Do you have a smart phone? If so I have bad news for you.....

Whataboutism, giving up on personal freedom or privacy, because it takes effort is not helpful. Your handle betrays you.

Oh I haven't given up at all. My cell phone service expires Dec 10 never to be renewed.

The massive amount of data your phone collects about you is quite relevant. Thanks for the downvotes which have now throttled my new account, and given me a bit of a bad impression of the community here.

Can you explain what you mean by "your handle betrays you?"

You're new here. I suggest you read the rules of you haven't (it's to get an idea for how comments are handled and expectations). Comments tend to get downvoted if they do not add to the conversation. I'd give it a bit of time to learn how HN works before making up your mind. I get downvoted all the time, but if you're posting comments of value you can expect your karma to increase over time.

Been lurking and reading the articles for 3 years.

such a young soul...

Ahhh my 40" google TV was too big to haul across the country the most recent time I moved. Ended up in a dumpster. Really too bad.... That was a nice TV. Good picture quality.

On the bright side I bought a new TV and found, to my surprise, digital antenna works much much better now. I have two TVs, the flat screen from ~2010 gets 3 channels, the new one gets 30. They're connected to the same source.

> Ended up in a dumpster

Bummer. Put it on the side of the road and someone would have LOVED to take it.

Facebook has a lot of personal information about you even if you have never had a Facebook account. For example: your GPS location data, approximate age, gender, ethnicity....

Welcome to the future komrade. Sadly, it's not a matter of just "not giving them" your location data. Your devices supply it.

And your friends too. I dutifully kept a new number out of FB until a friend messaged me with, is this your number right? Xxx-xxx-xxx. They can also tag you and auto tag you through face recognition.

I use a lot of burner phones cuz I'm paranoid, and when you sign up for fb/google/whatever they treat a burner phone you just turned on completely different from your regular, existing phone number. Example: if you activate a burner phone and sign up for tinder with the number, it pauses after you enter the code and then asks for your email address. You have to sepetately login and verify your email. On the other hand, if you sign up for tinder with your normal number you're verified; it doesn't request an email address. They get some kind of information packet about your account that I would guess includes activation date, your approximate age, whether your service is prepaid etc. I should say, I use the term "burner" for a cheap Android phone you insert a bring your own SIM into. Don't worry, it's not that anonymous because they also track/correlate your device IMEI with the services you use. I had an interesting experience the other day. The burner phone service expired, and tinder knew within 24 hours the number was no longer active...... Creepy.

2010-2019 has been the smart phone decade and now it's coming to an end. I'm celebrating by letting my cell service expire. My smart phones leak way too much data. I'll be using my too-smart phones like an ipad, making and receiving calls and texts only when I'm connected to WiFi at home.

I have the same experience with tinder. They build shadow profiles on you, and they're not even discreet about it if you look at their traffic. I get whole phones with sim cheap.

It's the implementation of a "social credit" system. I don't know all the details but they evaluate your "social media creditworthiness" through your phone number.

I don't agree to any TOS with tinder and I really doubt they "delete all my information" when I delete the account like it says.

In fact my guess is they just leave your profile active if it's popular to encourage other people to "match" with you.

> In fact my guess is they just leave your profile active if it's popular to encourage other people to "match" with you.

I wouldn’t go to the extent of saying they don’t do it, but I think it’s very unlikely due to the nature of their service. It’s different of, say, Facebook, that can do it without anyone knowing. If I got into a relationship and close my Tinder account but they kept it alive, a single friend can find it and tell my partner. If this happens too often word will spread that something shady is going on.

Facebook tracks you even if you don't have a Facebook account though. And if I signed up in 2009 did I really agree to sharing location data on a smart phone in 2019??

Completely aside I'm finding how much data my Android phone shares extremely intrusive.

You may have an argument if you never signed up, but if you did, you agreed (when checking the “I agree to the TOS” box) that Facebook can make changes to their TOS and you agree to the new changes. Basically, Facebook can change their terms at any time and there’s jack squat you can do about it if you want to keep using the site.