Just got locked out of Bluesky until I "verified my age" and of course that required me to either give this KWS company a copy of my ID, a face scan, or the last 4 digits of my SSN.
How about no.
Deleted the app and that's that.
I've never looked at men's thongs. Never cared for looking at men's thongs. I don't swing that way. Nothing on my computer about men's thongs. Unfortunately I'm now typing the words "men's thongs". But Google keeps putting men's thongs in front of my eyes. Every time I open Youtube, it's there. I scroll down to read comments, it's there. Mens thongs, mens thongs, mens thongs. I cant escape it!!!! FFFFFF! 20 years of being online without turning on Personalized Ads. Is this Google's way of forcing me to finally give in to Personalized Ads???
Usually, when you delete your account, your messages and pictures will still show up in a chat, just under 'Facebook User' instead of your name. However, I've seen that some old chats of mine with deleted accounts no longer contain their messages, just mine, and it's happened to a few friends of mine as well. Has anyone here experienced this? Do you think Meta is beginning to phase out saving these messages?
The Know Your Labor Rights Act was introduced on Apr 21, 2026, which "Makes employers display posters and tell new hires about their rights to organize and bargain for better working conditions under federal law".
I'm well aware legislation like this is unlikely to become law, especially given the current majority in Congress. But I thought it was rare and interesting to see a bill sponsored and cosponsored by Republicans that is in favor of unions and worker's rights.
And its not like adding posters in workspaces is going to make any radical differences over night. But I imagine there are thousands of workers that are completely unaware of their rights, and maybe something as simple as a poster is enough to spark something bigger?
These activist attorney generals never miss an opportunity to abolish the fourth amendment using child safety to do it.
https://reclaimthenet.org/oklahoma-roblox-lawsuit-child-safety-biometric-age-verification
I’ve been looking for a good place to use as a diary/secure journal, and Apple has its journal app, but I’m not sure how safe it is to use that for sensitive info/inner thoughts(just the standard uses of a diary/journal). Does anyone have any input? It’s already on the devices for so might as well
It would be handy to have. I'd self host it with all my standard security measures.
The thing is that I hate that so many people have doorbell cameras because I can't walk down the street without being surveilled. I have to keep my front blinds closed practically at all times, because I know the neighbours across the street have a doorbell camera that can see into my house if I let it.
If I ruled the world, it would be illegal for a doorbell camera to have an effective range of more than about 3 meters, so everything beyond that would be out of focus. So that's the camera I want. Does anyone know of any that meet this criteria or at least have settings so I can make it meet this criteria?
Privacy focused VoIP solutions that will let me log into shit like claude
I just discovered that my main current bank (wells fargo blehh) has integrated an AI Chatbot, plus the mobile app is getting really buggy so I suspect they're using AI coding or something like that. I'd like to switch to a bank that doesn't use AI at all, if that even exists. AI is frustrating as hell for me to interact with but I'm also worried about the financial risk I'm exposed to if my bank is using AI.
I tried looking around on reddit but didn't find anything. Are any of you aware of banks in the U.S. that aren't using AI at all? Ideally a bank with physical locations since I have to go into one from time to time.
I'm aware of the likelihood that they've all embraced AI and there's nothing I can do but... here's hoping...
ETA okay new question--anyone aware of groups organizing nationally to call for legislation around getting AI out of banking?
tldr; Data breaches don't matter if you use local-first software.
She learned about the breach from a push alert, half asleep, phone glowing on the nightstand. By morning her inbox was a pile of password-reset emails from accounts she had forgotten she still had. Some were junk. A few mattered. One was the small business invoicing tool she used for side work. She changed what she could. She could not change the fact that her old passwords, tied to her email, were now a line in someone else's giant file.
Nothing about that week felt dramatic enough for a movie. There was no montage of hackers in hoodies. There was fatigue, embarrassment, and the quiet fear that she would miss one account and pay for it later. That is how a lot of people meet a data breach. Not as a headline. As Tuesday.
Breaches have become background noise. We scroll past them. Then real people spend evenings resetting passwords, watching for fraud, and wondering what else leaked that nobody has told them about yet. Empathy matters here. The story is not only "a database was exposed." The story is disrupted sleep, lost trust, and time stolen from people who did not choose to be part of someone else's security mistake.
If you take one idea from this piece, let it be this. Most harm from big credential dumps is not magic. It is attackers trying leaked email and password pairs across many sites. People reuse passwords. Companies store secrets in centralized systems. When those systems fail, the failure spreads farther than any one user intended.
So the honest pitch is not "never worry again." The pitch is shrink the attack surface and pick tools that fail less catastrophically for the kind of data you care about.
Use a password manager. Unique passwords per site turn one breach into a contained problem instead of a master key to your digital life.
Turn on two-factor authentication where it matters most, especially email and banking. A stolen password is much less useful if the second factor is not sitting in the same leak.
Assume reuse will burn you once. If you have ever reused a password, breach news is a nudge to rotate the important stuff and stop repeating patterns.
Ask a boring question about any app that holds sensitive notes or credentials. Where does my data live? If the honest answer is "on a company server," then a breach of that company is a breach of you. That is not fearmongering. It is how the architecture works.
Some products are built so the sensitive payload never sits in a central database waiting to be dumped. Local-first designs keep primary data on the device you control. Sync, when it exists, is a separate design choice. The point is not that any approach is perfect. The point is that where data lives changes what "getting hacked" even means for that product.
You still need a strong device passcode. You still need sane backups if you care about not losing data. No architecture removes the need for good personal habits. It does change who holds the crown jewels.
"Don't get hacked" sounds like a taunt. Be safe is the serious version. Safety is boring on purpose. It is unique passwords, second factors, and paying attention when a service tells you to rotate credentials. It is choosing tools that match how much you care about the information inside them.
If you have ever been the person staring at a pile of reset emails, you already know why this matters. You are not naive for wanting software that respects that stress instead of adding another central pile of secrets to the internet.
I'm de-Microsofting/de-Googling and rethinking my email setup after finding my old Outlook address in multiple data breaches. Drowning in phishing too.
What I have (all free): Proton Mail, Tuta, SimpleLogin, AnonAddy.
My use cases:
What I'm trying to figure out:
Free only, no paid plans. Thanks.
Stripe seems to be the only payment accepted on substack and I just really side eye stripe when it comes to identity protection. My assumption is don’t do it, but putting my question here in case I’m wrong and there’s a work around im not aware of.
Let’s say I want to sell my old computer motherboard that I had to RMA because of missing accessory. Is it hypothetically possible that the next owner could get my address, email, or name that I had to provide for the RMA claim?
The manufacturer probably has records showing that the motherboard was RMA’d, so if the next owner has issues with it and contacts the manufacturer, could they accidentally leak my information by mistake, like saying, "should we use this address to send it to you?".
I came across a BBC Archive video posted on YouTube:
> 1986: Email - the Perfect Tech for the Jet Set? | Micro Live | BBC Archive
[Apologies, but you have to look it up yourself, links not allowed in this sub because ... spam.]
With all the verification requirements going on and in general - need to have accounts everywhere - so that everything can be safe, I feel like this video might as well have been a look ... back into the future.
Imagine you want to send a memo to someone, but it needs to be from verified account, but then it has to go to another country, you might need to have another "registration" with authority there to even allow you to "cross-message", and then as the lady concludes her reportage:
> Until the [ISPs] get their act together ...
Oh yeah, that would be great, if they go on share all their data with everyone else, so that e.g. an authority in North Korea knows who made this snarky Reddit post ... oh well.
I followed some post about removing these organization tabs because AI or whatever. But it's completely overwhelmed my gmail and I haven't de-googled yet.
So how can I re-add these fools and restore some level of sanity to my inbox?
So from what I've heard, a while back, the FTC decided that age verification (both IDs and faces) would be exempt from COPPA violations, apparently because the data is only determined to "see the user's age" (yet they require a ID with other personal info like your address and whatsoever), the data should be removed as soon after the verification (pretty ironic, many companies actually store data for longer periods), the data shouldn't be shared with third-parties (they can get breached easily to third-parties) and that they should ensure privacy notices about age verification (yet it doesn't even respect privacy)
I find all four of the points from the FTC nonsensical and outright stupid. The data won't show just their age, but also other info like your address, location, mobile number, etc. because you are showing your other personal info with an ID. And the fact they say it can get deleted fast is obviously false, I've seen countless times of AV providers actually keeping the data rather thaan deleting it. And the data can definitely be shared with third parties, what even is FTC thinking.
Digital ID/face verification should ideally be a COPPA/GDPR violation. Companies are not supposed to be collecting data of minors without parental consent as far as I am aware. I'm honestly shocked how the FTC has made it an exemption so that more laws can pass. And even worse, they are proposing KOSA and COPPA 2.0, both of which would apparently require a digital ID. Why won't lawmakers treat it as a violation?
Edit: I have seen companies like YouTube actually get sued for collecting children's data, and I've seen AV providers who collect user data get sued for the First Amendment, but ironically not COPPA or any similar law that is meant to protect the privacy and data of children.
I've been notified twice of data breaches at companies I do business with. I have not experienced any direct consequence from either. I do care about my personal privacy and can list many potential consequences, but I have to wonder about the real consequences.
What are you most concerned about, and have you experienced any consequences?
Which motherboards and bioses are good privacy and security wise?
I heard about imei in intel but you can buy and amd processor and disable the PSP.
What do i need to look out for in motherboards?
With the prevalence and evolution of facial recognition, gait recognition and CCTV/security cameras everywhere around the world, what is the solution for someone who wants that information to stay private?
Presumably, some companies allow you to opt out, but that probably just puts you on some sort of list, you also have to get your face scanned in the airport (I know you can opt out in both the US and EU as a citizen), and many such things.
So, for the privacy minded individual who does not necessarily want all that information publicly exposed (and to have the possibility to be falsely accused of crimes, randomly flagged and all the other potential risks that come with this), what do you have to do? Do you just have to mask up everywhere and learn how to control your gait? Is that not a bit overkill?