health insurance it’s required of everyone
That’s quite interesting, did you have other sort of compulsory ID before the national one? Like, what did you use to register to stuff, like enrolling in school or college, opening a bank account or getting a retirement plan, etc.
In my country we have both the state and national ID. I guess very long ago you could use your state ID to register to stuff, but as they pushed for more standardization everything started to require your national ID instead, and your state ID card was more a proof that you are who you claim to be (like, you have to collect a parcel somewhere and show it belongs to you, or if you are stopped by the police you can show your state ID)… but usually people just use the driver’s license because it has both ID numbers and your picture, so it’s a valid document for everything.
For a lot of people for a long time your insurance card (that didn’t have a photo) was the only “identification” you had. Otherwise you had to bring your school ID, work ID etc.
Most people don’t have drivers licenses cause they take the train. When you sign up for banks etc you usually have to get a bunch of official documentation from the local ward office with your information.
Proof of identity in Japan has always been a bit of a hazy problem. You sign most documents still with a family stamp, so the idea of what legally is defined as identifying is kind of vague.
Most local offices aren’t networked up, so when you move you have to register with your local ward office and the japanese beauricratic army goes and gets the previous ward office to fax over your info.
“My Number” is the japanese governments attempt to get all that stuff wired together in one database.
In my country it’s becoming ever more common that when I visit someone and that person lives in an apartment, the building has a doorman/security and they ask for my id.
Also all supermarkets want to know your id number, but there at least I can say “no thanks”.
