[ExI] The NSA's new data center

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 11:26:08AM -0700, spike wrote:

> We know we cannot stop all data leakage, so perhaps a better strategy for
> privacy fans is intentional obscuration.  I have friends over to my house

It is much better to prevent association with your data in the first
place.

> regularly, and have them do Google searches on whatever they want, just to
> clutter the profile, like camo on a tank or a soldier putting foliage on his

It doesn't hurt to run https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/
but it's not enough by far.

> helmet.  Same for posts, including posts to ExI-chat.  If anyone ever asks
> me if I wrote something, intentional obscuration redirects the power back to
> myself.  I can ask to see the comment, then I have the option of owning it
> or not recalling having written that comment.  In general I think this is a
> more effective strategy than stopping all data leakage.

I don't think this strategy is at all effective for profile builders via
web access and email providers like Google Mail.

Google Mail is very much deprecated for the privacy-minded. These days, it
takes a considerable array of privacy extensions for Firefox (Chrome is likewise
deprecated) to reduce the tracking exposure while the web.
 
> Even if one does not practice intentional obscuration, the other guy does
> not know that, or cannot prove it.

Doesn't hold water. You're not in a court.
 
> What would be even better is if some of you code-hipster privacy fans can
> figure out a way to arrange for others to log on as me elsewhere and still
> make it become part of my online profile and my search history.  That would
> be a kick!  Become a melded generic extropian avatar, our search histories a
> superset of all those currently reading these words.  The presence of that
> tech would discourage the data snoops, for their whole exercise of
> data-mining and search profiling would become pointless.
> 
> Extra credit if our alternate selves are on another continent.
> 
> Eugen, how do we do it?  Can I just post you my passwords?

Go get https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
and use it, preferably with end-to-end encryption (so malicious exits
don't sniff your data). A better way to use VirtualBox or other virtualization 
technology and to run Tails https://tails.boum.org/about/index.en.html