Re: What DeleteMe and Incogni aren't telling you
Posted: Sat May 03, 2025 10:02 pm
Lets not be alarmist and fatalistic.
CCTV is a concern depending on location and local laws. Yes its a headache and not easily addressed but luckily most people with cctv and Ring cameras do not upkeep their device as they should. Others have refused to use them as they become more aware of the problem it presents. Law enforcement would first need to be aware that these resources are available. The amount of storage needed for 28 days of "workable" video for 10 camera on my NVR is about 3.2 TB. At a decent resolution about 5.5 TB. Yes companies can pay to secure their own locations but for a city to pay for workable footage @ a city wide scale for any length of time should leave a noticeable dent in city budget for whoever cares to look through hardware upkeep, bandwith, and power consumption (for both the spinning drives and camera). IMO the biggest threat with city cameras are License Plate Readers. Instead of saving the video all they need to save is your license plate in an image or a spreadsheet. Terabytes of data reduced down to just Megabytes. Once its ingested into the city database that data can be used to track any vehicle's movements throughout the city. This data is at risk of abuse, breach, or FOIA. (though due to the inclusion of PII may be redacted) ***Talk to your reps.***
Yes there are some phones out there that keep a low power beacon chip running for features like Apple's "find my" feature. There are easy ways to defeat this in the way of a Faraday bag that keeps signals from reaching said device. At the peak of my paranoia phase I had 2 phones and my center console was modded to be a faraday cage. I then chose specific land marks for when 1 phone goes in and another for when the other comes out. (Inspired by Michael Bazzel)
Yes a thermal camera can spot fires/heat but a camera would have to be set up to look. A small drone does not have the staying power to sit there and wait for an event. A long range drone is hella expensive and need flight plan filed. IR cameras have a hard time penetrating objects. Satellites with the prerequisite tech to pull off such an operation are better utilized for more important tasks and have severe limitations. Of course I am assuming that the 'we' in question are average citizens and not leaders of any organizations. I can only imagine the amount of red tape it takes to task a satellite. They are after all strategic assets that nations either want to keep secrete or know about and track.
Its easy to read an "erased" hard drive as the information itself was not erased or changed but the pointers that tell the computer where and what that data is the only thing that got "deleted". A HDD with its information "over written" can still have its data recovered this is true to an extent. If an HDD of 1TB that was "properly" over written with 1 pass the cost to recover that data is in the deep hundreds with a minimum of 8 hours. (given the average 7200 RPM drive with the best commercial software available). A a single read, without processing, would take over 1.5 hour. Processing that data into something useful would take days. Processing an encrypted hard drive without the key.... Good luck!! Or if you degauss a drive then that is 100% unrecoverable. Encrypt your drives.
There are solutions to keeping identifiers of your device from revealing too much about you. I do so through the liberal use of VMs,VPNs, and sandboxes. Download brave and go to https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ . They attempt to keep you from being identified by spoofing little things here and there. The browser in TailsOS, like a VPN, tries to hide by throwing you into a crowd all wearing the same hoodie + mask. **If using Tails do not change the size of your browser, it is a data point for fingerprinting**
There are solutions. It is hard and tiring, but its not hopeless. Defense in depth is key, but don't go overboard. Take a step back and do a sanity check. If you defense puts too much friction in your way.... you will likely give up or become the vulnerability. Is the juice worth the squeeze.
CCTV is a concern depending on location and local laws. Yes its a headache and not easily addressed but luckily most people with cctv and Ring cameras do not upkeep their device as they should. Others have refused to use them as they become more aware of the problem it presents. Law enforcement would first need to be aware that these resources are available. The amount of storage needed for 28 days of "workable" video for 10 camera on my NVR is about 3.2 TB. At a decent resolution about 5.5 TB. Yes companies can pay to secure their own locations but for a city to pay for workable footage @ a city wide scale for any length of time should leave a noticeable dent in city budget for whoever cares to look through hardware upkeep, bandwith, and power consumption (for both the spinning drives and camera). IMO the biggest threat with city cameras are License Plate Readers. Instead of saving the video all they need to save is your license plate in an image or a spreadsheet. Terabytes of data reduced down to just Megabytes. Once its ingested into the city database that data can be used to track any vehicle's movements throughout the city. This data is at risk of abuse, breach, or FOIA. (though due to the inclusion of PII may be redacted) ***Talk to your reps.***
Yes there are some phones out there that keep a low power beacon chip running for features like Apple's "find my" feature. There are easy ways to defeat this in the way of a Faraday bag that keeps signals from reaching said device. At the peak of my paranoia phase I had 2 phones and my center console was modded to be a faraday cage. I then chose specific land marks for when 1 phone goes in and another for when the other comes out. (Inspired by Michael Bazzel)
Yes a thermal camera can spot fires/heat but a camera would have to be set up to look. A small drone does not have the staying power to sit there and wait for an event. A long range drone is hella expensive and need flight plan filed. IR cameras have a hard time penetrating objects. Satellites with the prerequisite tech to pull off such an operation are better utilized for more important tasks and have severe limitations. Of course I am assuming that the 'we' in question are average citizens and not leaders of any organizations. I can only imagine the amount of red tape it takes to task a satellite. They are after all strategic assets that nations either want to keep secrete or know about and track.
Its easy to read an "erased" hard drive as the information itself was not erased or changed but the pointers that tell the computer where and what that data is the only thing that got "deleted". A HDD with its information "over written" can still have its data recovered this is true to an extent. If an HDD of 1TB that was "properly" over written with 1 pass the cost to recover that data is in the deep hundreds with a minimum of 8 hours. (given the average 7200 RPM drive with the best commercial software available). A a single read, without processing, would take over 1.5 hour. Processing that data into something useful would take days. Processing an encrypted hard drive without the key.... Good luck!! Or if you degauss a drive then that is 100% unrecoverable. Encrypt your drives.
There are solutions to keeping identifiers of your device from revealing too much about you. I do so through the liberal use of VMs,VPNs, and sandboxes. Download brave and go to https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ . They attempt to keep you from being identified by spoofing little things here and there. The browser in TailsOS, like a VPN, tries to hide by throwing you into a crowd all wearing the same hoodie + mask. **If using Tails do not change the size of your browser, it is a data point for fingerprinting**
There are solutions. It is hard and tiring, but its not hopeless. Defense in depth is key, but don't go overboard. Take a step back and do a sanity check. If you defense puts too much friction in your way.... you will likely give up or become the vulnerability. Is the juice worth the squeeze.