Honeypots

There was speculation that the NSA is deeply involved in Cloudflare, which wouldn’t be a surprise at all.

In fact all US services are probably infiltrated one way or another.

ISP don't even pretend not to sell your shit anymore...

that's really the only real benefit to using VPN, deny that parasite profit while shifting trust to another corpo. at least VPNs pretend to not sell your data. i mean some do it anyway

Anything by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Facebook literally got people killed by volunteering their location data to a tyrannical government in a third world country. Don't think they won't do that to Americans.

Android (the mobile OS) kind of is. The only reason Google bought the hobby project to put Linux on smartphones was because they could collect more data with it than they could with Gmail. You can get a Pixel device and install GrapheneOS on it, but not even 1% of Android users are turning off telemetry (which only anonymises it), let alone installing custom firmware that doesn't have it. I'm not saying iOS isn't — because it's not open source, we don't know — but I am saying Android definitely is. And I don't just mean Pixels — to use the Android brand, Google requires certain things of OEMs like Samsung, from having Gmail and/or Chrome on the main home screen, to having Google Play Services, which does the data collecting, installed. (I'm pretty sure the Play Store actually requires it. Forks that don't use the Android branding, like Amazon's Fire OS, don't have this restriction, but Amazon probably has plenty of other crap in theirs.)

Now, I never said Android was a honeypot, and it may not be. But Google was just sued for antitrust, and they made a deal to keep Chrome and Android under their banner. We don't know what the terms of that deal are. I would consider both of them to be compromised by bad actors (potentially they always were since Google was selling the data). Don't think so much about who you call (though that can be valuable) but like, your Maps data, anything you put in Health (like if you're female, like if you miss two or more periods but not eight or nine and then start back up again, I'm sure the GOP would love to know that — for the dense fellas, it could mean she got pregnant and then terminated it, or the pregnancy failed somehow). Tim Cook's advice of "get your mom an iPhone" doesn't sound so far fetched now. Your sister, too. Heck, specifically regarding Health, Samsung put out an update last year, maybe the year before — that is, before the current administration — saying if you keep using Health, they can sell your information to whoever they want. Either agree and keep using it, or disagree and they delete your data. At this point, no stock Android phone can be trusted to keep your information private. It's different if you use GrapheneOS, but that requires buying a Pixel, putting money in Google's pocket. The Pixel 10 is what, about as powerful as an iPhone 11? A 12 maybe? And it costs the same as an iPhone 16. You decide. Personally I don't think it looks like a very good deal.

The ice watch apps

This privacy-centric US phone carrier may or may not be a honeypot, but seems too good to be true. https://www.cape.co/

ANOM wasn’t until it was, and then it shut down. I recommend the Darknet Diaries episode to hear the story.

Stingray phone trackers and similar IMSI catchers are a kind of honeypot.

Discord is 100% I'm only unsure if it's NSA or CCP

Tor

proton

Signal? I don't trust anything that's not part of the fediverse.