[lisarea]

Those are some good ideas, but it's kind of weird, like what they chose to include and what they left out.

So with sharing others' personal information, it's not usually like that. Sometimes it'll be in the form of "invitations" to things, but most of the time, it's contact scrapers, where people give apps access to their address books. Most people aren't really doing it on purpose. They're just not thinking.

And most data mining is also pretty opaque, but it doesn't usually depend on explicitly sharing information, or on someone hacking to get privacy data. It's mostly stuff like the contact scrapers and other little conveniences people opt into out of ignorance and/or apathy. Which I kind of wonder if the person who did that comic is leaving more relevant privacy measures out because they either don't know or don't care themselves.

Things like:

Check permissions on your devices and make sure you're not letting apps access your contacts, because that's how your friends' contact information is getting out, not by you, like, handing some guy their calling cards.

Turn off or block, ideally physically, any microphones or cameras when you're not using them. And don't use them without the express permission of anyone who might be recorded by them. This means turning off your "smart" assistant on your phone and covering your camera and microphone, and not taking pictures of people or god forbid posting them to social media without permission from everyone being recorded. Don't report other people's activities to Facebook or other social media, either.

That doesn't just apply to your phone and other mobile devices, either. Disconnect your "smart" TV from the internet, turn off/disconnect your Echo or other device, and secure any internet enabled security cameras you have on your property when you have guests, unless they're fully informed and consent to being recorded. Anything type of device you have that responds to voice or motion.

And just generally make some effort to understand the technologies your'e using. The really egregious privacy breaches get normalized because people adopt new consumer technologies without understanding or even just thinking about what those things are doing.