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I think that how business is allowed to use data needs to be severely reigned in, allowed only to collect the bare minimum necessary to maintain a business relationship with the customer and to monitor and improve the service for mutual benefit. Anything that goes outside the walls and is legally shared between third-party service vendors should be required to adhere to the strongest of any of their privacy policies to avoid “Five Eyes” type of hijincks (I didn’t share your data.  HE shared your data, nyuk, nyuk). Any preventable breaches should be met with more than a slap on the wrist and a shrug of the shoulders, even if it looks like the barn door isn’t ever going back on its hinges.

Imagine if a brick and mortar business were to exploit your business relationship with them in such a manner as Meta does.  Oh wait, they’re all plugged in now; forget I said anything. That didn’t change the rules of decency overnight. It just opened the door to exploitation by distant perpetrators with throats you can’t reach to get your hands around.

That’s why we have apps for coupons at the grocery store, personalized for your pleasure with secret savings just for you, instead of the simplicity of just a circular you grab when you walk in, same savings for everybody. They still have those, though, so it wasn’t about saving trees. It’s so they can collect data from you to sell to the grocery marketers and anybody else who will pay, which I despise, as it only entrenches the big brands that can afford to play in the metadata sandbox and derive useful information from it. If they were being honest, they would just come out and say that they benefit greatly from the market research you provide, but that would open the door to having to pay you. I guess they do, in a way. You want to continue to be bestowed with savings don’t you? Going somewhere else isn’t an option in my town and I see what a burden this system is on the poor people at the customer service kiosk.

Not only that, but now the door is open for discrimination in who is allowed to save money on what or who is allowed to see what in a curated feed.  Who knows what these algorithms are doing when they aren’t being abjectly horrible?  They could be partnering up with artificial stupidity!  Not only do they have massive data sets that allow them to know more about you, than well…you, but they can mangle it and still attribute it to you.  Nothing is anonymized for those who can dig and literally put two and two together.  It stands to reason the can of worms should be kept as small as possible, especially considering the daily data breaches that occur, but greed prevails so we need massive warehouses to store the data that is being rampantly collected for no other reason than that it can be and may prove useful down the road for some purpose… any purpose.  Their attitude is basically “Somebody stop us, mwa-hahaha.”  Somebody should.

It would be immensely useful if a business could just download a federally authorized and enforceable restrictive privacy policy document, or contract, if you will. Government needs to step up and do their job for the average citizen, but they can hardly see due to all the dolla dolla bills in the air around them.

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wavy, Just another Forum Poster, OscarCP

I would imagine that if a friend is using the service and therefore agreed to the privacy policy, that anything they post about you (intentional or not) and any associated metadata derived from it would be fair game for Meta.  How many regular people have an NDA with their friends? As for Meta (what an “in your face” name change btw), they’re teflon.

Terminating the collection contract or swearing off the privacy policy, if a mechanism were to exist, would be tantamount to terminating the account (but not the data already collected and stored and future data from “partners”) because slurping your data and selling it to advertisers is their business. IOW, as it stands, if you want to use the service, you have to agree to a complete package of overstepping that tilts the balance of power firmly in their favor.  Take it or leave it.  It’s fundamentally wrong to use your content like they do, but the will is not there to reign in the industry and the big players have the money to keep it “legal”.

It would be best not to catch the facebook virus in the first place, but even for people on the fence, FOMO means most people take that pill and forget about it and move on.  I think it’s only people like us that wring our hands over it, because we believe privacy and laws regarding it are paramount to a functioning and equitable free society.

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rc primak, wavy, OscarCP

Ben Myers wrote:

Susan, This is timely information for all.  I get so much spam email that I cannot tell a phishing spam from the MailChimp hack from a generic phishing spam, a sad commentary on how vulnerable we all are, despite all the patching of Windows and the brave, new more secure Windows 11.  We, ourselves, cannot be patched and we don’t have TPM 2.0 or Secure Boot in our brains.

My advice to most anyone who asks me about anti-virus, anti-malware or anti-computer-anything is that the best malware defense is between one’s ears.  We all have to use this defense.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, Ben.  Or any funnier.  I think we could all use Secure Boot to get through that critical first hour after waking up and systems coming online.

It seems that as time goes on, we have to take on more of the duties and responsibilities traditionally provided by contractors and professionals; either because they have reduced their services, have become un-affordable, unreliable, or just plain unavailable.

Think about how much googling (hint: start at page 3 or 4 on your searches nowadays) we do so we can be our own doctors, lawyers, plumbers, etc. Our systems are failing us do to rot and bloat.  We have to become more vigilant and self-sufficient to survive. I don’t think there is a better illustration of this than the current cyber-security landscape.

That’s why, in the last 10 years, I have shifted my focus to education (best practices) and not on any “solution” that comes with its own set of problems.  You can’t reach half of them, though, which is a bit depressing. It’s a tougher nut to crack than the homeless problem.  Theoretically, if we gave everybody on the street a tiny home, a job, and life skills, we could eliminate about 80% of the problem, at least initially.  If we can reach even 40% of workers in IT settings and maybe 20% of the general public and make them at least security “bros” (and “sistas”), we would be doing extraordinarily well, I think.

Of course, this has it’s own set of pitfalls.  At what age do we teach our children to “trust, but verify”?  Will they become hopelessly cynical and anti-social?  (it’s too late for me.) Until we figure it all out, I think it’s safe to say that there are protectors and those in need of protection, and we should move forward with teaching the basic, non-technical skills needed to mitigate threats to our family, friends, community, anybody who will listen and take heed. That is our skill set and we can’t be solely responsible for fixing the fundamentally twisted paradigm of somebody exploiting somebody else because they are not physically present to be dealt with properly and barely legally accountable.

Sorry, long post. “Oh, look…a QR Code I must scan!”

Yes, BitLocker requires TPM v1.2 or higher.

I wouldn’t soften my computer’s security by glibly disabling TPM to avoid an upgrade nag.  Tsk, tsk, lol.

This from Chris Gardner on positekdotnet:

On the Windows Update page you’ll see a “Stay on Windows 10 for now” link underneath the blue Download and Install button. Click that, and you’ll stop being nagged all the time to upgrade to Windows 11.

Whether this will continue to work in 2022 or how long it works before you have to do it again, I do not know.  I’m still on Win 7 and dreading the inevitable move to OSaaS on newer hardware.

I wonder if there is a registry “hack” to report an unsupported version of TPM or complete lack of TPM to Windows Update while maintaining the functionality of TPM 2.0.