Ever feel like just dropping out of using technology?

As in you have considered not owning a laptop, email, or cellphone? The total disregard for privacy is frustrating, and researching ways to protect oneself is a gamble at best, often overwhelmig, and isn't assurred to be effective tomorrow.

 

Maybe if you'll live somewhere outside of technology due to all the ways they can track you with them.

 

It's worse in meatspace

Good tech is our only hope.

 

GG? I am doing quite fine with $100 a year a small amount of knowledge and 5 minutes of my time. I don't get why people are freaking out.

 

Hey, I'm not freaking out. I'm having fun

 

Yes, because before technology they weren't spying.

Just think to those confessionals invented by the church. Do you really think God needs you to go to a guy behind a wall to tell your sins?

 

Denying - discarding tech devices..... is like closing your eyes and pretending you're going somewhere......when you open them......you're still where you were!

You don't have any privacy concerns if you:
never criticise the authorities;
never do anything wrong;
never say or do anything;
live under a rock;
don't breathe;
all of the above.

 

I don't see how. It's not like they're separate. Nobody physically follows me through stores or down the road. No one is staring in my house windows. Tracking and data mining are far worse online than in the physical world.

I thought about getting a laptop. In the end, I decided that I had no real need of one. I barely use e-mail. As far as cellphones go, I don't need to be reachable 24/7 and I definitely don't need to be connected to the internet everywhere I go. I'm already spending too much time on the internet. I'm not going to waste more on the likes of Facelessbook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.
AFAIC, these are little more than data harvesting points. Facebook is the equivalent of a public diary. Linkedin is little more than a status symbol. Twitter is just a way to put in your 2 cents on whatever suits you at that moment. Implemented and used properly, they could all serve a purpose, but the way things are, the costs far exceed the benefits.

The idea of completely disconnecting is very appealing, but not entirely practical. 10 to 20 years ago, the evening news was sufficient. Now I want access to uncensored news. I want to hear what all of the "other sides" have to say and form my own opinions as to what the truth really is. Since we seem to be at war with just about everything and everyone, there's lots of "other sides". I want to hear what the censored, domestic news doesn't cover. For this, the internet is indispensable.

As far as using the web for financial purposes, its design is too insecure to be trusted. It doesn't matter how well you secure your end when the other end can be exploited. The same applies to using plastic instead of money. At one time, it was touted as safer. The way things are now, you stand a better chance of being robbed via plastic than you do of being physically robbed. Being robbed physically required some amount of courage on the part of the attacker. With plastic and online fraud, any coward can be a criminal. I've had $400 stolen from a debit card that I'm forced to use (direct deposit, no choice), a card I've never used online. The only way I can figure that it happened is that one of the places I'd used it was compromised. Fortunately I got it back, several months later. Now I withdraw everything on the day it's deposited. If it's not there, no one can steal it.

Disconnecting doesn't have to be an all or nothing concept. It is largely up to you how "connected" you want to be. Some items are easy to avoid or to do without. Others are harder. Not carrying a cellphone makes tracking you personally with GPS impossible. It won't help when you're driving if your car has GPS built in. Not using plastic makes tracking your financial activities more difficult. Using cash makes it almost impossible if it's not tied to some other personal info, like store cards, account numbers, etc.

 

I've had an Android problem the last 4 years. Like six different ones. Two different primary cell carriers. I was thinking about just using a dumb phone with no data. Oh and very seriously thinking in about 50 days switch to a 3rd carrier after my current PINs run out.

Sick of always charging my phone. My dumb phones can go 2 weeks without charging.

Guess I'll head over to Hofo & ask some specific questions.

 

Hope for what? I dont agree that "meatspace" is any safer/better and am inclined to agree with noone. I appreciate and respect your knowledge, but for the average joe bloggs like me, and who represent the vast majority, this knowledge doesn't come easily nor is it something very many will even attempt to pursue. That leaves the vast majority extremely vulnerable in that they will be trusting in 3rd parties. Most have been conditioned not to care, much less do anything about it.

noone_particular I really appreciate your posts. Your one above is no different. I wouldn't bet though that we're not being stared at through windows, but I get your point. Nothing surprises me anymore. Theres technology everywhere to keep tabs on you, both physically and online, but your post gives a better overview than what I could write.

All that said, Pukubigbrotha, the answer is a resounding yes, for online stuff anyway.

I'm sure people who are honest researchers, are aware of the processes that go into "prepping" people for the next level of "technology". Credit cards are meant to be a transient nuisance, so people will embrace with open arms the next thing on offer. This is similar to engineering a crisis so people will accept a solution. Their solution. Moreover, the offer will be optional at first then mandatory. In this case Im referring to an ID that will be implanted into humans. This is NOT news and is already happening on a voluntary basis. It started with animals. Get people used to the concept. People are heavily conditioned to see the "great" benefits, but how many want to see that this very scenario is not only written in the bible but has dire warnings for those who do this?

Just some food for thought.

 

With Win 7 and 8, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. On XP and older systems, the users still have the ability to disable or remove most of the snoop features. That's one of the main reasons I'm still running a modified Win98SE. I find it hard to believe that MS needs a cybercrime center like this to fight botnets. I'd be more inclined to think it's a storage and correlation center for all the data Windows calls home with.

I won't go so far as to say that the path we're on was spoken of in the book of Revelations, although I can see the temptation to do so. Depending on how you view it, Revelations could be speaking of the future, the present, or 2000 years in the past. Maybe it seems that way for a reason. In many ways, it's history and keeps repeating itself because people never learn from it. All that it mentions happened 2000 years ago, and again about 70 years ago, and who knows how many times in between. It's happening again now. There's another repeating pattern in this that many people seem to miss. Every society that's tried to implement that level of control over people has collapsed shortly afterwards. Myself, I expect this present surveillance society will also collapse under its own weight. Being as disconnected from and unreliant on that system as possible might make the difference between surviving or collapsing with it.

 

I'm not sure quitting technology would help someone looking to drop off the grid. The surveillance state will continue on regardless of whether you participate or not. The moderately, privacy conscious user, is still going to attract attention by limiting the data they share. A better approach might be to participate in the surveillance state, but control what information you share. Not by restriction, but rather by subterfuge. I tried this approach for a couple years while doing facebook and other social media. It was a lot of work and the average person is going to: give in and forget privacy or hermit and hide everything out of convenience.

Even with subterfuge, your not out of the woods considering:
You have no control over what others do with technology.
- family, friends, etc. might store and share information about you.
- cloud storage push locally stored data up into the cloud. What doesn't support cloud these days?
- Government isn't going to sweat (illegal) physical/remote access attempts.
- anything you've stored or shared online is could live despite your efforts.

You can not travel without leaving a trail.
- interstates use surveillance to track motorist.
- home and business owner use surveillance for security.
- cash purchase are almost always in person and on camera.
- credit/debit purchases are electronically tracked.
- communication and networking activities are predominately logged.

Even the isolationist is kind of screwed here. Just getting to the middle of nowhere leaves trail and attracts attention. Humans rarely survive complete self-reliant. Even when they are, its usually short-lived and we are pushed back into working with others to trade supplies or to get work done. Like I said before, you can't control what these folks do and I wouldn't expect law enforcement to take less notice of those living in remote places. I'd expect the exact opposite.

So it really comes down to just finding a balance within the surveillance state. You fudge what you can to make it seem like your participating still and you find ways to minimize or supplement unnecessary privacy risks in a way that more favorable. But I would agree with the author, that there are days when I wish we could throw all this technology away and just go back to one-on-one conversations, spending time with family and friends. The simple fact that we live in a time when the amount of data (big data) is so large that DBMS can't keep up. Really shows just how data hungry everyone is.

 

If the surveillance state had infinite resources, I would be inclined to agree. Collecting and correlating data from a few electronic sources is easy and cheap. If you do all your purchasing or bill paying from one or two cards, it's simple to map where most every dollar went. When they have to add in private camera images and match those to each companies transaction records, the process becomes more involved. It most likely requires some degree of data input by actual people. This raises the cost and slows things down. It's harder and more expensive to get the complete picture. There's a very old method of buying and selling that's very surveillance resistant, barter. There's no realistic way to monitor or stop it.

Ultimately, you can't defeat surveillance state tracking. What you can do is make it more expensive and more labor intensive. If they want to track my internet activities, they have to separate my traffic from the Tor traffic exiting at my IP. That's one of the reasons I run an exit, to add more hay to the haystack they're looking through. If they want to determine my location or track my movements, they'll have to use their equipment to do it. Nothing of mine has GPS capabilities so there's no signal to follow. If they want to track my finances, they'll have to do it manually by tracking cash payments and purchases, plus a few money orders. Sure they can do it but it'll cost more and require more effort than it does to monitor someone who is "connected". If they want to waste their money and their employees time to keep tract of me, that's fine. They'll find nothing of interest for all their efforts. If a large enough percentage of the population did things in a similar manner, they'd need a bigger budget and more people to analyze the data. They just got rid of a lot of people they'd need for that trying to eliminate leaks. This system can't be defeated directly but it can be overloaded and bankrupted.

 

There's a lot to be said for a laptop with no networking, cards pulled, and used 100% offline. I have one that I use only for writing, so it acts like a word processor circa 1987. I also have an information management program on that laptop (RightNote). It's really bare-boned actually. I have a WP program, Scrivener, RightNote, VLC for music and movies, an image viewer, an offline Wikipedia (the whole thing), and, I have stopped 80% of background services. It's a nice set-up and runs easily with a 2nd gen i5. In fact, I know somebody who does the exact same thing but uses a cheap $229 laptop from Staples and stripped of all online abilities. It uses an AMD E1 processor. I was highly skeptical, but it's actually quite fast with so little on it, services shut down, etc.

It's a liberating feeling to have even the one laptop that I know has no upload/download capabilities. It's hard to explain, but it's an oddly comforting feeling.

 

Naw, it's how I make bread these days.
Have thought about a cabin in the woods in Alaska but not that fond of bears.

 

yeah, i'm down to only 3 websites that i visit regularly now. thinking i may be done with the web in 6 months to a year. i have an older cell phone that i think i can do without also.

the privacy violations are only gonna get worse until millions or billions drop out or stand up - they think they have you addicted to the technology and the facebook and twitter and television baloney, which is what they wanted. aside from a few world series games i haven't watched TV in almost 10 years.

 

Sounds boring

 

How often do/have the big guys lie/d? My thoughts are it would be a phone home center at the very least. You can absolutely guarantee that it will be all tied into NSA et al. I believe these are all "joined at the top" anyway, so it doesn't really matter where all these data centers reside. They will all be in each others pockets. Its a global system and MS is certainly part of it all. Kinda makes me laugh when google and these other giants, act all innocent as if theyre doing great things for the people using their services as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouth. Yeah right.

Fortunately for those who care to give it more than a cursory glance, the bible is not intended to be open to all sorts of interpretations, where words can mean anything, otherwise it would be a pointless waste of time. There's things in Revelation that have never happened before in history. In other words some prophecy is yet to come to pass. Case in point "the mark of the beast" where "no man will be able to buy or sell without it" and other surrounding factors attest to this fact. OK so those who don't believe, the proof is in the pudding as they say. We wont have to wait too long to see how this plays out.

That said, even though I see the writing on the wall, I'll do as much as I can to be as safe as I can from prying spying eyes.

Yes I agree the SS will continue on but eventually everyone will be forced to "be in the system" to some degree. Right now theres still choice in some things, but I think that model will change. Big subject. Not sure how or what exactly the internet will morph into next, but you can be sure there will be some sticky surveillance fingers in the pie.

The average person is just NOT going to be bothered with all this. As you say, and really interesting to note, we are still dependent on other people online. It's still a 2 way street. If we want to email them privately, we are dependent not only on our knowledge, but theirs as well. We are at a serious disadvantage because of this. It makes it VERY easy for the spysters to do their evil.
Interesting you associate giving up "FB and other social media" with being a hermit. I wouldn't even associate going offline altogether with being a hermit. Only a short few years ago we never had the internet. People did just fine for 1000s of years without this. Hermits were much different.

They are trying, believe you me they are. One method...expect unreasonable "duties" of gift tax or similar. Another... Consider the recent diabolical codex alimentarius - where they are trying to shut down cottage industries and the like. One tactic is scaring people by making it a food safety issue.

Hear hear! I love stories that make it as hard as possible for "them". Flood their servers with their dearly beloved keywords. Anyone?

Just take away a teens smartphone/tv/FB etc and unfortunately you will see how pathetically dependant they are on all this. I think they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams to get people hooked on this stuff that "makes life easy".

 

Revelations and its meaning are way off topic for this forum, and if we divert too far that way, the thread will be locked. FWIW, I have studied Revelations and the other books associated with it. From Roman times til now, the only thing that's changed is the technology available to them.

The NSA/corporate spying is just one aspect of the problem. It's inseparably tied to most every aspect of life from our food and water, finances, property ownership, medical, and of course, our ability to communicate either directly or via the internet. The "food safety" item you mention is one example. Monsanto is basically in charge of that while they poison the worlds food supply by trying to control it. Poison labelled as medicine gets rubber stamped by the FDA, but prune juice can't be prescribed as a laxative because it hasn't passed their tests. They can pass laws against a lot of things like barter, prescribing natural remedies, producing your own food, etc. Enforcing them is another matter. That takes manpower, which has to be paid. Let them try to prove that I paid for an item with other items, or by doing a job for them in exchange. Let them prove that I fixed a PC in exchange for a few good chickens, or 3 months worth of eggs.

This giant corporate/government takeover will eventually collapse under its own weight. The way capitalism is designed, it has to continuously grow to survive. When room and resources are finite, infinite growth is unsustainable. IMO, this worlds economy is already on borrowed time.

Upload any encrypted any cat videos lately? They collect encrypted material so why not give them some entertainment for all their decryption efforts?

 

Yes.
This is like stop reading books because authorities monitor what books your get from library or you buy and stop watching movies because they monitor what movies you watch.

 

It's a great idea to keep a couple of computers off the grid. You don't need to worry about mal-ware. You don't need to worry about so-called upgrades being pushed to your system that can compromise security or break existing applications. And you don't need to worry about information on them getting out.

Today's teens, and even pre-teens, are hopelessly addicted to the instant gratification of whatever social media is in vogue. And you can bet those sites are harvesting data, whether it be for marketing or other purposes.

I'm like at a relatives' or neighbor's dinner and the kids are doing youtube and facebook and all sorts of other social media at the dinner table. They even text and facetime one another when they're in the same damned room.

I can certainly understand the novelty of such a device, a picture-phone and playing around with it. But when they're too lazy to get up off the couch and get their own water even - have to text mommy who's upstairs or in the garage, that's a problem.

Next thing to consider in today's surveillance state is that you've got all these consultant companies and web startups that provide "business intelligence" and "analytics" services. These services are pushed and sold to other businesses of all kinds with the promise of increased profits. So a good portion of all this interconnectedness happens because of desire to make money.

 

Eventually, they'll have brain implants, and we'll all be Borg

 

Ever feel like just dropping out of using technology?

For 5 minutes before I realize I need to check something online....


Borg queen can assimilate me any day of the week

 

Quite the opposite. Life is a lot less boring when you don't waste it parked in front of a monitor (or a TV). Besides wasting time, sitting in front of a TV or monitor for extended periods causes your body to deteriorate. "Use it or lose it" applies very well here.

Regarding their monitoring what movies you like, I suspect that the types of movies you prefer is of very little importance to them. IMO, it's more important to them that you are wasting your time on movies than putting it to better use in the real world.

Regarding books, they might be able to monitor what you borrow, and to a degree (depending on how you pay for them) what you buy in stores. It's not possible to keep tract of books sold in 2nd hand stores, yard sales, etc. Given the choice, I'll take a real, physical book over an E-Book any day. Physical books can't be censored or edited the same way as electronic books. E-Books can be lost due to hardware failure or be inaccessible because of a power outage. Real books have to be physically taken away or burnt.

Slightly OT but possibly useful to some, especially those interested in alternatives to conventional medicine. This site has made PDF copies of many of the old herbal and alternative medicine manuals from the last 200 years. Many of them are nearly impossible to find in physical form. All freely available to download. For anyone interested in alternative medicine, it's a good resource.

 

I too am dismayed, but not in the least surprised at what has become of civilian surveillance and cybercrime. But, I would also say that in reality technology has simply made it easier to do these things which were already happening before our advances. Let it not be forgotten that the absolute worst invasions upon civil rights and freedoms history has recorded occurred before humanity had computers, cellphones and other such devices. I understand the forum rightfully has a no politics stance, so I won't talk specifics. But we all know the names and when these atrocities happened. Freedom and privacy doesn't rely on our ability to work around invasions, they rely on our willingness and ability to fight them head on. In some countries it is indeed much easier said than done. But I would remind the hopeless that history books are filled with triumphs over oppression.