I am a software engineer living and working in Belgrade, Serbia. My hobbies contain a lot of things including cycling, bikepacking, photography and quantum computations.

All the photos in my posts are made by myself (if not specified other) and are shared under CC-BY 4.0.

  • 1 Post
  • 11 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: April 27th, 2023
  • Sem@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Is there even a point of using a VPN on Google's Android? (Example: Watching Youtube on Firefox browser while logged-out)English
    201·
    7 days ago

    Yes. For me reasons of VPN on Android (even with Google) are following:

    1. Most of greedy apps are trying to collect info about your location. Because in most of the cases you will restrict direct access to the location data, apps will try to do it through IP. VPN resolve this problem at all.
    2. A lot of greedy apps or websites are trying to do fingerprinting to identity your logs. While it is possible in theory to do fingerprinting by fuzzy matching all-logs against all-logs, the task is so computationally heavy that the only way is to try to do fuzzy-matching (aka fingerprinting) within the locations. VPN allows you to hide your location.

    Of course one may say that VPN does not provide a 100% protections from fingerprinting, I think there should be applied the same approach like in cyber security: the goal is not to protect yourself by 100% but to make attack so expensive that it does not make sense. VPN makes fingerprinting so hard that noone will really do it until you are a journalist, intelligence officer or something like this.

  • Sem@lemmy.mlOPtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Big brother: the effects of surveillance on fundamental aspects of social visionEnglish
    9·
    3 months ago

    As I understood, the main concern is that such a hyper fast eye gaze is similar to the psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched.

    Our finding that sensory processing of gaze direction is facilitated by the act of being watched is consistent with evidence suggesting top-down cognition can influence the earliest stages of gaze processing (Teufel et al. 2009). Also, eye-tracking studies indicate that a social presence can significantly alter where attention is allocated (Risko and Kingstone 2011, Nasiopoulos et al. 2015). In light of our findings, an enhanced and specific allocation of attentional resources towards self-relevant social information seems plausible. Importantly, our results rule out that being watched leads to a non-specific attentional boost, as non-face stimuli did not benefit from this effect; instead, our results support the idea that this is a specific effect directed towards face information. This is consistent with clinical observations of social-specific attentional biases and a hyper-sensitivity to eye gaze in mental health conditions like psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched (Rosse et al. 1994, Hooker and Park 2005, Corlett et al. 2009, Tso et al. 2012, Langer and Rodebaugh 2013, Chen et al. 2017, Langdon et al. 2017, Stuke et al. 2021). Future investigations should explore in detail the effects of surveillance and the sense of privacy on public mental health, as these can have profound social implications (Aboujaoude 2019).