Maintaining opsec on the modern internet

With almost everyone embracing blatant spyware like Discord, blindly using social media, and leaking information about themselves and their friends with no second thoughts, how in the world are you supposed to maintain privacy anymore? There seems to be a general culture online that if you don't share personal information (name, birthday, occupation, location, etc.) about yourself, you must be untrustworthy or up to bad soykaf. If you do share these things with them, there's always the chance they will carelessly reveal it to others Is the solution just to become a hermit and interact with nobody at all? I want a thread on how to maintain my privacy while living in a culture and time where nobody cares about their or their friends' privacy at all.

yes. delete your facebook, stop using windows, Libreboot a x200 & install qubes on it (or tails), use pseudo anonymous nicknames which are different from every site, use Tor, Signal, Riot.im (or some other Matrix enabled client) & host your own mail. Buy your domains & VPS using monero (I use https://cockbox.org/). Cover your webcams (or better yet, manually remove them). Always have a mindset as if all your tools are compromised. Know how to get totally rid of a drive & such quickly, drop your current phone & either get a Librem 5 (https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/), or an old Nokia. Pay with cash, drop soykaf like paypal & such, use pre-paid cards if you *have* to pay for something online. It's quite possible to avoid the botnet, you're just too lazy to do so, because it's easier to like a post on facebook than to avoid it

>>7032 >Libreboot a x200 & install qubes on it (or tails) jesus christ, horrible advice, OP is trying to get rid of botnet warez, not evade the fuarrrking illuminati tails can never be a daily driver, and this is coming from someone who uses tor browser as his main browser, half the internet hates tor nodes, they will bombard you with cloudflare captchas and that makes the internet unusable, i have several workarounds around this to help me browse otherwise i'll drop tor. two don't tell people to flash soykaf into their PCs that can get them bricked, OP is better off picking just any AMD laptop and disable PSP from the bios otherwise ok post

>>7032 What's the point of using modern technology at all at that point, or being part of society in general? You're using massive amounts of energy for no practical benefit, and even if you did all of those things your privacy could still be compromised. It would also make you look suspicious and, ironically, that has a massive impact on how your privacy is respected.

>>7034 >tails can never be a daily driver Hence why I put it in (). I use Whonix for most of my daily use in Qubes >don't tell people to flash soykaf I agree the project leader was a complete user, but that doesn't change the fact that the code it self was good. Else just use Coreboot or some other open source bios. >half the internet hates tor nodes Yea that's true. Be prepared to get derezzed & having to solve a jewgle recaptcha for 30 minutes >>7035 >massive amounts of energy for no practical benefit Convenience over privacy? >privacy could still be compromised Care to explain? I use all of what I posted in >>7032 on a daily basis. Sure it's close to impossible to hide from it all, but it's still extremely effective. This will get most of the Facebook users away from you. Sure CIA niggers might still be a me to track you down, but at least not private companies or skids

>>7035 Why are people like you even on this site just go back to facebook please.

>>7037 >>7043 I don't think my point came across, so I'll try to be more clear. OP is asking here if it is possible to maintain privacy when the current trend for many corporations is to gather as much information about you as possible. These corporations make most of their profit by using this information to provide targeted advertisements for the benefit of other corporations. This allows them to provide the everyday users a "free" service, where they pay with the information they give (and actually are the product being sold). This business model has many ethical concerns and I think that is the reason why OP started this thread. The simple solution would be to avoid the services provided by these companies. But things aren't so simple. Avoiding them completely doesn't necessarily mean you can not be profiled, for example if you email someone with Gmail, Google will analyze you and make a profile out of you. If someone has your phone number and they synchronize their contacts with Facebook messenger, they will make a profile out of you. In order to avoid this data mining efficiently, you would have to take more extreme measures like >>7032 is suggesting. I find these suggestions questionable as it takes a significant amount of effort and greatly limits your daily activities, functionality in society and the way you interact with other people (it may not be a popular view, but interaction with real people with different world views is very beneficial). It also does nothing about the profiling that has already been done about you and without a doubt raises a lot of red flags for law enforcement and national intelligence (which makes it very likely your privacy will be compromised with more old-school methods and the profiling will be done by them instead of corporations, which one do you prefer?). In more authoritarian countries you'd get in very deep soykaf, I don't see how that would be worth it. At this point, I don't see many situations where this approach would be optimal, even if you do illegal soykaf (I'm not sure if OP was implying that) you're better off at least trying to blend in a little. When I asked why would you bother being part of society at all when going for this approach, it was a genuine question. I think it's important to understand what is the underlying motivation for it, I guess it is simply ideological? I would personally prefer becoming a true hermit and rejecting society and modern technology completely. Rather than using all of my energy on avoiding the botnet, I would be able to focus on my personal growth without interruption from human society.

>>7030 Spread misinformation about yourself, be a soykaf on social media and let the people fall for it.

>>7032 Everything that this person said is accurate. >>7034 >CloudFlare Captchas Just don't use those sites then. You can find a lot of content outside of HTTP anyway. Need files? Use FTP. Need communication? XMPP or IRC is the answer. The majority of sites are infected by CloudFlare and such other services that violate privacy but there are quite a few servers and services which are not. It's perfectly reasonable to be on Tor all the time.

https://hunch.ly/osint-articles/osint-article-how-to-blow-your-online-cover

>>7046 Then just have no friends or security oriented friends

If you want to spread your values of privacy you will need to make pragmatic sacrifices.

Good reading

>>7589 >Note: you are about to step in to the teenage mind of... Closed and deleted at this point.

>>7590 >Note: You are about to step into the mind of a teenage hacker interested in the crossroads of information security, the human right to privacy, and mass surveillance efforts. >This “book” was written during many late nights of my high school senior year in my bedroom, in solidarity, with a naïve passion; only now am I releasing it, years later. This book is not professional, Yeah, thanks but no. When I need the opinion of someone who has never had real world experience, I'll come running. It's not really awful at a cursory glance, but if any of this is new information to you, you should definitely not be doing anything (or thinking of doing anything) sp00py in the first place.

>>7034 >half the internet hates tor nodes, they will bombard you with cloudflare captchas and that makes the internet unusable, i have several workarounds around this to help me browse otherwise i'll drop tor. Would you mind sharing these workarounds? The method that I use is startpage's "Anonymous View" configured to use EU servers, but this way of accessing websites is weak since it relies on some shady company called Surfly and has a time limit of about 10-15 minutes before the session ends. I'm currently looking into switching to searx since it provides a similar proxy service.

>>7593 Not >>7034, but I usually grab a free VPN from somewhere like mullvad and route my tor browsing traffic through that.

>>7594 That's kind of counter-intuitive isn't it? Might as well just drop Tor entirely if you're connecting to a VPN through Tor, what benefit does it give?

>>7630 >route my tor browsing traffic through that. correct me if I'm wrong but it sounds like he's saying VPN encapsulating TOR traffic not TOR encapsulating VPN traffic If it's the latter, it is kinda pointless IMO

>>7630 I'm not the person you're asking but as a general point: VPN -> Tor has the benefit of hiding Tor usage from your LAN / ISP. Tor -> VPN has the benefit of not getting blocked from websites for coming from a Tor exit node.

>>7653 >Tor -> VPN has the benefit of not getting blocked from websites for coming from a Tor exit node. And protecting your traffic from malicious exit nodes if you trust your VPN operator more for some reason.