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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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I guess it really depends who you're trying to hide from. In my mind, the layers roughly go like this: low-effort spammers, higher-effort spammers, a casual stalker, a dedicated investigator, government agencies in general, and then last a specific government investigation. There's a little bit of overlap between some of the layers and your ISP itself is in a bit of a unique spot as well. Even a very poor opsec burner phone number is pretty effective for at least the first 3 categories, and arguably that's all most people care about, though it sounds like OP is probably most concerned about levels 1-4 (up to and including a dedicated investigator/stalker/etc).

though it sounds like OP is probably most concerned about levels 1-4

Nah, I'm not that concerned about government agencies, I've already made peace with the fact that if they come after me there's nothing I can do. I'm more concerned about your average journ*list etc. wanting to gather info on me.

What does opsec have to do with spammers?

A lot of web vendors resell personal information to third parties, who in turn sell to third parties, which often sell to spammers at best and scammers more often. This includes places you'd expect to know better: QuinnyPig has gotten contact points he's only given to Amazon resold to spammers. Mostly e-mail in his case, but I've personally gotten phone calls from vendors trying to use one of my online identities.

((Which is funny, but in a morbid way.))

If all they have is an e-mail or phone, without even a real name, there are upper limits to how credible their spam or scams can be. You might, maybe, get generic stuff like "your car's extended warranty has expired". The more personal details you have available connected to the same account, the more those people can start more aggressive tactics. Just standard purchase info is enough to make a pretty compelling-looking fake invoice, for one of the more common scammer tricks. And this can scale up pretty dramatically as more information leaks.

((And it's just annoying to get ten thousand spam phone calls or e-mails, even with tools to block them. Yes, in theory CAN SPAM and the national Do Not Call list should help, but they're limited in effectiveness.))

Opsec's not the only way to have problems, here, but it's a non-trivial way for many attacks to come in.

I don't know. I have never used a VPN in my life. Gmail filters out just about all the spam emails. My phone filters out the spam texts. Maybe I get a spam call every now and again, but by simple virtue of never picking up a call from anyone I don't know and never listening to voicemail I'm pretty insulated from most scams. I'm skeptical that there is much benefit to being super anal about logging into discord.

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