hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2183.txt

Episode: 2183
Title: HPR2183: Data Privacy: Farlands or bust
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2183/hpr2183.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:26:04

---

This is HPR episode 2,183 entitled, Meta Privacy, Far and Farmered.
It is hosted by Bill, MFMED1 Miller and in about 15 minutes long.
The summary is conversation in response to comments about my last episode called.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hey everyone, how are you doing?
I'm just a mic here.
Welcome to my second podcast.
This is going to be called Data Mining, Far Lands or Bust.
It really is just a rebuttal in response to the comments I got from my first podcast
called Google It.
Some people stating that the fact that Google was not a success story because of everything
that they offered for free was really not free.
They're stealing information from us, data from us, things like that.
I don't wear that tin hat so strong.
I think the data that they mine is fine.
It's like the data that Amazon mines is fine with me.
I use their products to give me a service for it.
If I go buy a tablet, which I just did, about a tablet, an HD8, they offered me covers
for it or cases, tempered glass.
I'm good with that.
That's the kind of mining that they do.
They mine and figured out, hey, if they buy this kind of cell phone, they buy these kind
of cases or they buy these kinds of chargers, let's offer it when they come back.
They know I buy basketball shoes for my daughter so every time I go on there now, since we
just bought a bunch of basketball shoes, they're offering me a basketball shoe every
time.
Does it timely?
No, because obviously I've already bought the shoes, but overall, it's a fair trade.
I think that the stuff that they mine is nowhere near worth anything that they're doing.
They may get some information out of us as to what we buy and purchase, but the information
cannot be really used against us.
They're not really stealing anything that we don't tell everybody already.
Some of the examples I give you is that I went on to the Wikipedia page and looked up data
mining when it started things like that.
And realistically, it got going.
People seem to think that it's all about the technical data mining now, but it's been
going on since the 1700s, that people have been taking data and mining it.
So it's not a new thing.
It's just new ways of doing it, you know, Google's doing it one way.
Eventually down the road here, Google will be gone and somebody else will take their
place and mining data another way, you know.
We all do it business-wise, even I do.
I started out building personal computers and repairing them here in New Jersey, actually
I did it in California.
And when I moved here to New Jersey, that's when things started to change and people
weren't here, weren't buying computers.
I mean, weren't building them.
They were just going to, you know, Walmart or Best Buy or Circuit City and buying them.
They were interested in building them a system.
They were interested in calling some out their brand.
They just figured, well, I've had it for a couple years, but I'll just get rid of them
by me.
So with that kind of information, I learned that I had to adapt of how I was doing things.
I went from building custom machines in California to setting up machines here for elderly people
who didn't really understand computers all that much.
You know, they were just, they were baffled by it.
It was kind of like my parents and the VCR.
I had really, that's what my customers became, were those kind of people.
I'm not a guy that does servers and things like that.
I was the, you know, the local guy that worked on your system.
So I took PCs and I started putting things on them that would work.
Now I do more Chromebook style stuff and more Linux stuff now than I do anything else.
I try to keep people away from Windows only because if I have them on Windows every
week, I'm getting a phone call, it can fix their computers.
So if Linux is not so bad, there's a lot of good, you know, distros out there.
Code Linux is one, peppermint OS I love, Manto OS is another, from elderly people, I really
use the Code Linux deal because it really just runs like Chrome OS and keeps them out of
trouble.
But anyway, I digress.
Yeah, a conversation came up with Joe Heck, who I think's smarter than I'll ever be.
I'm like Yogi Bear looking for my next picnic basket when it comes to, you know, trying
to battle what's with him.
But he seems to think that it's the fact that, you know, Google is stealing information.
So that's nothing is free.
I claim that a lot of the products that we get are free and they say it comes at a cost
for your freedoms.
I don't agree.
The things that we get out of it's far outweigh the things that they take from it.
So they get some information, you know.
Where are they going to get out of it?
What are they going to use it against us?
I mean, what are they hearing?
Are they going to find out possibly my search engine that I'm looking at, Midget Circus
porn?
Oh, well, who's going to use that against you, you know, who are they going to post it
up online?
I'm more worried about the after effects of information we have.
Like, it's not the Google's that I'm worried about.
It's the people who steal the information than what they do with it.
Like, I had my PSN account, my PlayStation network account hacked years ago.
They got my credit card and they rang up a bunch of stuff on it, including a couple
hundred dollars on World of Warcraft stuff.
But my bank took care of it right away.
We shut it down.
I changed out the credit card on the PSN and I got smarter.
I learned that I don't put my credit card on the PSN.
I put a rechargeable one on there and I keep just a bare minimum amount of ten bucks or
something that keeps it going or twenty bucks to keep the gold series going on.
I don't have to worry about it anymore.
But that part of the privacy is what scares me more than the actual Google taking it because
it's never Google who uses my information against me.
It's individuals who steal that information and then use it against me.
There's a website called Have I Been Poned that you can look up if your emails have been
you know, hijacked off of, you know, hacksites or whatever.
I've got a few up there.
I've just got one for War Inc.
I think it is or a War Rock.
I forget what it is, but probably ten years old, they've figured out a way to hack the
database and they got that information out there, which I don't know if they got all
full passwords, but they definitely got salted passwords out of the deal.
But there's a few of them.
I got it from my space.
Some type of hosting I was on.
It got me up there, but you can put your email address in and check it out there.
And so I've learned to change my habits.
And those people scare me more than companies, the more so than companies like Google.
It's for getting my information realistically, we have given our information away for decades.
I can tell you personally it started, you know, as soon as I got out of high school, I applied
for credit cards.
I mean, what's the first thing you do when you apply for credit cards?
You give everybody your information.
I've bought cars.
You have to give them almost everything including your blood type to get a car loan, you know.
So I have a mortgage.
All that information is out there.
I'm an amateur radio operator.
My call sign is out there because you have my address and everything else, you know.
So if you're looking for information, you can get it from me.
You don't have to really check that hard.
And a lot of us are that way.
If you own a business or an LLC, you know, you show up online, you can't hide that information.
You've been given, you know, your information away to governments for years when it comes
to your taxes.
We used to do phones.
You know, we talk about, oh, they're bugging our phones or they're getting information
on our phones.
Well, I just think we remember, you know, before cell phones, when it came to landlines,
that we'd get our cell phone, I mean, our phone bills.
And we'd go through them.
We'd make sure that there were no erroneous phone calls in there and, you know, stuff
we're getting charged for.
And what did we do?
We didn't shred it.
I didn't have a shredder in my house back then.
We just dumped it into the trash.
So anybody could get our information.
It's all on the old bills.
And anytime you pay the bills pretty much that way.
You didn't shred anything.
I mean, for years before shredders became a thing, you could go buy in a department store.
You just do the stuff in the trash.
All your bills you paid, your gas bill, your water bill, all the stubs on that were there.
When you went into, you know, to open up a bank account, you had to give all that information
up.
You used to write checks, you know, checks is a major one.
How many of us wrote checks and everything about you is on the check.
Your phone number, your address, you know.
You have got pretty much everything on that check right away and your signature.
So they could open up accounts knowing your information there.
Anytime you got employed, you give up information.
You know, God knows how much information you give up when you're employed.
They want everything as well.
Nowadays being employed, you can't even have a Facebook life because if you say something
about work on it, it could go back to haunch.
That's why I don't say anything about where I work and what I do on Facebook or anything
like that.
I keep that separate.
Everything is renting, you know.
Here's the main one I had problems with, you know, when it comes to us giving away our
privacy is that, you know, before I was a homeowner, I was a renter.
Well, in the 90s, I want to say, probably mid 90s sometime, people started running credit
checks to free you to rent an apartment.
Well, the people that they had running these properties were not, you know, professional
property management people, most of them, most of them were some schmuck that they gave,
you know, a discount on their rents to collect the information for them, to run the credit
checks and so on.
So you were giving your information to just some schmuck that was running this property.
Not a professional, you know, it was just somebody that hired to run your credit info and
you just gave it away freely.
Did you ever get it back?
Well, it was if you were declined.
Well, if they said, no, I'm sorry, you know, we give the apartment to somebody else.
We never went back and got our applications back.
I never did.
So I mean, the thing about our privacy is kind of a misnomer that we are, you know, being
unundated now more something we ever were, it's just different things that they're looking
for.
We have given away everything in the cow since day one and all that plays into it.
I mean, if you go back and look and realistically do this for me, go back and make a list of everything
you filled out and signed up for online and, you know, card you got in it, stores, the
customer, you know, VIP cards you've done, every time you've applied for a giveaway, you
know, when you walk up and give your name, add just some fun number.
All right.
A little bit of entertainment every time I run.
I'm going to leave that in just because that's my ringtone on my phone.
Actually, guys, I should have turned it down before I started, but anyway, where was I?
So yeah, go back and make a list, you know, look at what you've given away on your own
versus what someone has taken from you and look at what could possibly go wrong with everything
you've given away versus the fact that you have Google spying on you.
You'll learn that real quick that you've probably done more damage than Google ever could
when it comes to keeping you private.
I know it is with me.
I just go back and I did the list thing myself.
I went back and said, well, I'm going to fill it out lately.
Let's go back 10 years.
And let's fill it out and sure enough, I went, wow, Google has nothing on what I have
done.
They really haven't.
So anyway, that's pretty much it with me.
Like I said, I'm one of those guys that you probably people hate.
They call me, you know, probably an idiot for doing it, but I'm one of those ones that
does not worry about my online privacy very much.
I changed my passwords now more so than I ever did.
I don't set it for websites, erroneously, like I used to.
I'm pretty straightforward as to where I get my products from.
You know, I shop Amazon, I shop Google, I shop, you know, I do, you know, I use a password
manager, I use separate emails for anything.
I do like that, you know, credit cards online are now like a rechargeable credit cards.
You try and do as much as you can to keep yourself safe, but it's going to come down to
you.
And it's never going to be Google that steals your information or uses your information.
It's going to be someone who stole it from a company, you know, eventually, and then
using it against you.
The PSN was one, I just had three friends here just here within the last two weeks.
They got hacked, their debit cards got hacked, going to local stores, you know, and finding
out that people are running up hundreds of thousands of dollars with the stuff on their
credit cards and emptying their bank accounts on stuff from Nordstroms to everything up
all the way up to New York City.
So, you know, I've any time that something like that happens, it usually starts with somebody
local, not someone like a company like Google or Yahoo or things like that, you know, people
hack into companies like Target and those are the people that are going to do the most
damage to you.
It's not going to mean necessarily Google.
Do they need to work on their security, but yes, all companies need to work on the security
and we're way behind the eight ball when it comes to security.
They need to protect us more when it comes to that security, keeping our data safe.
I don't care if they collected that, I just wanted to keep it safe.
Do I agree that they all need to work on that?
Yes, that is the main thing.
Get it safe.
You can take whatever you want.
You can get all the information.
You want to find out I like wearing two twos and watching my little pony at night?
Hey, more power to you.
You know, I just don't want to find it up on Facebook later on.
So that's it.
So anyway, what's your opinion of it?
I know I've rambled on on this one here a little bit, but hopefully it's fun to listen
to you and I get some more feedback.
I want to thank everybody for the feedback that they gave me on my last episode, especially
guys like Joe Heck, Dorter Dorgie, Steve McLaughlin.
You guys are definitely inspiration to me and I definitely cherish the feedback you give
me.
Good and bad.
It's always very constructive either way and I appreciate the comments you do.
I mean, the compliments you give me as well.
If you can get out there, check all these guys's podcasts out there as well, podnets.com.
Joe is on, you can find him on Google, Google Plus through the podnets community.
He has his own podcasting as well.
It's the SPC VPN show, I believe.
Very smart, very cerebral way above my favorite.
I listen to him and I get that whole deer and the headlights look when I listen to him.
But I do get stuff out of it and I do get stuff out of his posting and I do catch a little
thing.
He's like, oh, that's what he meant by that.
So if you're going to listen to people that are smarter than you, they just make it better
for you.
And those two guys are doing jobs that are making me smarter in the end.
It's not very much, obviously, but it does come in.
And also everybody else, too.
There's guys, Mark Cockrow out there at LNNOP.com, you can find out the Linux guys over Jupiter,
Scoogie Sprite, another guy.
He's insane.
I love the man to death, a good friend of mine on Steam.
And he's crazy as hell.
But when it comes to Linux gaming, there's nobody else I trust more.
So get out there and listen to those people.
Get out listening to me if you want.
I ramble.
Those guys will give you good information.
They will keep you on the straight and narrow.
And then there are people I look up to.
So get out there and support them the best you can and I hope to hear back from you as
well.
You can contact me at tech warriors at gmail.com, tech warriors with a Z on the end.
I don't know if I said that wrong or not.
But you can contact me there.
I take all comments.
I listen to them.
I listen to the fact that you guys didn't like the echo, so I took the echo off this
time.
I kind of agree with you.
After I listened to it, I didn't like the sound of it as well.
But thank you and you guys have a good day.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio dot org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast and click on our contributing to find out how
easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dawg pound and the infonomicon computer club
and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on
the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise status, today's show is released on the creative comments, attribution,
share a like, free dot org license.