Far, far easier than you'd think. I wouldn't say I do it for everything, just services I'm suspicious of; there are plenty of businesses I don't mind having basic info about me. But once you know...
Far, far easier than you'd think. I wouldn't say I do it for everything, just services I'm suspicious of; there are plenty of businesses I don't mind having basic info about me.
But once you know how to parse them, it takes ~3 min or less to find and scan the important parts. This article pretty much nails it on the things I typically pay attention to.
Ah okay. Potentially ignorant question: if you then find that you don’t agree to their policy, then you just stop the registration and find an alternative?
Ah okay. Potentially ignorant question: if you then find that you don’t agree to their policy, then you just stop the registration and find an alternative?
Not a bad question at all. Finding an alternative is one route, but for many common situations (such as services that want to trade away your phone number to their business partners for...
Not a bad question at all.
Finding an alternative is one route, but for many common situations (such as services that want to trade away your phone number to their business partners for marketing), you can typically give them fake info, keep a burner e-sim and email account, feed them a privacy.com virtual credit card, etc.
I personally just don't like being advertised to, and try to minimize the number of widely-available datasets my name/address/number show up in to reduce risk of targeted phishing, but I'm typically trivially doxxable online. "Extreme privacy" folks typically keep multiple VOIP lines for SMS, wildcard emails, premade pseudonyms, PO boxes, and shell businesses handy - but that really only matters if you're dealing with serious physical threats (e.g. if you work as a PI/LEO or have a stalker). Basically, just be pragmatic and work off what matters to you.
I find this article very informative but how practical is it to play privacy lawyer and go through privacy policies of every service you register to?
Far, far easier than you'd think. I wouldn't say I do it for everything, just services I'm suspicious of; there are plenty of businesses I don't mind having basic info about me.
But once you know how to parse them, it takes ~3 min or less to find and scan the important parts. This article pretty much nails it on the things I typically pay attention to.
Ah okay. Potentially ignorant question: if you then find that you don’t agree to their policy, then you just stop the registration and find an alternative?
Not a bad question at all.
Finding an alternative is one route, but for many common situations (such as services that want to trade away your phone number to their business partners for marketing), you can typically give them fake info, keep a burner e-sim and email account, feed them a privacy.com virtual credit card, etc.
I personally just don't like being advertised to, and try to minimize the number of widely-available datasets my name/address/number show up in to reduce risk of targeted phishing, but I'm typically trivially doxxable online. "Extreme privacy" folks typically keep multiple VOIP lines for SMS, wildcard emails, premade pseudonyms, PO boxes, and shell businesses handy - but that really only matters if you're dealing with serious physical threats (e.g. if you work as a PI/LEO or have a stalker). Basically, just be pragmatic and work off what matters to you.