Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for August 20, 2020

You don’t want to be tracked? Lose the cellphone.

“The government literally has a number assigned to you as a person tied to your bank account and would show every single place you’ve been just based on where you buy things”

-But tracking devices in the vaccines!

“Oh look, I can find you using my phone”.

Actually, Rat, nobody really cares where you are as long as you’re somewhere else.

It’s OK so long as big corporations are doing it rather than government…

I’m very privacy conscious. My spouse is not. I actually have to go to extra effort to use some websites (because I dis-allow intrusive data gathering). my spouse and I agree with each other that the other one is missing the point.

I do post on Facebook, but for the most part, avoid letting people know where I’m posting from…

I sympathize with your privacy concerns. Oh, and you’re low on toilet paper.

GOOD. POINT.

That’s just three years. In 2015, someone else posted the Pizza Rat meme tracking his dining habits.

Zager and Evans … “In The Year 2525” … Croc Power !

Hard to avoid tracking these days!

this is precisely why i use a shoe phone with special encryption features…

I just love the paranoia people have about being implanted with “tracking micro chips” by vaccination or whatever. It’s totally not necessary. Already, the so-called “smartphones” that fools carry do exactly that, and so much more.

Both FaceBoot & Google, where privacy goes to die, have tracking accounts built from public records on everyone, even if one has never had an open account with those monsters.

Use DuckDuckGo as your search engine. Set your browser(s) to make it the default search.

But there are ways to defeat their tracking, mostly. Use Firefox as one’s browser. These days FF automatically installs the Facebook Container add-on which blocks FB from tracking one across the web. FF also has the most effective built-in privacy tools of any common browser and most of them are enabled by default.

Most current web browsers have at least some privacy protection settings to block trackers. They should be enabled, and browsers should be configured to delete all cookies & history upon exit. Then exit & reload frequently. I also use three different browsers at different times for different sites. That confuses the trackers, too. (e.g. Opera seems to work better with WaPo than FF, so I use Opera exclusively with WaPo.)

Privacy Badger from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is another basic and essential privacy add-on and it works with most browsers. uBlock Origin is also an excellent privacy enhancing ad-blocking add-on. Beyond that, both DuckDuckGo and Malwarebytes offer privacy protection add-on suites that are free and fairly effective.

Go for it. I never see targeted advertising anymore. There’s much more one can do, including using a VPN, but these things alone will get you 90%+ the way there.

Well, Rat, no matter how they track you, at least you can’t be hauled before a court of law for being the douche you are!

Rat is … not wrong.

As others have said, you’re being tracked already. Pretty much everyone with any electronic device (or electronic-interactive device such as your credit card) is being tracked mostly by private companies. Fortunately, most of us are boring and not worth bothering with for more nefarious purposes than advertising. But don’t think you’re avoiding it.

Anytime you use your rewards shopping card they know what you eat, and what type of TP you use.

If you have a Google account and “Location” is turned on on your phone, go to “timeline. google. com” and you will see where you’ve been every single day.

Government tracking you? You know all those traffic reports you get on your phone with Google Maps, Waze, or whatever? Guess where that data comes from…

Would have preferred Pig making this comment but LOL. I’m going to print and frame a copy, hang it on the wall of someone I know because this is her tin foil hatted self to a tee; spot on perfect.

THEY know where you are, what you do, stores you shop, food you like….THEY are watching…. and listening……TV…Computer…..IPad….cells…..Alexa……

Somehow, Facebook knows every site I’ve been to.

I hate being tracked everywhere i go. Thats why when i go to the secret meetings for planning the overthrow of the government i always leave my phone and computer at home, so no one knows where i am while attending the meetings at google headquarters.

There was a podcast I used to listen to where one of the hosts was addicted to checking in on Foursquare. That was linked to her Twitter, so she was broadcasting to everyone that followed her where she was most of the day. Then she would pitch fits on the show about not having any privacy, and no, she wasn’t inviting people to join her.

It never occurred to her that if she simply had to use Foursquare everyplace she went, she should have done it when she was leaving.

………and..what you had to eat! Close ups! ;oD

Self awareness is lacking nowadays.

I work at privacy. Limit that social networking site to “Friends” only. Clear “history” and erase “website data” after each site visited on the web. Empty caches often. Try basically to erase all I can or deny access to as much as I can. Have set DuckDuckGo as default Search Engine, but regularly use in fact Startpage (which claims to be “the world’s most private search engine”).

But it is almost impossible to avoid the literally ubiquitous Google and its various subalterns (e.g., YouTube). Just erase, erase, erase! Kill cookies after you’ve used a site!

And still it isn’t good enough. Some history is too deeply embedded to erase without damaging the harddrive….

Good grief! Rat said something smart!

Instead of “The Government” replace it with the name of your least favorite politician.

Your phone GPS tracks everyplace you’ve been with it.

I’ve started researching family history – so much information is available just in public records.

It is amazing that people demand Privacy while plastering their entires lives on the internet every day.

Same with things like Alexa, people literally buy devices built to listen and record you and then get upset when they find out “Wait, this microphone I bought has been listening to me?”

After reading George Orwell’s 1984 I had the impression that Big Brother came about by force . . . Nope, we did it to ourselves

One of my relatives inexplicably posts pics of his empty plates, with descriptions of what the menu items were.

And even worse, the photos of the food.

Everyone I know is an idiot.

…

Er … except you guys, of course.

Shrug, if they really want to know where I am and what I’m doing, the joke’s on them.

I’d like to see photos of Rat eating either crow or humble pie!

Much preferred over my pictures of Men’s gas station toilets around the world.

Having the right to privacy doesn’t obligate you to exercise it….

Start looking into what Google, Facebook, even retailers like Kroger or Amazon are recording about you.

The vast majority of humans are worth the millisecond it takes to track, I’m thinking. You’re done for someone really wanted to find you.

aren’t

While back i put a scratch in google’s location tracking by disabling my phone & tablet., day later i checked if google showed any phone movement over the last 24hrs, showed no movement, doesn’t mean they’re not shadow tracking, tho.

That wall must be really short for mouse to reach it.

Google tells me everywhere I went for several years through my phone. It shows where I worked, what days I worked. It shows my out of state trips and what congregations I have been to. It confuses my trips to the gym with visits to retailers I have never been to because of their proximity to my gym.

Get rid of your cell phone, then! I may not remember where I’ve been, but my phone sure does!