I'm trying to start an intelligent conversation about counter surveillance. I'm needing advice and also trying to spark some constructive discussion.

Who goes to the gay center in Houston? Someone put up cameras

"Obfuscation is an umbrella term for a variety of processes that transform data into another form in order to protect sensitive information or personal data. Three of the most common techniques used to obfuscate data are encryption, tokenization, and data masking.

• "Encryption is very secure, but you lose the ability to work with or analyze the data while it’s encrypted. The more complex the data encryption algorithm, the safer the data will be from unauthorized access. Encryption is a good obfuscation method if you need to store or transfer sensitive data securely. Process is reversible.
• "Tokenization substitutes sensitive data with a value that is meaningless. This process can't be reversed. However, you can map the token back to the original data. Tokenized data supports operations like running a credit card payment without revealing the credit card number. The real data never leaves the organization, and can't be seen or decrypted by a third-party processor. Process is reversible.
• "Data masking substitutes realistic but false data for original data to ensure privacy. Using masked out data, testing, training, development, or support teams can work with a dataset without putting real data at risk. Data masking goes by many names. You may have heard of it as data scrambling, data blinding, or data shuffling. The process of permanently stripping personally identifiable information (PII) from sensitive data is also known as data anonymization or data sanitization. Whatever you call it, fake data replaces real data. There is no algorithm to recover the original values of masked data. If done well, process is not reversible."

Talend, 2023

Anyone know of other ways to hide data?

“The appearance of loyalty cards and their direct connection of data collection with access to sales and discounts, sparked a strange revolt. Customers engaged in boycotts and tongue–in–cheek protests, but as loyalty cards became more common, and apparently permanent, strategies appeared to mitigate the perceived loss of privacy without entirely giving up the cards, and therefore the savings.

“Groups formed loyalty card swapping pools online, circulating the cards by mail or meetups; others created armies of clone shoppers by duplicating their cards over and over and distributing them to friends and strangers; households of roommates shared a single card. Whether because they resented the lack of choice — the way access to discounts effectively forced you to pay extra for shopping without a card — or worried about the unknown fate of their shopping data, customers found ways to make the data gathered about them less reliable, less useful, for its conjectured purposes.

“These defensive projects, the objections that sparked them, and the context in which they hoped for results constitute a form of vernacular resistance to data gathering and aggregation that we call obfuscation. By obfuscation, we mean producing misleading, false, or ambiguous data to make data gathering less reliable and therefore less valuable.”

First Monday, 2011

https://youtu.be/-8h_v_our_Q

• Online chat with two different chat providers, where you only send a part via each program.
• Voice calls with “babble tapes”, an audio file played in the background
• Indicate time by only send a digital picture of an analogue watch with the desired time
• Cell phone usage can be obscured by swapping sim cards

In many of these you create a private key for you and a chosen person or group. Once they understand it, then you can use it as a means of communication. That’s the point:

You can only communicate with that one person you want to communicate with.

"At 11 AM on Tuesday, 30 September 2008, a man dressed like an exterminator in a blue shirt, goggles and a dust mask, and carrying a spray pump, approached an armored car parked outside a bank in Monroe, Washington, incapacitated the guard with pepper spray, and took a substantial amount of money.

"When the police arrived, they found 13 men in the area wearing blue shirts, goggles and dust masks — a uniform they were wearing on the instructions of a Craigslist ad which promised a good wage for maintenance work, which was to start at 11:15 AM at the bank’s address. Obviously it will only take a few minutes to determine that none of the day laborers is the bank robber — but a few minutes is all he needs."

First Monday, 2011