Posted: Sat May 2, 2020 9:30pm
Incidentally, I’ve never said and never will say that we are not being monitored. Because we are, in sooooo many ways and there is little we can do about it - little, but not nothing.
I’ve already mentioned about Spain’s legalization of tracking mobile phones - supposedly only until end of State of Alarm, buuuuuut ... ?
London, of course, with its cameras, one of the most - if not THE most monitored city in the world. Just by walking through London, your face is captured on a SCARY number of cameras.
Then of course there’s Social Media - it’s very well known that Social Media is monitored, watched, checked to see if anyone is posting hate-speech, terrorist propaganda .... but Facebooks hueristics can throw up all sorts of errors.
But there’s some not-so-well known methods. For those of you that use Windows 10; one of its big points was that you could wake it from sleep with a smile .... yayyyyy wait ... does that mean it has facial recognition and an always active camera ...? Hmmmm
Then there is a “service” that runs; originally called “Diagnostic Tracking Service”, it was retro-fitted by updates to Windows 8.1 / 8 / 7. It is a service that collects everything you type, everything you search in Cortana and the index of media files, and sends it up to Microsoft servers every 30 minutes (it’s one of the reasons W10 can run a little slow.) It was quickly discovered by computer users and the subsequent uproar caused Microsoft to .... change the name of the service to “Connected User Experience and Telemetry”. I disable that service very very quickly.
So what can you do? Don’t go online without a VPN - a Virtual Private Network - that encrypts your connection and builds an encrypted “tunnel” so even your ISP can’t see what’s going through to and from your computer. I use NordVPN, ultra reliable, very fast and doesn’t keep logs.
If you have anything sensitive to say to someone, don’t say it on a public forum, on social media, on Messenger or even on WhatsApp, which although it advises end-to-end encryption, is owned by Facebook and their Privacy is shocking.
Instead use a free app called Signal, which is open source and offers true end-to-end encryption.
And if like me you are completely paranoid about digital security, use GnuPG (PGP) to encrypt messages with military grade encryption. It’s Public Key / Private Key encryption and is very very secure. Obviously the recipient also needs PGP, but you can encrypt emails as well as messages. It allows up to 4096 bit RSA encryption.
NordVPN gives you a mobile phone app as well - so if I have something sensitive to say to a contact, I encrypt it, send it via Signal, over a connection protected by NordVPN. Someone wants to untangle that amount of encryption? Good luck ..... 😎