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)
Not a whole lot, honestly. Wear a mask and sunglasses sometimes.
If you were determined/sensitive you could attach IR lights/battery to a hat that will blow out the image on a CCTV camera without drawing too much attention from those around you.
Gait detection is also a thing that hiding your face won’t stop. You’d have to just constantly put a rock in different places in your shoes or break a leg LOL
They also make devices that will blow out microphones in close proximity.
Never even considered this but that makes sense damn. Time to start work on my open source privacy-respecting leg breaking machine
these folks can help and its less invasive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeeovY4qNU
I hear a lot about gait detection, but I wonder how widely it is implemented.
Maybe I should start walking at an irregular pace like the Fremen in Dune to throw off gait detection. Since it’s probably trained on an average lazy American gait I suspect an intentionally irregular gait would completely fuck the algorithm. Of course, if you’re the only one doing it you might wind up even more identifiable. But maybe you could introduce some subtle irregularities that most people wouldn’t notice in person but a computer would pick up.
This laughably does not work unless you’re only walking at night under very specific circumstances.
What doesn’t?
Nothing. Simple.
Everything you’re describing is terribly inaccurate.
LOL good thing you showed up to tell us absolutely nothing