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  • Showing only topics with the tag "privacy". Back to normal view
    1. How do you feel about social media archiving tools such as Pushshift?

      On and off throughout the years, I have attempted to make my online footprint as small as possible, taking steps such as: using pseudonyms on social media creating a new account every year or so...

      On and off throughout the years, I have attempted to make my online footprint as small as possible, taking steps such as:

      • using pseudonyms on social media
      • creating a new account every year or so
      • overwriting old posts with a new message blanking out my original post
      • "deleting" posts after a few days if the account has a higher probability to be tied to my real life

      The last point, I put quotations around deleted because I understand that once I post something, it is not ever really deleted but it adds a barrier of entry to trying to dig into my personal life. Pushshift comes up because, try as I might, I seem to have difficulty getting accounts removed from their searches. Additionally, I think they allow you to download reddit data in bulk so even if I were able to get my name removed from the search results, the data could still exist on someone's hard drive, somewhere.

      From your perspective, are services like Pushshift, that archive people's information without their explicit knowledge, ethical? On the one hand, I think of detestable content that users might post then delete later to avoid accountability. On the other hand, I think of people like me who want to keep their data footprint as small as possible because of the crazies who might utilize this information to do harm.

      8 votes
    2. How to scrub your online footprint?

      I don't necessarily want to delete everything there is about me, but I want to significantly clean it. I've been deleting old accounts lately, I've seen some screenshots of my tweets on Reddit and...

      I don't necessarily want to delete everything there is about me, but I want to significantly clean it. I've been deleting old accounts lately, I've seen some screenshots of my tweets on Reddit and I've asked the authors to delete them. They've been kind enough to do it.

      But I feel like there's more that I need to do. I just realized that there are probably a lot of screenshots of YouTube comments and Tweets that I've put out there in the world with my name and face. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't drastically increase my footprint last year during my time on Twitter.

      I'm not a techy person, I was thinking about asking or hiring some type of hacker or expert to help me. Because they could probably find more information about me than me.

      Can anyone help?

      17 votes
    3. Differential privacy code removed from Chromium

      In a discussion on Hacker News, Jonathan Mayer pointed out that the differential privacy code was removed from Chromium. It looks like they finished doing this in February. I haven't seen any...

      In a discussion on Hacker News, Jonathan Mayer pointed out that the differential privacy code was removed from Chromium. It looks like they finished doing this in February.

      I haven't seen any announcement, discussion, or explanation of this based on a brief web search, so I figured I'd note it here.

      At about the time this process finished, there was a Google blog post about how they're still using it in other products.

      We first deployed our world-class differential privacy anonymization technology in Chrome nearly seven years ago and are continually expanding its use across our products including Google Maps and the Assistant.

      (If you read this quickly, you might think it's still used in Chrome.)

      Reading between the lines, I suspect that some folks at Google are still advocating for more usage of differential privacy, but they lost an important customer. Why that happened is a mystery.

      11 votes