Always use ad blockers!
There is spyware that doesn’t even require you to click on it:
Of course turning off personalised ads is good for privacy, but this post seems to imply it could help protect against this spyware as well. That’s not true, is it? To me those things sound totally unrelated.
“Personalized” means “allow ad network to run scripts on your device without notifying you further.”
It’s related.
This is a nation state level actor using a public ad network.
If your one of the targets of this, none of those measures will help. At best, the adblock will work for the publically known ad networks, but they’ll get you with an ad served from a fresh domain. And if they are using zero-click exploits, they likely have a persistence mechanism as well, and even if they don’t, they will probably exfil all your data as soon as they can anyway.
The good news is that most people aren’t actually useful targets to nation state actors, so all of us are likely safe. We aren’t worth risking a zero-click zero day on (or the persistence exploit). Journalists/politicians/military personnel though should be a lot more concerned, but they already have solutions like airgapped networks and other opsec tools.
It is still worth mentioning. And some VPN services are Israeli and other companies sucking up information.
Yup, its all good advice in general, but we should avoid needlessly panicing about things that won’t realistically be used against us.
I’m much more concerned about shoddy vpns and ad tech tracking.
panicing about things that won’t realistically be used against us.
That we know of…
A zero click zero day is worth 10s to 100s of millions of dollars. They guard these very carefully, to avoid burning them, like what happened here.
You aren’t that important to anyone.
Don’t be so sure. You don’t know me Cameron lol.
to add, running their compromised hardware and software won’t do you any favours and changing a simple setting won’t disable tgeir backdoors or fundamentally fix the nightmare we are in.
running stuff graphene and ditching google software is only the beginning of it.
Of course there are more advanced scenarios but the information is still worth telling. If anything, you might just get less ads.
i never felt a difference. the way they promise it, it’s supposed to track you less and it does show less “relevant” ads, but i bet they keep collecting the data anyway.
they’ve been shown not to care about user settings in court before.
It is a catch 22 situation, if you block ads (which is a no-brainer), you can’t see the ads repeatedly selling the same item you just bought.
Im personally happy if they simply cannot monetise tracking me. They can track all they want, but if I never see any ads, it’s m much harder for them to manipulate me.
