Imagine being Mark Zuckerberg, and having exclusive access to the
world's biggest goldmine: Private, and often secret, information about
every single individual on earth.
Even about those individuals
not using Facebook at all, since FB tracks everyone across each of the
thousands of websites you visit, whether you're logged into FB or not,
whether you have a
FB account or not, and capturing much of that data still when your
browser is set on its most strict privacy settings, even when you use
private tabs, even when all cookies and data clears when your browser
closes. Using add-ons claiming to block trackers isn't foolproof either.
Somewhere data always leak.
Your device — cellphone, laptop, tablet, smart fridge, smart television, anything with internet connectivity —
is broadcasting some highly unique identifiers in order for your device
to be able to connect to the internet. Your IP address, and more
importantly, your MAC (hardware address; each device in the world has a
unique number) and several other bits of data. Every bit of data gets
recorded, including the size of your screen (which is why you should
never maximize your Tor browser screen), and all those little bits of
data adds up to form a very comprehensive forensic profile about you
over a period of time.
Online data collection is not all you
should be worried about. FB buys data from credit bureaus and data
aggregation companies about your offline life too. They reveal you had
bought under your real name a laptop, with MAC no. xxxx.
And so the dots connect, with your fake name on FB not hiding your real
identity at all. This allows Mark Zuckerberg to see you missed a
payment on your home loan, which indicates a weak point that can be
exploited for far more nefarious reasons than just serving more
personalized ads to you.
Facebook is not the only one buying and gathering data about your offline life. Google, Microsoft, and every other IT company are on a mad rush to obtain info about every individual on earth, from poor to rich, from sick to healthy, from black to white. This includes the software development companies behind applications you downloaded from app stores too, many of those apps' primary purpose is to gather data, while you are thinking it's such a cool photo editing app only. Your info on your phone ends op in the hands of hackers behind shell companies, and those companies are legally allowed to buy your data from credit bureaus. And they do!
The official explanation all IT companies and most websites present is to serve you more personalized advertisements to increase the chances of you clicking on ads, and yes, that is true. Ads, however, are becoming more difficult to serve, with more than 50% of people now using ad blockers. That poses a major problem for websites earning money from advertising, but they still have a treasure trove of data about you. How to monetize that, they ask themselves. Maybe sell it to some Russian hackers?
Advertising as excuse is not the only reason data collection had become one of the biggest threats to our various freedoms, and democracy itself. Data about you reveal your weaknesses, your passions, and more. As such, 'Big Data' is now able to predict what political party you support, the likelihood of you actually going out to vote, for example. Or what medical conditions you may have, and should you in future becomes a 'problem' your medical aid may suddenly run out, or you may end up in an operation theater with internet-connected machines that may go haywire. See what I mean? Don't think that kind of thing happens in movies only; movies are being made as a result of real-life events too.
We are entering the age of the 'internet of things', where even your bread toaster will be connected to the internet. Toothbrushes too, so that Amazon knows you're out of toothpaste and can deliver automatically. Great, isn't it. So convenient. You may complain about something in the kitchen to your wife, just to see a product as solution on a billboard next to the road half an hour later on your way to work. Yes, your bread toaster snitched on you.
The future is going to be all rainbow farts everywhere, the marketing people assures us. Also, their marketing daddies told us back in 1979 that the alarming movie 'The China Syndrome' is just a pipe dream, that nuclear reactors are safe and that Jane Fonda is just a bitch. Ten days after the movie came out, the Three Mile Island accident happened, stopping just half an hour away from a full meltdown. Don't trust the people getting paid to tell you something, kids.
We know that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the saying goes and history proves. We also know that the super wealthy, the so-called elite, understands the power of controlling people. If you can serve them ads and narratives and show them search results that suit your plans, your chances of success increases rapidly to get the political candidate of your choice elected.
We know the power of religion to controls people, so much so that
they'll do crazy things to align with their beliefs. Fuel that, play
along with their prejudice, and you can get an entire nation to commit a
genocide or to kill people in France. We are seeing the prelude to
genocide in South Africa now, with Afrikaners being told to perform
useless actions like dancing Jerusalema and praying, to control the sheep while the slaughterhouse is sharpening its knives.
But religion is busy losing its grip of fear on society, which makes controlling and owning data about people so vital. When you know a person's weaknesses you have leverage over him.
You may have a great business idea. Or for an invention. So you doodle a
bit about it on your laptop or cellphone, or even speak to a friend
about it with your phone in the same room, and start saving up money to
make it a reality.
But just a month later, before you can launch
your idea, someone on the other side of the world patents it, or launch
the exact business you had in mind. 30 years ago, definitely an
unfortunate coincidence. Today? Don't be so certain.
Google
actively records your voice, when you opt in, and when you use the magic
words 'hey Google'. That's magnificent technology, and inevitably we'll
all start using it. Why type when you can just tell your device what to
do?
The big question is, is Google only listening in when you
tell it to, or is it listening in at other times as well? What most
people, no, everybody tends to forget, is that Google uses actual humans
on the other side at times to listen in and to match what you said with
what its software have heard. It's true, research it.
The
excuse, and it's valid: To improve their voice recognition software. But
will there be a point in the future when they stop using humans to
improve their software? No. And some humans there may very well record
your juicy talk with the neighbor for blackmail purposes months later,
as one example. Google employees are not retired angels, like the one
case where an employee stalked his ex to an incredible degree using data
collected legally by Google. If he could do that, what prevents another
one from targeting a stranger?
With a crypto company like Luno
(a South African company with millions of users here in Europe; now
bought out by a US company) aiming to have one billion users over ten
years, it is clear that our money is moving entirely online. Cash notes
will be gone over ten years, is my guess.
You will only need to
remember one long number to carry all your cash with you in your head
around the world. Then a hacker will need only your password and some
other details to wipe you out. And Big Tech is storing those details
without your consent, while only your online wallet should have some of
that info.
Your cellphone runs on a closed-source operating
system (yes, even Android contains closed-source code only Google has
access to, it is not fully open source and that's a travesty).
You
may believe that the Whatsapp messages you send are encrypted (and they
are), but who's to say your keyboard haven't logged all of it first
before the message could be encrypted, and sends those data to either
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or any other company?
A year or three ago the top spy company Microsoft bought out the hugely popular keyboard app SwiftKey.
It is no secret that all of Microsoft's software is sending your data
back to Redmond, especially Windows 10 was labeled the top spyware ever
when Microsoft released it, and opting out of data collection is just
impossible. How do we know SwiftKey isn't logging all your keystrokes?
It is further an open secret that companies like Microsoft and Yahoo shared data freely — okay, not free, but at a fee — with the NSA. Your data, and you aren't even a terrorist. Still remember the scandal when it was uncovered that Skype — owned by Microsoft —
literally spied on users and shared that intel? Many companies used
Skype for meetings, discussing trade secrets, and Skype sent it all — or some of it — to Microsoft. How is that not anti-competitive, industrial espionage? Wonder what Zoom is doing with all this year's chats...
You
can fit an entire book the size of a Bible on a .txt file that will
measure in kilobytes the same size as that of a photo. And we know how
quick a photo can be sent from your phone to a server other side of the world.
This
means that all your passwords you thought are encrypted and only held
at your bank for internet banking, all your love letters to your harem
of wives, and everything else you typed on your phone, may also be at
companies that should not have it in the first place. We also know those
companies are hacked every so often by black hat hackers.
How do
you know that data is kept encrypted on those company servers? Just a
year or two ago the mighty Facebook with its best IT pro's in the world
stored millions of passwords and login credentials in plain text in an
astonishing act of stupidity. Millions of people had to change their
login details.
You get hacked, and your bank account emptied
right after your pension lump sum or investment gotten paid into there,
and the police almost never catch such hackers. Hacking is about
obtaining and exploiting information. Who knew the money would be
deposited? Who knew your passwords? Who knew how to circumvent the one time pin sent to your phone? You are
connecting some dots here, right.
Officially you will be blamed, you let
your password lie around, that kind of b.s. But a simple hack into the
servers of companies that should not have your data is the real cause. A
while back credit bureaus like Experian were hacked too, with millions
of credit card details and its owner data grabbed by the hackers. That's
sensitive data, and credit bureaus store far more data than just that.
That info is just a step away from emptying bank accounts.
The
moral of this story: No matter how hard you try, all of your vital data
will eventually leak out onto servers where it doesn't belong, in the
hands of software developers that may not always be upstanding citizens,
or outright into the hands of malicious hackers. Just a week or what
ago Google removed 23 malicious apps with millions of users from Google
Play Store. Those apps had access to sensitive data on the phones of
many, many people. It takes just a little of that info in the wrong hands, to financially destroy you or your reputation.
The solution? Simple. Fake news. Disinformation.
Fake
news on social media gets a well-deserved bad rap. It gets people to
base their decisions and beliefs on untruths, strengthen prejudices,
fuel conspiracy bullshit, and it makes people question what they believe — okay, the latter is actually a very good thing; goodbye religion — and sets scientific progress back.
But
when disinformation is applied by yourself on yourself, it may really
save you from anything from getting hacked to being killed. Atheists
especially are often targets of bloodthirsty mentally deranged
Christians that will exert physical violence to protect the bad name of
their ridiculous god-thing they can't even prove to exist. It is thus a
clever move to not put personal info online at all, and even better, to
put a lot of fake info online.
Once upon a time, long ago in
internet time, in an age you totally forgot about, there was this guy
called Edward Snowden. He worked at the NSA in the USA, as an ordinary
guy and not a general or someone with top-level access. Yet what he saw,
and easily obtained access to, about data collection by the US
government concerned him so much that he grabbed 'some' of it, and
showed it to the world as wake-up call. And the world was shocked for a full two months, kids of the future.
For income-related reasons I had a particular interest in that leak — that made WikiLeaks wildly famous —
and it blew my mind to see the levels of data collection already back
then by one government. I can't recall the exact numbers here, and it's
stored too far away to look it up now (but you can Google it, duh), but
the magnitude of it was astonishing. Something like a billion emails
being stored daily, ten million telephone calls intercepted, that kind
of numbers. And I have no doubt that all governments since then expanded
their abilities to mass-intercept vastly more quantities of data.
What
business is it of an organization thousands of miles away that I like
milk over my cereal? Yet they had that data too. When given to a CIA
operative, the guy will know to spike my milk to take me out. Or a
Russian agency that has the same data. Just an example, feel free to
think what your data can be used for.
That security breach at one
of the world's best guarded spy agencies made it clear that our right
to privacy is under severe threat, and that most people till this day
cannot comprehend the danger it poses. The USA is not the only one
spending billions on obtaining data about everyone around the world, as
part of the Five Eyes partnership Britain, France, Canada and Australia
shares your info to and fro among them too, without your consent.
China
is deeply in on the spying games, with them having a law making it
compulsory for any Chinese business to furnish the Chinese government
with all data collected. You people playing TikTok, a Chinese spy is
drooling over that sexy outfit of yours right now. Pretty much every
major government elsewhere is collecting data on large scale. Trump may
be what he is, but he had a valid point to block the cellphone
manufacturer Huawei from entering the US market.
South Africa is
on par when it comes to spying, with weaker laws to prevent it, and is
harvesting data to such an extent that even if you get on public bus
services like Greyhound, South African spy agencies know about it the
moment you board. Freedom of movement, huh. While being watched, creepy
as fuck.
If you are a political dissident underway to a political meeting, what
is to stop bad actors from sending the police to stop and perform a fake
search of the bus for drugs, getting you to miss your meeting, as
example. Information is dangerous in the wrong paws.
Back in 2014
a hacker gave me the idea of spreading disinformation about oneself
online. This is something you should spend some thought on yourself. Why
do you need to show your face to people you don't know, to strangers
around the world, with many of them feeling a fuck
about you? Why does everyone needs to know what school you went to, the
name of your cat, and more personal details? Photos reveal more about
you than you think, try it yourself, look at someone's photos and make a
list of everything you can learn from it. You'll be busy for hours.
The irony is, security questions to reset passwords asked by websites are usually such personal questions like 'name of your
cat' or 'best childhood friend name'. And then you go and plaster that
very info on Facebook! For a hacker social media is worth gold. They run
a simple script on your profile, collecting all data you deem of little
value, on your profile. That narrows the possibility of finding
passwords you use down, because till today people use weak passwords
like the names of their favorite flower.
The strategy I thus
followed for the past few years was a Biblical one. (Yeah yeah, there's
pun intended here.) Just like the Bible says one thing on page one, just
to contradict itself directly two pages later, I did the same. So at
least that book of bullshit taught me one lesson (and also that it
doesn't work well as doorstop.)
I started posting conflicting
information about myself online, using various different pseudonyms and
accounts, even using two proxy servers instead of a VPN, and more. Yes, I
was married four times, and yes, all of them fell down the same flight
of stairs, and I'm secretly super-rich with a yacht and everything. 😉
Proxy servers, when configured properly, offers several benefits like
obfuscation of one's location. Very handy to fool even Facebook to think
I'm in South Africa, thus giving me updates from there.
Spreading disinformation is kind of a game, hide-and-seek,
in order to protect oneself, just like one has to put on a safety belt
when driving somewhere dangerous. Data will leak, inevitably, as I
showed earlier here, but when potential attackers have a fake map of
one's route, one has a chance. The internet is a dangerous alley. You
think very wealthy people avoid Facebook? No. Most are on there, just
under fake names. Not a good idea to make yourself a target for
kidnappers.
When malicious actors — including companies, marketers, governments, and hackers —
get contradictory data, they don't know what to believe and what not.
It's not dishonesty on your part, it's an effort to protect yourself.
And it works.
When you become skilled in protecting your digital life — and we know our digital lives are becoming more important as technology takes over — you can build in honey traps in your game.
For
example, a few weeks ago I received a call from 'Microsoft' about my
computer allegedly having a virus. Now we all know that scam, yet so
many people still fall for it that Nigerian scum still peddle it. Except
that I don't use Microsoft for some years now, and that I knew exactly
how the scam works. I played along for a while, acting all freaked out
just like a real victim would. What stunned me was how much info the
scammer had about me. Fake info, but nonetheless. It once again
underlined to me how much research hackers do.
I dragged some of
what he thought he had on me out of him, and that way I could determine
from which of my online accounts he obtained the faked info from. I
eventually got tired of playing along, trolled him a bit by discussing
his father that was the village donkey and his mother the village baboon
on a pole, before putting the phone down.
Why the paranoia about
internet safety, I have nothing to hide, many people told me before. As
revenge for such ignorance I could have sent them to the Dark Web, even
helped them install software like Tor, I2P and ZeroNet to get there, but they would have been hacked the same day and then blamed me. (BTW, do check out Zeronet, it's a fantastic alternative internet.)
So
here's my answer. If you have nothing to hide, go post your banking
details including your PIN and other details anywhere on the internet,
and watch what happens.
Oh, that's excluded from nothing to hide, you say.
Okay
fine, go post things on FB, with your subconscious mind that made up
your flowery password letting you post photos of that flower. That's a
clue for bad people. Remember, hacking does not work like in the movies
where you just press buttons, hacking entails a huge lot of research
while keeping tracks covered.
Hackers don't look for the obvious
only, so they can hack your FB just to prank you, they look at ways to
monetize you. For that they look at the more subtle details, like your
child having hockey practice this afternoon. Then they surf a bit more,
and see the practice ends when the school security guard isn't around
anymore and the school's name is so-and-so and Google Maps shows the
streets and getaway possibilities so nicely, and so on. Then they cut a
deal with some child kidnappers, and later you have no idea how your kid
disappeared. But you have nothing to hide, you told me.
Yes it happens, and I can guarantee you that all child kidnapping syndicates always do their research online first.
Why
is it important to you that strangers know things about you that has
nothing to do with them? As criminals increasingly switch from offline
crime to online crime and become more tech-savvy, you will need to think
about what I'm saying here about using disinformation to protect
yourself.
Your data is far more valuable than you may think, including minuscule
little details. The internet is not a friendly place, don't let social
media deceive you. A study showed that only something like four people
on your friends list really cares about you. The rest are at best fair weather friends, and some may really only be there observing you for bad reasons.
A scammer that did his homework can at that
time have taken out an overdraft on your bank account, with you having
to pay it back. Or opened online accounts at auction sites and
retailers, and have had a boatload of stuff delivered to a throwaway address, with the bills going to you and destroying your credit record for years.
When
you upload contradictory info about yourself online, and took proper
measures like using a Linux distro instead of Windows, your level of
personal security raises so high that it is often not worth it for
malicious people to pursue you. Think of it as having a higher security
fence than your neighbor.
Governments with their huge resources
are another peanut to crack, but if you remain a legal birdie you should
technically have nothing to fear from them, and should they get hacked
the hackers may still only get fake and/or contradictory information
about you.
Ideally they should have little info about you too,
it's none of their business that you dance around naked in your
backyard, and they should not have your sex tape on your phone on record
either. So consider the possibility of becoming a James Bond online,
and use secure apps like Telegram instead of Facebook-owned Whatsapp.
And
remember, there's nothing wrong with using pseudonyms, from actresses
like Marilyn Monroe to authors use it all the time. Pick yourself a
great name, and make that one of your online identities. Your friends in
real life should be okay with it if they are worth the term friend. If
they disclose your real identity you have legal avenues you can follow,
or call up that Mafia buddy of yours.
When strangers know too
much about you, you are giving them the ability to control and wrong
you. Ultimately it leads to the erosion of privacy, which brings us much
closer to a totalitarian regime. Protect your freedom.
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