Hello, Sorry if this is the wrong place for this.

I am looking to start an online store for some art projects/crafts/stickers mostly as a creative outlet for some of my current frustrations.

Since some kinds of people take art way too personally, I want to take precautions from doxxing or being harassed.

What are some best practices for an online shop? Are there any recommended storefronts or something like that? I’m sure there’s a lot of things I’m not even considering.

Any help would be much appreciated, Thanks

End of September, Switzerland will vote for E-ID. A big threat for our privacy as it will widely used for tons of new use cases.

Behind the government pitch of an "open source project, completely optional" hides big tech industry... Which will make it mandatory to access their services.

What are your thoughts on that ?

#Switzerland #Privacymatters

https://mastodon.social/@murena/115225427452624080

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37648654

Thousands of Flock Safety surveillance cameras captured Virginia travelers with an unblinking eye. Their data was shared and searched around the country millions of times.

Comments

• Reddit.

Sometimes I think, I have learned a lot about this issue and I'm well aware of the fact the whole world is going towards a state of surveillance that no one can escape, I have done everything I could to ensure my personal privacy, but what about others?

the majority of the world population does not even care about this matter, and they might even see it as a normality, the people might even know that they are being watched/listened to/surveilled, and they don't do anything to prevent it neither individually or collectively.

I also believe that protecting the individual privacy automatically contributes to the collective privacy and vice-versa, but seeing how the world is heading towards extreme surveillance that is practically impossible to resist (eg.. face recognition, chat control law), I ask, what is the point of all of this? how can i live peacfully knowing that i can be suspected of anything just because i made a joke here or said something there?

and I'm not talking 100% privacy or anonymity, i'm just talking peace of mind and well-being.

So I have a job that will be getting me out of the US. For most things I’m not to worried, except for my computer. What would be the best way to securely move it and also not potentially worry about damaging it?

It’ll be a given that I have an encrypted off-site (cloud) back up, but I’m torn about removing the drives to hand carry and then shipping the chassis. My only worry about that would be customs stopping me because of carrying hard drives… more specifically 3x M.2, which I’m not as worried about and 4x 2.5” SSDs

Thoughts?

Given that EM serves as a lense into our homes, would this provide an effective counter measure??

What do you run; Opnsense, pfsense, Smoothwall, maybe a WAF like wazuh?

Today was update/audit firewall day. I'm running a standalone instance of pFsense on a Protectli Vault FW4B - 4 Port - Intel Quad Core - 8GB RAM - 120GB mSATA SSD with unbound, pfBlockerNG, Suricata, ntopng, and heavily filtered. I did bump the swap to 8 GB as I've previously noticed a few 'out of swap' errors under load.

Before I signed off, I ran it through a couple porn sites to see if my adblocking strategy was working. Not one intrusive ad. Sweet!

Show me what you got.

Hello all,

I am currently looking for a privacy respecting alternative for the medication tracking app I currently use. Apple's native health app seems to be decent privacy wise, but it lacks the ability to input my current capsule inventory and set a reminder at a certain amount of pills so I can refill them on time. (I should also note that I have an older phone so I'm running iOS 18.6? I'm not sure if the app has changed on iOS 26.)

Thanks for reading and I look forward to your recommendations. ^-^

A VPN that grants network-level privacy on mobile by routing app traffic through Tor, assigns each app a separate circuit for improved separation, bypasses app-level censorship, features per-app routing, security via Rust-based implementation, and awaits early adopter feedback.

Post reads: "❓ Do you know who are the inventors of the hardware-level kill switch for smartphones?

🤫 Stay tuned! We’re teaming up with them to offer you more privacy.

👇 Share your ideas in the comments! "

Five hours after Charlie Kirk was shot this week, an Atlanta man got a phone call from an Illinois police officer asking about a photo he shared with a couple of close friends on a private Discord chat. The Atlanta man, who asked not to be identified, says the post was merely a confirmation that he had purchased the same T-shirt that the accused killer wore (from an Illinois-based online shop).

Social media companies are generally forbidden by law from divulging users’ private communications to the government without a traditional legal process (e.g., court order). But there’s an exception: in perceived emergencies, social media platforms can proactively and “voluntarily” hand over private messages in response to what’s called an “emergency disclosure request” (EDR).

Discord, I am told, did not respond to any EDR here; but when I asked them directly if they’d provided law enforcement with information to traditional legal process, they declined to respond on-record.

The FBI, or the intelligence community, evidently is monitoring Discord private messaging, even from people who have broken no law.

Full blown Orwellian world. Run for local government and stop this shit.

The largest populated areas are left leaning. If they ae controlled by democratic socialist, we can restrict this shit. Just by pure numbers.

A court ordered Google to pay $425 million after finding the company misled 98 million users about data collection through its "Web & App Activity" setting[^1]. The case revealed Google continued gathering user data via Firebase, a monitoring database embedded in 97% of top Android apps and 54% of leading iOS apps, even after users disabled data collection[^1].

Google's internal communications showed the company was "intentionally vague" about its data collection practices because being transparent "could sound alarming to users," according to district judge Richard Seeborg[^1].

This ruling adds to Google's recent privacy settlements, including:

• $392 million paid to 40 states in 2023 for location tracking violations
• $40 million to Washington state for similar location tracking issues
• $1.38 billion to Texas in 2025 over location tracking and incognito mode claims[^1]

Google plans to appeal the $425 million verdict, with spokesperson Jose Castaneda stating "This decision misunderstands how our products work" and asserting that Google honors user privacy choices[^1].

[^1]: Malwarebytes - Google misled users about their privacy and now owes them $425m, says court

Private company - but can they be trusted to maintain user privacy?

Hostinger is a (German?) company that provides web hosting, vps and other services.

In case anyone is interested in a digital exodus:

https://mastodon.social/@patrickleavy/115182449720835182

ETA a link with more details: https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/collectiveaction.html

So I had researched it a while ago and don't recall having found anything effective and non-suspicious to protect from public camera mass survaillence in cities and the like. Is there anything that is a good option for that yet, and if so, could you point me toward it?

I've used mullvad for quite a long time, but because it doesn't have port forwarding, its created some concerns with media sharing. Ive seen TorGuard and AirVPN as the main 2 that are recommended. Are they as trustworthy as Mullvad?

Hey there,

i have a domain (.de-domain, registered with netcup) that i would like to use for my email-provider, but i am hesitant.

Why i am hesitant: I don't want that people might be able to find out my name/adress that is registered with my domain. If some service does not need my personal data, i simply don't want them to be able to access them. It's as simple as that.

I read that a whois-check could reveal my data, but the situation seems more complicated. At least, i couldn't reveal my personal data with a whois-check.

Why i would like to use my own domain: I want to be more independent from my mail-provider.

I am not that tech-savvy, so sorry if this is a silly question. I tried searching, but didn't found anything, probably because keywords like domain bring up lots of different topics.

I use GrapheneOS and love my privacy. However, I am not as knowledge in regards to simcards.

My family needed to get a new simcard while abroad and I was hesitant to get a new simcard and preferred to 'hitchhike' on a family members internet thearing so he could get a simcard instead of me.

It left me with the choice to:

• Get a Sim card
• Get an e-sim
• Let a family member get a simcard and hitchhike from their internet. (Internet hotspot thearing)

My question: Was my worry in vain and I could actually get an e-sim/Sim or did I do it correctly, making someone else get a Sim and share the internet to me? :P

What I'm worried of, is that I'm currently outside EU and I don't want any weird hacking attempts towards me from the government. There are a lot of protests here, quite violent ones at times too, and I am aware that governments usually use stingrays or equivalent devices to identify or stalk people of interest.

Something I hardly see mentioned here is encryption for data such as on your PC. My modus operandi is to encrypt all the things. This is a little .bat script I came up with to lock all drives, except the C: drive, all in one click.

It resides on my desktop as an icon, and i can lock all drives in a couple seconds vs doing it drive by drive.

Not sure if anyone here could use it, but I thought I'd share. I am sure that some of you real coders here could fine tune it a bit, and I'd be open to suggestions.

@echo off
REM Script to lock multiple BitLocker drives with admin privileges

REM Check for administrative privileges
net session >nul 2>&1
if %errorlevel% neq 0 (
    echo This script requires administrative privileges.
    echo Requesting elevation...
    REM Create a VBS script to trigger UAC prompt
    echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\elevate.vbs"
    echo UAC.ShellExecute "%~s0", "", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\elevate.vbs"
    cscript //nologo "%temp%\elevate.vbs"
    del "%temp%\elevate.vbs"
    exit /b
)

REM List of drives to lock
set drives=D: G: I: H: E: F: P: J:

REM Loop through each drive and lock it
for %%d in (%drives%) do (
    echo Locking drive %%d...
    manage-bde -lock %%d -ForceDismount
)

echo All specified drives have been locked.
pause