[Ta3m-Seattle] A question about protecting digital privacy

[Paul English]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2017, Andrew Kane wrote:

> On 11/20/2017 03:06 PM, Jigna Kotecha wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>> 
>> I'm a grad student at UW, working on a project to find
>> innovations/practices/methods to protect digital privacy>
>> I'm concerned about my digital footprints from being misused for
>> marketing, stalking, abuse, doxing. And I want to take precautionary
>> measures to hide/protect my footprints. I am looking for methods that
>> are suited for people who are situationally disadvantaged, who cannot
>> totally opt out of social media and who also lack technical expertise.
>
> I recommend EFF's Surveillance Self Defense as a good place to start:
> https://ssd.eff.org/
>
> I also urge people to divest from Facebook, from Twitter and from
> Google. This does not mean "totally opting out" of social media, but
> withdrawing from those companies who have demonstrated a willingness to
> monetize, and in some cases weaponize, user data they should not have
> collected in the first place.

If you cannot totally opt out of social media, there are some ways to 
mitigate the issues:

1) Try using alternative open source/distributed social media, or 
blogging. Email for non-public content you generate - newsletters are 
currently popular. This may also not be an option ie: you're on conventional social 
media in order to see content from people who are only posting it there 
there, but it is worth mentioning. One of our Seattle TA3M Organizers is a 
major contributor to http://pump.io, though Mastodon appears to be winning 
the popularity race these days.

2) Lock down your settings on conventional social media as much as 
possible. eg:
https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-lock-down-facebook-privacy-settings/

3) Strengthen your authentication for conventional social media (and 
really, every website you can!) as much as possible:
* long strong passwords (and a password manager, if necessary, such as 
KeyPass)
* 2 factor auth (Google Authenticator app, or FIDO U2F tokens) https://twofactorauth.org/

3) Modify your usage patterns eg:
* only read family/friend news on FB, instead, email them the stuff you would otherwise post.
* strip EXIF data from images you post
* use FB mobile website instead of app
* use FB Tor site

? 4) ? gobo.social (for Twitter and FB only, for now) ? I haven't tried 
this one.

> I also recommend ditching software that is owned and controlled by a
> single company or entity and using freedom-preserving open-source
> software. Alternatives exist.

Can we extend the discussion by starting a list of these alternatives? And 
their benefits and drawbacks?

I've been meaning to do this for a while, so I finally just got started - 
a spreadsheet - feel free to contribute - it could use a lot of help:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zO5kL_IsSBNSW4rYQw3gEmOlG1jJH5P--fUhWvf6XnQ/edit?usp=sharing

So yeah, obviously.. Google. But all the FOSS options that come to mind 
would require me to set up/manage hosting, or (eg: wikis) require people 
to futz with table syntax. I'll move it to the next best option when 
someone suggests! :-)