It is extremely difficult to have any type of privacy anywhere. We are being photographed or video captured in our cars, in the checkout line, walking down the street, you name it. Now, let’s talk about online privacy…
There isn’t any! If you use an Android based smartphone, Google, Chrome, Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. You are allowing these providers to collect everything you do and say online. All of this information is used to create a profile of you, no matter how rudimentary, and this profile persists indefinitely. It is then sold to other companies that based on market data, can sell you something that you don’t even know that you want and probably never needed.
Now, let’s talk about hardware. There is a chip in your phone that allows it to perform multitasking duties. It is responsible for connecting to the cell tower with the best connection for your current location. There are surveillance devices that act like cell towers, but don’t provide actual service like Stingray devices that can trick your phone into sending your location, who you are talking to, text messages, and the like to law enforcement, hackers, and even hobbyists.
To me, this is an unacceptable intrusion and violation of my personal privacy and my rights as a human being regardless of my Constitutional rights in this country.
You can take measures to prevent as much of this as you can. I don’t know if we can ever be fully protected from these types of intrusions, but we can do the best we have learned, while continuing to stay on top of our online privacy/safety self-education.
There are free sites and apps that allow you to encrypt your web traffic like ProtonVPN, your emails like ProtonMail or Tutanota, and text messages like Signal Private Messenger.
For more information on Stingray and other methods of surveillance, watch this video that we found below.
[su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/Y1E3r2USd8I”]