Things like privacy statements and permission to use cookies are little more than sophisticated propaganda. If you think for a moment the Overlords cannot prepare a dossier on you within minutes that would make your mother faint and your father die of shame, you’re living in fantasy land. You have no idea how much data they store on individuals, and not just credit card purchases: tracking data, telephone conversations, text messages, anything you ever posted on the Internet. It’s a devouring machine. Get in their way, and you will find out how much they know about you. It has been this way for a very long time. This is nothing new. And yes, they really can turn on your cell phone camera and microphone at will without lights, so long as the battery is attached. And VPN? I laugh when I think about VPN. There is no cryptographic protocol used on the Internet, that the Overlords who brought all these technologies out in the first place, cannot decipher. None. The only way to live with this level of privacy evasion is to accept the reality of it. Stop thinking you are ever alone. Out in the middle of nowhere with no electronics on you? Maybe
I think modern privacy is more about creating noise than anything else. Anything you do that can in some way be tied to an internet connection in your name is traceable to you to some degree of certainty, so create lots of noise to filter through, so its hard to derive meaning from anything. Be simultaneously a Democrat, a Republican and something completely off the chart of their political understanding. The idea is to create misinformation about yourself that is indistinguishable from the real information. Use stock images for the pictures on any accounts under your real name and make deep fake videos using those faces. Run one of those scripts that generates a bunch of background traffic, use tor and a VPN for mundane tasks. Have social media accounts that express a wide variety of political beliefs and use chatgpt to fill in any details you don’t care to fill out. Never post pictures of yourself on the internet, but post stock photos/videos of other people frequently. Edit pictures of yourself to have other faces. Use algorithms intentionally designed to confound AI to edit photos. A lot of these tasks are being automated now so you don’t have to think too much about any of it. Also if you want privacy get a dumb mp3 player and a dumb camera that can’t connect to the internet at all. Then leave your phone in different locations, not just your house for extended periods of time. Switch usernames frequently and jump accounts on different services. Change your email address often. If you can, legally change your name, but go by many names in different circles. Move around a lot, change jobs often… etc, etc. Its hard to pull meaningful data out of a messy dataset, so make those that collect it all have to work really hard to make meaning of it all. Any combination of these sort of things in addition to good general oppsec will make whatever dossier somebody puts together seem fairly useless. Think about Lee Harvey Oswald for example. His dossier was all over the place, having him playing multiple political adversaries and making a bit of a scene while doing so. It’s almost impossible to determine his personal motivations because of all the misinformation he created around himself. Obviously its harder now to disappear into an alias identity, but give up on believing they can’t get anything on you, instead focus on giving them too much.