Every commercial website you visit makes someone money via advertising or data harvesting.
Social media sites exist for two purposes:
1- To sell advertising
2- To harvest and sell all contacts, pictures and usage data from your device.
It’s true, you agreed to it right up front.
All the contacts on your device are collected.
These contacts are all “reversed looked”.
All geo location data, property & vehicle ownership, traffic violations, criminal records, associated emails, social media accounts, current and previous addresses, relative’s, neighbors and MUCH MORE is then saved.
All that precious data is then sold to the highest bidder.
Scary right?
Well, it’s the nature of the social media beast and why Zuckerberg makes millions a day from everyone sharing their lives.
Fact is, installing a social media app on your main device is a VERY BAD THING.
You may not care if your personal information is continually purchased AND MONITORED by the Chinese Communist Party AND OTHERS but, what about your family’s, neighbors and associates personal information?
Knowing is half the battle. Breaking a social media addiction is more difficult than quitting many other addictions.
You can however, use social media with relative safety and privacy IF you know how.
Another option is to have your own website! IT’S EASY and VERY inexpensive.
You can message your friends and share pics with ease in a secure environment.
You can even monetize your website and earn.
Believe it or not, one of the easiest ways to make money online is to open a forum and start an argument!
While people feverishly post, the ads on your site get more exposure.
Your identity and personal information is safe with your own website IF you know the basics of cyber security.
One easy to implement security example is not putting your phone number or email address online.
Data harvesters can easily gather that information. It is called scraping or data harvesting. It is going on 24/7 365 at massive bandwidths.
Now, this technique is not fool proof but, a data scraper cannot see this as text or numbers.
WHY? because it is an instantly generated image. It does not exist until you load the webpage. It does not exist after you leave the webpage. If you try to save it to your downloads, you’ll just get gibberish when you try to view.
Naturally, I Base64 encode the letters and numbers first before sending it over to the graphic generator.
VGhpcyBpcw0Kc29tZSBhbmdsZWQgdGV4dCENClRyeSB0byBjb3B5IGl0 That is the encoded sentence: "This is some angled text! Try to copy it."
That is then decoded by my script and turned into a temporary graphic.
You notice I can rotate and put other characters over the text that have opacity. To help prevent OCR’s from reading.
To do it again: Refresh
