Digital privacy seems quite straightforward, because your digital devices are environments you more or less can have complete control over if you want to. But when you’re out and about, it’s a much more uncontrolled environment. There are cameras everywhere.
I wear face masks everywhere for a combo of protecting myself from illness and privacy. But the limitation is social acceptability. If anything good came out of covid it’s the normalisation of face masks, but you are far from unidentifiable if your only face covering is a covid mask. We’re lucky that sunglasses and hoodies on their own are fairly normal, but all of the above in combination would draw attention to you. And it’s definitely not socially acceptable to walk around in a balaclava.
The other thing is forensic data. If you don’t wear gloves, you’ll leave fingerprints everywhere, and hair too. I suppose wearing gloves is not particularly seen as weird or suspicious, but it just seems like there are a lot of considerations and challenges with preventing the state from knowing your every move when you leave the house.
What considerations do you make for IRL privacy, if any?
(Not particularly interested in “I don’t care about IRL privacy so I don’t do anything”—that’s fine and your choice, but ofc this question is aimed towards those who do care)
cash
not much I can do about CCTV (without breaching important social norms)
(without breaching important social norms)
But why would anyone who cares about privacy consider them more important?
because human being
That’s weird.
Because that can make you stand out even more.
As an example: No point using high contrast makeup to break up the patterns of your face from facial recognition if all they have to do is look for the guy with wacky makeup on in their footage.
Have fun not getting stopped by the police if you walk around with a balaclava, especially if you’re Black.
Their problem. We’re activists. We fight for rights, not compromise them.
What do you mean? Getting stopped by the police is a big deal. They can arrest you—in which case they will obtain your details, take your fingerprints, etc, which is antithetical to privacy—and they can do worse than arrest you too if they feel like it.
Well it highly depends on the country in question
In what country does being detained by the police not lead to them identifying you? The police are highly unlikely to release someone if they don’t know who they are. I think it’s fairly global that detainees who refuse to give their name to the police will at least be kept until the police have identified them.
The government already has your data because it’s how it works. Detention for identification is not bad and you can just bring your ID with you (that you should do all the time tbh) in case the police ask questions. Still they won’t like follow you so there is some improvement as long as you don’t let the cameras track you exactly to your home address.
Gotta say, I don’t think most peoples’ threat models make worrying about IRL privacy a concern, but that’s obviously not the point.
For the record, I don’t use any of these techniques myself, it’s just stuff I’ve read.
For facial recognition, a lot of CCTV cameras don’t have IR filters, and can be blinded with Infrared LEDs, so there have been some promising experiments with shoving a bunch of them into hats. You’ll glow real bright in any footage, but they won’t be able to see your face.
Beyond that, there’s always prosthetics (think like what is used in movies) to alter your facial characteristics.
All that said, I believe the main way of identifying individuals in camera footage now is by gait analysis. Supposedly a rock in your shoe can change it enough to not match up between different footage.
You’d also want to ditch your phone or put it in a signal blocking bag, as it can be uniquely identified by the saved wifi SSIDs that it tries to connect to, and by its bluetooth unique identifier (might just be the MAC address), that can be tracked by low energy bluetooth beacons (how stores track customer movement within and how most places did covid exposure tracing with the apps).
As far as fingerprints go, maybe a light layer of superglue on your fingertips to disrupt the print patterns? That’s a complete guess though.
Barely related, but I did see this recently and had a laugh
Edit: correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they misunderstood the abbreviation “cctv”. Mixing up “closed-circuit” and “closed-captioned”.
[Loud spinning tire sounds]
[dramatic music]
Nothing. The effort required to make a meaningful impact against this type of threat is way beyond my threat level.
In the public, I wear sunglasses and a hat. I don’t park in area’s that have lots of cameras. Also don’t try and stand out, don’t wear to flashy clothing, but try and match a little.
For at your home, if you have a garage, park your car in the garage, that way when you leave, neighbors don’t know your gone, or when your home. Also make sure to install some sort of lock on your garage door, but make sure it’s not electric, found that out the hard way. If you live in an apartment complex, park your car out back if you don’t need to carry anything in.
IRL privacy in winter is super easy, wear some layers, hat, sunglasses and gloves.
Some notes for you, standards change were you are, so reflect on the advice your given. For example, I live in the States, but some might live in Europe, cars are different, dress standards are different, stores are different, etc. So some pieces of advice that might be rock solid in one place, may not be wise in others.
I love my Kolari shades I picked up when they were running their kickstarter. Fantastic to use indoors and out. https://kolarivision.com/product/kolari-shades-ultra/
Oh and if you have need enough to worry about fingerprints, best to just get rid of them outright and deal with the rather short but uncomfortable recovery for your fingers to heal back over.
I don’t really bother much in public places, I use umbrellas when it rains and sunglasses when it is sunny, but In general I try to avoid connecting to public WiFi and always use my vpn when I do.
I dont have any identifying data on my mailbox. I make sure to destroy PII on mail.
My routine is normal, gray, boring.
Stay in the basement and drink alone.
Ride a motorcycle. Then if you’re wearing a helmet and gloves it’s not odd
