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I’m still pissed the email I had managed to keep junk free for years was leaked because my insurance company had a breach.
Simplelogin/anonaddy
That having been said, keeping an email “private” is roughly as silly as people who think phone numbers are private, as if the white pages never existed.
Does your company/school provide employee/student Microsoft 365 licences? Ask your Windows-using colleague to check that “Optional Connected Experiences” are enabled and tell the IT team that they are likely allowing genAI training on internal documents (Microsoft seems to have reserved the right to do that and never denied the allegations). Yes, they can disable this organization-wide and will likely contact Microsoft over this, and if enough of us do this they’ll know they crossed a line.
If your company’s IT team does not respond, you’ll have another argument getting your peers over to LibreOffice.
We’re working hard to get rid of Microsoft as last we checked, we can’t disable copiloi using our data used on SharePoint without also removing all required user functionality like searching documents from SharePoint. We searched everywhere and literally couldn’t find a way to remove that.
I know that government is storing citizens data there…
WTF, why have companies ever decided to use Microsoft ?
Dump Microsoft, now.
Because the IT Manager is a clueless imbecile who only wants things his way and will not take in any other alternatives whatsoever. Doesn’t matter if it’s better for the company, they insist on having everything their way.
I believe the government gets a different version of Windows. My work has blocked copilot and all the AI tools. The search function in Sharepoint works for me though. Companies cannot afford to dump Windows. They need to hire people with Linux knowledge or train existing employees and most importantly rewrite programs still using MS DOS.
programs still using MS DOS
Ever heard of DOSBox, the multiplatform DOS emulator?
But yes, the lack of support for Office and other programs on Wine is a problem.
On a side note, I don’t discuss anything with gmail users that I don’t want indexed and stored in Google’s dossier of me.
Valid. I also don’t have the “I don’t care” stance but rather that medical providers etc should go to jail for storing data on unsecure infrastructure
Until there is serious consequences to data breaches and criminal charges it doesn’t matter. It’s been a free for all for a long time the best we can do is simply keep using products or services that respect your privacy and discourage or not use services.
Yeah, our response to the Equifax breach was the end of data privacy. Oh, you lost literally all of the data for all of the adults in the US that you have been tracking without consent? All good, don’t worry.
Really, the response should have been the FBI taking all of their equipment, figuring out exactly what was stolen, notifying all the victims, then formatting and shredding all the equipment and sending Equifax a bill, on top of a huge fine.
Pretty sure we all know that. I’ve been using Linux full time for about 8 years now. I’m also EXTREMELY aware that I can’t change what OS an organization runs. It’s a systemic problem.
i use linux and don’t have family or friends or get any kind of medical care ☺️ checkmate
Using Linux in America be like
The failures of the United States healthcare system are compatible with the Unix philosophy due to its emphasis on doing one thing poorly and leaving the rest for the user to figure out. Like Unix tools, each component—insurance, billing, and treatment—functions independently, refusing to communicate effectively while relying on the user to “pipe” themselves between endless calls, paperwork, and escalating bills. Debugging your health, much like debugging code, requires advanced knowledge, infinite patience, and a willingness to accept that nothing will ever be fully resolved.
So that’s why they named it Wine.
This very succinctly explains why I, with AuDHD, find it practically impossible to get anything done as I slowly rot from untreated chronic illnesses.
Audhd?
Gold deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Getting stressed AF when you don’t have money.
Autism + ADHD
Most sociable Linux user.
human relationships are antithetical to the unix philosophy
And most servers do too.
God save ASP and .NET applications
What drives me nuts about this subject is rarely spoken about.
No single company can properly compensate all of their users for the damages caused by mishandling their personal data.
In fact the damages may even be too great for the government to properly compensate said users.
No single company can properly compensate all of their users for the damages caused by mishandling their personal data.
What do you mean? Every time I’ve been involved in a data leak, I got offered 6 months of identity monitoring. What more could you want?
My government forces a fingerprint on our id cards. I already lost. I can’t use my fingerprint anywhere for authentication because it’s not mine anymore.
All your fingers, or just one?
privacy is scary stuff if you think. it’s like, i care so i dont share my phone number with facebook, but someone out there may have my number/address/name on their contact list and chances are big that they have no problem sharing with zuck. so i’ll still end up on zuck’s database.
My dad did that. The man has a slight obsession with collecting information about our entire extended family, as far back as he can go in time. He’s been known to get in touch with small municipalities to ask for their records about someone 8 generations back. He’s collated quite a bit of data over the years.
And then one day he went and loaded all of that into a shitty mobile family tree app. Phone numbers, current addresses, email addresses, photos, a shit ton of personal information of a shit ton of people, uploaded to some random developer’s unknown database without their consent. He didn’t even pause to think about it for one second. I told him what he did, he wasn’t even bothered.
There are tons of people like my dad who don’t have a single cell in their entire bodies that gives a flying fuck about data privacy, unfortunately, and they give out everyone’s data along with their own.
I just activated my checking account with PayPal and one of the questions from the verification battery was asking me which email I recognized. They were different domains of my mother’s ISP email that she uses only with Amazon.
I had the urge to answer incorrectly as if that would remove their association.
Don’t forget with the Recall feature, you may be on Linux and are using a secure communication application, but if who you are talking to is on windows your conversation can be scraped.
Same thing with email. It’s all well and good if you’re using ProtonMail or Tuta or Posteo, but you’re still cooked if the other side is using Gmail.
Old problems, new modi operandi.
Afaik, with proton you can send messages that won’t open through gmail if you protect them with a password. The other person receives a message with a link to open the mail in a browser after entering the password. It’s not the easiest solution but if you want to avoid gmail from knowing the contents of a message, you can do that.
But windows recall scrapes your screen, so even that wouldn’t work.
“But they are stored locally! Certainly, Microsoft won’t have access to those, right? Right???”
True
You can send self destructing messages with Protonmail
Do Proton remotely erase the message on the recipient’s email server? Even if it’s not a protonmail server?
They burn down the datacenter if they are not deleted in time.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong because I don’t know how proton works on this. These type of things usually don’t send the protected content in the email to the recipient’s server, they just send a link that the recipient opens and it’s all still kept on the private service’s server.
Good morning, Mr. Phelps.
It’s not like companies that use Linux don’t get breached either. Your personal data is in thousands of databases that have varying levels of security. Personal choices don’t affect any of that, regulations like GDPR are what’s needed.
getting breached is different from using spyware.
GDPR has much the same problem: it can only actually be enforced against entities with a presence in Europe. When Europeans do international business, the GDPR only protects them if that foreign site has a business presence within Europe. When they have no bank accounts or business assets inside the EU, they are not subject to the GDPR.
Even though the GDPR covers your side, it doesn’t always cover the other side.
That’s why I said “regulations like the GDPR”. The US and other blocs need similar regulations. Especially the US is important, as they’ve shown that they’re willing to stretch the size of their jurisdiction to sometimes absurd lengths.
That’s usually a bad thing, but in this case that might be good.
I think you missed my point…
I am not subject to the GDPR. I don’t have to abide by it. Even if my country adopted a GDPR-like regulation, that regulation would only apply to my privacy. Not yours.
Microsoft has proven themselves overtly hostile to privacy. Yours, mine, and everyone’s. The available options are:
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Attempt to regulate them into behaving like decent human beings.
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Avoid their business.
When my therapist is using a system that is overtly hostile to their privacy and mine, the solution is not to ask the government to chastise their attacker. The solution is to eliminate their reliance on their attacker, and get them in a system the attacker doesn’t control.
I’m not saying we should avoid GDPR-like regulation altogether. I’m saying that at the OS level, Linux is intrinsically compliant with the intent of such regulation but may not comply with the letter, if the letter requires some sort of affirmative confirmation or certification of compliance that would be complicated for the developer to implement.
Microsoft will be able to be technically compliant with the law, but will definitely subvert it’s intent and purpose however it can.
Regulation will likely have chilling effects on the better option, while promoting the worse.
Even if my country adopted a GDPR-like regulation, that regulation would only apply to my privacy. Not yours.
That could depend on how the regulation is written, so we should push to have these new regulations cover all users of services hosted in our countries.
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So it’s not enough to brag about being on Linux ourselves, we should be encouraging our friends to switch to Linux as well?
this goes for pretty much every single chat app out there. most of the popular ones are proprietary and go through private servers.
privacy is important kids.
How’s this different from someone just record your call? The thing you are worrying about has been possible long before Recall is a thing.
This is framed with OSs in mind but the place where this actually happens the most is mobile apps.
It’s difficult to protect your contact info when everyone with you in their contracts gives access to candy crush. It’s the one I see the most and know who does it because those people will show up in the “you might know this person” shit.
It’s always the games or some other Chinese crApp
Despite strenuous efforts, I still get ads using my private information (like I told my friend in person I needed a charger for a specific brand of vacuum [I needed the charger for a piece of random equipment but found that a Dyson cable worked and wouldn’t be $100] and next thing you know I’m getting ads for Dyson and vacuums in general).
As a home user the OS thing is preference, some prefer Windows, some Mac, some Linux, etc.
Your post however raises a good point, and it certainly makes me form an opinion in a greater context. Thanks for making me think about this, genuinely - it’s good to have opinions challenged.
Thanks for making me think about this, genuinely - it’s good to have opinions challenged.
Not me. I plan to continue being a sweaty holier-than-thou neck beard and mock people using Windows. Brb gotta write to my dentist about how good Linux is now and recommending Arch to my general doctor who still uses a computer from 2010.
Using Linux does not make you safe either. Given that almost every server runs Linux, you can bet good money that most intelligence agencies have a few full time employees adding backdoors to the kernel XZ Utils style, and at least one of them has succeeded.
True, but I’m a betting man and I bet that the US intelligence agency is so deep in Microsoft that Linux looks totally free and clear by comparison.
No, you need to demand that government organizations use Linux or other open source systems as well, there is no other way.
You can require Microsoft to comply with rules, it won’t. It doesn’t care, it wants money, and more money, and that is it. It’s been like that since it’s inception. The same goes for all other tech companies
You know what brand doesn’t careuch about money and will respect your privacy?
Open source software. Linux. Firefox (eh, mostly) with plugins, mariadb, etc…
We can’t even get the government to stop using Twitter.
If you believe the duly elected people have less power than a corporation, well, that’s also a “we” problem
I once took a government contract for rebuilding a critical piece of software to provide civic services to the under-employed.
I finished it in about a month. Was paid. And I was on a retainer for three years to provide updates.
It actually took FOUR years before it was launched live to the general public.
Best of luck convincing the underpaid govt IT to move OSes.
You speak the truth.
But does your medical clinic do?
No, they don’t, and it pisses me off. Every time I see it, I think, Well, there goes my medical privacy.
But where else can I go? There’s only one health company in town, and they bought all the doctor’s offices.
Who can I complain to? The doctors and nurses are visibly frustrated with Windows every time I see them use it. If they can’t change it, how could I?
I work for a healthcare company and when we launched we made a huge deal about only using Linux on our backend and only giving Macs to employees. It’s been almost 10 years and we’ve hired a small army of morons since then and they fired our CTO. These idiots have demanded windows so they can “do analytics” despite all our analytics being in looker and dbt and a bunch of fucking business bros in the csuite and vp level who demanded windows laptops because they just like it. They eventually canned our head of IT ans well and replaced him with a dumbass and that guy is currently trying to take MacBooks away from engineering. Then the head of “cloud engineering” just started outsourcing half our shit to consultants who keep building one off snowflake windows machines because nobody gives a shit anymore. So what used to be a clean ecosystem is now a giant botched pile of lowest effort garbage.
Stay away from this entire industry. There’s some brain rot where they only hire people with healthcare backgrounds even if the role has nothing to do with healthcare. What that turns into is people from ancient out of date orgs who have no idea what they are doing being hired over people from legitimate tech roles or any other background that is more advanced in other fields and the company will always slowly roll backwards into stupidity.
That ship has sailed anyway. I’ve had no less than 5 breach notifications show up in the mail from things related to my health care in the last 2 years, and it’s not like I’m constantly at the doctor. The whole system is a disaster.
I work in IT for healthcare, and our CTO, CIO, and head of Cybersecurity are all ex-Microsoft. We’re a “Windows Shop” adopting anything Microsoft has ever made, from Windows to Azure DevOps to Access
They might not know there are alternatives. So they likely do not ccomplain to their IT person.
Dont be a “jUsT uSe LiNuX” guy, but when you see them frustrated maybe say “hey I see you are frustrated as well and I as a patient are concerned about my medical data privacy. You know there are better and safer alternatives, maybe you could ask your IT if it would be possible to switch to Linux?”
Realistically, they can’t switch because the software to use some $€1m medical device only runs on windows.
I’ve had the se thought as expressed in the last paragraph the other day and isn’t the anwser in compatibility layer? Like can’t they install and run windows medical software using WINE?
Having worked in healthcare IT. Adding more complexity will only make things harder for them. A lot of healthcare staff can barely operate the Windows PCs and applications they’re used to. Change anything and they act like the sky is falling.
That opens up a legal liability for the people creating the compatibility layer. You’ve gone from two points of failure (the doctor and the machine) to three.
For sure it can be done but most people / companies won’t want to take on that liability.
I sell encryption. Send me the lead dog ;p
