As a retiree, my main EOY goal is to manufacture income for ACA and tax purposes. I also rebalance my allocations as needed.

I’ll second this. I ditched my bank for Fidelity three years ago. So far no issues. Their web interface for bill pay isn’t as nice but its functional. Its also nice at tax time because I only need to wait for the one 1099.

Privacy guides?org has a fairly active forum

Yep, that was the first thing I thought of after reading the headline. I read ‘The woman who.would not be silenced’ and it left a big impression on me.

Apologies…I misread that

Try removing bitwarden and do the same test. Ibet bitwarden is checking for updates that it needs to sync.

I should clarify. I have zero spam at my new email Addy and 20-30 at my old hotmail account.

I dramatically reduced my spam by switching to proton email and requesting removal at the big data brokers. Inteltechniques.com has a list of data brokers and how to request removal of each. There are a ton of brokers but I just did the big 6-8 brokers that they recommend starting with. I went from hundreds of spam a day down to 20-30. YMMV.

Yep I’ve been working through the old shows and remember him talking about that. This was weird that all the episodes were removed…even recent ones. I just found his podcast so I’m hoping its just a temporary hiccup.

The podcast is currently down. A new show was published the other day and then quickly deleted as well as all the old shows. It’s not clear whats going on with it…legal or technical issue.

This can go way beyond ‘tracking’ software. I used to write software that my company used in its core business activities. Almost everyone in the company used some portion of this software. The logging for that system included timestamps and user IDs the captured general high level activities. If we had a system issue we could ramp up the logging to much more granular levels. If mgmt asked we could query the logs and get a pretty good idea of how much or little you were using the system. That wasn’t the main intent for the logging but it had been used for employee performance monitoring on more than one occasion… In all my years of coding, every app I worked on had similar logging.

If you are on a work PC, assume your activity can be monitored and/or logged in some fashion.

Oh yeah. Don’t fuck with cats was great. I guess I knew in theory that sort of thing was possible but to seeing real implications was a serious gut check. It made me seriously consider my online activity and things that I was revealing g unintentionally.

Edited for grammar

I feel your pain. I’ve been trying to clean my digital life up and it is almost overwhelming. I’ve only been working on it for a month or so in my spare time but it’s a collosal PIA. I wish every site that had a create account button had an equally obvious and easy to click delete account button.

That’s common knowledge now but some of us have been around since the beginning of the modern internet when corporate data collection wasn’t even a thing. The privacy invasion was a slow creep that some of didn’t notice until it was too late. The 198 accounts in my password manager are only the last ten years or so of accounts. I’ve been online since the early 90s and can’t begin to remember what services/sites I was using back then that might have survived or been breached.

I love shows like that. There is one called something like ‘How I caught my killer’ which usually involves digital forensics of some sort. It’s cool and super creepy at the same time. It also makes me wonder how far I should go with trying to be anonymous. If someone had a Grapheneos phone bought anonymously and only used e2ee communications on a VPN…what sort of hindrance would that be if that person was murdered. Lol these are the thought exercises that I go through while I’m walking the dog…that and how to keep the dog from noticing that bunny in the next yard.

Long story short. I googled my name and city and was sufficiently creeped out. Ive been online a long time and just didn’t notice how much privacy had eroded around me. It’s like that parable about how to cook a frog. They just slowly increased the temp on me. Fortunately I’ve jumped out of the pot before I got cooked alive.

In the Midwest, some farm.

I’m in the Bitwarden camp. There is no other way for me to have complex/secure passwords and remember them for my gazillion accounts.