Thread: What's with the Paranoia?
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Old 09-27-2021, 10:12 AM   #424
i.am.stack
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Quote:
Originally Posted by David Munch View Post
What data is that, and how do you see it misused? The information that the 3. Twilight book is your favorite and that you read it every year? Credit card information? Your name? That you own 2517 books?

I am genuinely curious.
Yes, I have had my credit card information stolen from a company that didn't secure its systems. Thus, I _never_ allow any website to store my credit card. It isn't hard to type in a few numbers and an address. It is a nice peace of mind knowing that it isn't easily stored in a database by a company that doesn't care to properly secure it.

But I'll give you two more examples.

A friend was having his first kid. As a prank I, with zero kids, bought an industrial sized box of diapers meant for large pre-schools from a well known store. Not only was I inundated with constant advertising from that company for years afterwards trying to sell me more baby junk, I started getting ads from other stores that should have not EVER known I had made that purchase. We went from near-zero advertisements for baby junk to multiple ads every day from multiple companies for the next several years in both my email and physical mailing address. WTF? Turns out, when you buy online from this store (the only way to get this industrial sized box of diapers) you agree to let them sell out all your purchases to many other companies. I will never do business with them again.

I was working for a company that had high security requirements (even though I didn't do anything that required that). I know for a fact that if you searched for various keywords on the internet for me, you got nothing. The closest was an address that I lived at for a single summer a LONG time ago, and even that was wrong. Then, the OPM hack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office...nt_data_breach

My time with the military bit me hard core because I had to provide a full detailed record to OPM of every address and people I knew. No joke, two months after the hack my security-focused employer alerted me to it. Search those same keywords and EVERY address I lived at through my time with the military is now easily available (though none of my addresses after the military service are online). Birthday, social security, and family members are all fairly easy to find now despite multiple attempts to take it all down - the data pops up in other places. Even images of my freaking fingerprints were found on a government contractors site (unsecured!) a few months after that!

I was long gone from working with the military. There was no reason for them to keep that information. [explicated deleted] the OPM for collecting and storing that data. They had been warned multiple times of security issues and didn't take proper precautions. I happen to know some people who currently live at a past address - I know that within months of the OPA they started getting slammed with junk mail for me. Years later it is not uncommon for them to get more junk mail for me then anything addressed to them or "resident". And one summer they were getting threats meant for me though the police never figured out who or why.



Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
@i.am.stack do you know that you can very easily remove the DRM rom eBooks purchased from Kobo and then you'd be able full control?

I've had a Kobo account for about 8 years. I have never had a single problem with my data being misused or with Kobo sharing my data.

Heck, I've not even had a single issue with Amazon or Google.

The thing is, you are being paranoid. You have to give your data to some companies that are less secure then Kobo.
I could remove the DRM, but I'd rather support companies that don't use it. Congrats on not having issues with Amazon or Google. I have. Multiple times with Amazon. They are a horrific company.

And I'm not being paranoid. These companies continuously harvest data and use it to make a profit with no concern about how that data can harm the people they stole it from. AWS data breaches happen multiple times every year - the companies involved simply do not care about their consumers data. https://haveibeenpwned.com/ is proof of that.

I know they are going to collect data. I'm simply being cautious and diligent in knowing what I share and how much I share. That should be the consumers choice and it should not be an acceptable default that the company simply steals it.
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