You could take your ATM-dispensed cash and use each of the large bills for small cash purchases at an array of stores, resulting in a pocketful of truly anonymous small bills you could then use to make a nefarious purchase.
Why are you labeling this idea a “conspiracy theory?”
I’ll say this for a business, their goal is to sell me something, presumably something I find desirable. Any surveillance they do of me is in the hopes that they can discover a way to present me with a desirable something to spend my money on before someone else does.
Government surveillance of me isn’t going to result in me getting something I find desirable.
Well, it’s a bit of a pun. I am not exactly the conspiracy type.
Dennis
I don’t think “pun” means what you think it means…
People still send letters? Or is there some other reason to buy a stamp?
mixdenny, you’re Post Office Conspiracy only scratches the surface!!! (But you all knew that already, right?)
No shit, Sherlock!
Geoffrey A. Fowler, Technology Columnist at Washington Post, and some others, have been writing a series of columns under the general heading “The Secret Life of Your Data”, the most recent being published just today (Dec. 17, 2019):
What does your car know about you? We hacked a Chevy to find out.
At the bottom of the above article (or somewhere on the page) are links to a whole bunch of other articles in the series, with titles such as:
[ul][li] Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time[/li][li] It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?[/li][li] The spy in your wallet: Credit cards have a privacy problem[/li][li] Goodbye, Chrome: Google’s Web browser has become spy software[/li][li] I found your data. It’s for sale.[/li][li] You watch TV. Your TV watches back.[/li][li] Think you’re anonymous online? A third of popular websites are ‘fingerprinting’ you.[/ul][/li]
An earlier article on the same topic (about your car spying on you):
Big Brother on wheels: Why your car company may know more about you than your spouse. by Peter Holley, from January 15, 2018.
The one about your iPhone is especially interesting:
It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?, from May 28, 2019.
or they’re going to sell info about you to someone else in which case you get zilch; at its best gov surveillance is likely linked to crime prevention/solving
The business that buys the info needs to profit from it, there’s not a lot of profit in providing zilch.
And the Gov’t at its worst takes the idea of crime prevention and turns it on its head to screw over a lot of people who are just minding their own business.
That’s what I meant by cycles/levels.
For the truly paranoid, even these sort of things won’t be enough. What a surprise!
I should be the only one to profit from “my info”. I’m sick of middlemen cramming their way into life.
Most of these are problems only if you’re complacent. I can’t speak to the car one, as I don’t drive.
[quote=“Senegoid, post:28, topic:845007”]
At the bottom of the above article (or somewhere on the page) are links to a whole bunch of other articles in the series, with titles such as:
[list][li] Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time[/li][/quote]
So don’t use it. I have to wonder how many (meaning how few) people use Alexa. I do see the occasional post where you have a couple where one uses it and the other wishes they would get rid of it. (Make that a relationship requirement. No, you don’t need to date someone who uses Alexa.)
[quote]
[li] It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?[/li][/quote]
Android in my case but… no one. I turned the wi-fi off. It could be set to airplane mode (a big deal if you have data). Literally the only reason to leave the phone on at night is if you use it as an alarm clock. I have an actual physical alarm clock, because having only one alarm clock-equivalent is, IMO, foolish. I can use my computer’s free alarm clock as well if I need another backup.
[quote]
[li] The spy in your wallet: Credit cards have a privacy problem[/li][/quote]
Credit cards will track where you shop, but not individual purchases, unless you use a loyalty program.
[quote]
[li] Goodbye, Chrome: Google’s Web browser has become spy software[/li][/quote]
This is a PitA. I use Firefox, but mainly because it’s menu doesn’t suck. I would use TOR, except my library absolutely hates that website. Untangling the integrated spyware takes work, and often any extensions you might want to download want access to your data too.
[quote]
[li] I found your data. It’s for sale.[/li][/quote]
I visit the “have you been pwned” website every once in a while. A few of my passwords were uncovered, but only from times before I started using a password manager.
I have free credit checking sites that I can check (they give monthly emailed reminders to do so).
[quote]
[li] You watch TV. Your TV watches back.[/li][/quote]
I don’t watch TV. There is one where I live, but it’s my mom’s TV. That TV does not have a video camera, nor does it have “ears”. If I watched TV, I wouldn’t care if my provider knew what type of TV I watched. “He liked Game of Thrones and not reality TV.” Him and millions of other customers.
Doesn’t need a camera, it uses back capacitance on the screen pixels to generate a crude picture of what is in front of the set.
Hah! At least that is the cockamamie theory I posted once at work when we all got new computers. I had a whole scenario about how it worked and combining the image with keystroke monitoring was enough to tell who was using the computer. Really got a few people upset before it became obvious it was a joke. It was April first ferchissakes!
I got talked to by the IT crimes rep. Again.
Dennis
A recent hoax anthrax threat was solved using the information from one of these stamps. From the attached complaint:
Billions of people are being hacked and spied upon. But it’s not a problem at all because a few thousand of the people are smart enough to protect themselves. Does that pretty well sum up your point?
Getting back to the original question about the stamp carrying information that ties its purchase back to you, that it contains a serial number is neither here nor there. It’s possible the serial number is just for inventory purposes and is irrelevant for the purpose of ‘tracking’ the buyer.
But, as DPRK notes above, with steganography there are others ways of encoding things, other ways of tracking. A tag or an identifier could be coded into the color scheme of the stamp for example. No human eye would notice it.
…which is already being done in certain printers. I know my Xerox printer does this. I run out of yellow ink sticks sooner than the other two colors. And I’ve looked at prints from the printer under UV light and indeed, it’s printing tiny yellow dots all over the page.
I guess I’ll have to use a manual typewriter for my manifesto after all.
Kimera757 seems to suggest that the solution, for him, is living largely “off the grid”, perhaps in an ice cave in Siberia. How does he even post messages on the Internet? Maybe he sends IP packets by carrier pigeon. (See RFC 1149 and Wiki article IP over Avian Carriers).
Unfortunately, the CPIC (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol) does not scale up well to billions of users, and throughput is limited.
I dunno, the throughput from one pigeon can be damn near limitless.
Dennis