What is this “vid-eo chimera” you speak of? Some ancient technology from the Mayans? /j

I’ve aged myself, haven’t I? lol

Hmm if it’s a smartphone, their location can still be tracked even if they’re not recording videos for social media. Even if it’s not a smartphone, their location can be triangulated.

I’ve never attended a protest, but one of my younger siblings has. I agree with the author here: don’t take a smartphone with you. If you need to go to a protest, and it’s a charged topic (i.e. people have been fired or detained for it), take a dumb phone and make calls once you’re considerably away from the protest’s meeting site. Or, buy a burner phone for use only at the meeting site. If video footage is that big of a deal, take an old-fashioned video camera to record.

Thanks and agreed. An extra point (possibly more harrowing) is misrepresentation: just because there’s tons of data on you doesn’t mean that it paints an accurate - or even correct - picture of you. Instead, it paints a picture of what was collected, from where, and some of the error rates of the data collection method(s).

I’ve seen and experienced first-hand the inability to make sense of data to accurately represent a situation/person for various reasons, not all of which are tied to not having enough data. Except instead of waiting to examine unsubstantiated assumptions, they assumed their presumptions were valid and proceeded to run head-first into action.

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything” - that is disturbing. “On paper”, someone could reference some data from here and there, omit some, include some that they think/presume related to you even if tangentially, presume even tangential data is relevant in some way, summarize it, and hand it over like “see our analysis confirms/denies what you want us to confirm/deny”. See also this post analyzing the mishandling of generated LLM content.

Privacy isn’t about protecting (or “hiding”) what you don’t want others to know. I’ve learned that it’s also about protecting your identity from misrepresentation.

Anecdotal, but I can see this. Last year, I took a 2-3 months off of what I now call recreational internet use (e.g. keeping up with the news, forums, etc.), because my mental health and cognitive abilities have deteriorated a lot. The result wasn’t just improved mood but also regaining cognitive skills that I thought I had lost forever. Brain fog also lessened. A year later now, and the improvements are stable and still there, even though I do use the internet recreationally again. It’s still not where I used to be before, but it’s a work-in-progress anyway.