Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
My co-workers were having the "Nothing to hide" discussion yesterday. I didn't even feel like arguing.
tell them to post their buttholes online then 😂 i cant with folks like this.
"Normies"? We don't need more tribalism.
“My prehistoric brain can only think in ‘binary’ and doesn’t understand that development of a successful threat model doesn’t (and often can’t) be perfect, but any incremental change to my behavior and online practices in a way to prevent sensitive information from being shared and potentially utilized by malicious actors is a plus.
Instead of thinking about all of that, I’m going to reduce the whole subject to a nice and neat logical fallacy of ‘online privacy is terrible nowadays, thus it doesn’t matter what I do’ “
There’s worse.
They already know everything about me anyways. If I can exchange my data for some free and easy to use service, I’m more than happy to give.
I hate defeatism.
I don't, in general make this same bargain, and I'm not more than happy to give my data, and thus sacrifice my privacy. However, I have had to reckon, and I think many of those who value privacy must too, with the fact that it isn't inherently valued by everyone, that simply adequately communicating this in a way that's better understood won't translate to people suddenly realising what they're giving up. We aren't always simply one great analogy away from changing every person's world view and likely many have come to their view from a place at least as well informed as those of us who jealously guard our privacy. I also have to reckon with the fact that to some extent, my own desire to protect my privacy is at least not fully explainable by logic and rationalism, especially in light of how difficult it is to protect and how easy it is to have unwittingly ceded it. You might call that defeatism, and to simply conclude "well I lost some privacy, so I might as well give it up completely" is accepting defeat, again not something I'm yet prepared to do, but it is also perhaps important to acknowledge and factor present realities in to one's thinking. It might sound defeatist to point out an enemy's big guns pointed toward you from all sides, but it's insane to ignore them. That quote that you've produced, while antithetical to my thinking, really isn't irrational or illogical, and only defeatist if you were onboard with fighting to begin with. If you do not value your privacy and you get something useful in exchange for its sacrifice then it would seem obvious to part with it gladly and it's difficult to offer a rational reason why someone shouldn't. My strongest motivation for protecting it is more idealistic than personal and has more to do with a kind of slippery slope argument and a concern for hypothetical power grabbing and eroding of our rights and autonomy. I like to think that's reason enough, but at least right now, for almost everyone, none of those concerns represent clear nor present dangers and I can't prove it definitely will become such in future though I certainly feel like it has accelerated trends firmly in the direction of my fears.
On the last point you talked about, “prove it definitely will become such a future”. You simply cannot prove that without going there. What we’re seeing is not a natural course of actions, so we cannot simply derive the consequences like we would be able in science. Even in science, often times, the best we can do is probabilistic. The best we can do is show that such a future is possible, and that given the evidences, we may be able to conclude that the chances of realizing such a future is so and so, with caveats to known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
I’ll admit that chalking it up to defeatism is a stretch, but it’s not too far in my opinion. It’s the admission that the “machines” (though it’s really just big tech companies with a vested interest in as much data as possible so that they can sell it one way or another for profit) have already won and there’s not only no point in struggling against it, you get something out of it. I don’t necessarily agree with the gun analogy as I find it difficult to distinguish that from a threat of your life, but I see where you’re coming from: the easy path towards what most people current perceive as a modern life of tech is built in a way that pushes people into line as products, by enticing them with a “service” and taking advantage of their FOMO, and all other ways are either too much work or too technical for the common person.
When these services that people have come to rely on gets enshittified, these people would then just shrug and say “well what can you do,” maybe send some angry message somewhere into the aether and continue with the service, continuing to be a milk cow.
For myself, I see privacy as a tool towards encouraging a healthier variety in the ecosystem. It is a way to attain at least some healthy level of anonymity, as you would walking down streets in different parts of the world, so that I do not have to constantly maintain a single, outward personality everywhere I go. Supporting privacy is my way of saying I don’t like how many big tech business works, by essentially exploiting human nature and stepping all over it. That IS ideological; I simply believe that we can do good business without resorting to dirty tactics and opportunism; that humans should not be milk cows to business or capitalism.
That said, I have some vested interest in having more options: my interest and hobbies are niche and none of these services can or will sufficiently provide for what I seek. By the milk cow analogy, I do not sufficiently benefit from the blanket offers of these businesses. I also do not like the consequences of which they bring to humans and their relationships, and not fixing those consequences is out of a conflict of interest where they are motivated to exploit human nature and relationships to profiteer off us all, as is the many examples that we’re all starting to see and realize from capitalism.
Its not even defeatism, its willingly sacrificing themselves to the machine in hopes it will be merciful!
True.
And they’ll follow that up with a somewhat snarky comment that “You’ll be eliminated by the machines first.”
The claim to have "nothing to hide" was not just born our of ignorance, but also out of comfort - to not having to do anything about it.
Now that even the last one accepted that they do indeed have something to hide, but in order to justify their own inaction, it's labeled as inevitable: privacy is not real.
They are lying to themselves, because doing otherwise would mean they have to admit being wrong.
The 'nothing to hide' argument seems a lot like that 'first they came for socialists and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist...' quote. Sure you have nothing to hide right now, but what happens when something you weren't hiding becomes a target.
They genuinely do not care anymore. We lost, just like the cypherpunks lost.
but it was trash at loading html websites
as opposed to websites written in excel 2003 format or what
Bro's from the timeline where Flash became the dominant species.
A lot of people have just accepted surviellance for convienience.
People close to me get TSA precheck even though it requires fingerprinting, because "the government already has your fingerprints"
But if they did, why would they need to ask your for them?
Sorry for devil's advocate here because I agree with you but hypothetically the answer would be verification. ie., Google already has your password, so why would they need to ask you for it when you log in?
Technically they only have your password hash
html websites
These aren't normies. They're children.
"i don't have anything to hide" mfs when their passwords get leaked:
"If people say edge is bad they should consider thinking about your windows 11 os lol"
The mindset about privacy is just all wrong. It's not an all or nothing game. Any privacy gain is a net positive to no privacy at all.
To many people conflate privacy with anonymity or try "accomplish" privacy without understanding what they want to be private from and why.
"hello i am u/NotBillGates and I agree with this message"
When they realized they DO actually have something to hide, they moved the goalposts to now say nothing is private online anyway.
I mean, that is pretty close to the truth. Especially for people whose skill level is at "Firefox sucks at loading HTML sites".
That’s such a weird statement. People who don’t like Firefox at that level don’t know what html is.
Is it me or do those comments feel very shill-like?
Yes some subreddit is piviting hard captalism recently, giving up their dignity to defend corporations with their life.
Elon Musk popularised this cope argument a few years ago. It sounds intelligent to people who are incapable of any level of critical thinking or nuance and believe everything in the world is either 100% A or 100% B with no in-between. Sadly, this is a large percentage of the population.
A similar argument I hear is "If they want me, they will find and arrest me no matter my precautions".
Kinda yes... But why are you talking about threat models that include someone deliberately hunting you down? We are not high-ranking dissidents or criminals that they would put effort and money into finding. Our concern is passive surveillance - maybe the collected info doing us a disservice (like being leaked for scammers or sold to an evil ex), maybe even something mundane getting flagged and us being arrested just to serve as an example.
e.g. Period tracking apps being used as evidence when prosecuting people who seek abortions
my guess is its just another flavour of cope.
imo likely because recent history has began to undermine the delusions which were propping up the former flavour.
I use Edge on my work laptop because:
- Vertical Tabs
Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, Floorp and Zen have those
Gen Alpha doesn't care about privacy online. They need to be guided by their parents to care, e.g. when they buy a laptop, they install some Linux distribution on it before they give it to the child.
They've been primed not to. They've grown up surrounded by social media where oversharing with your legal name attached is incentived, both by the companies and the lonely, drama-hungry users. I wish we'd pushed harder against this back in the early days of Facebook, but I doubt most of us saw this coming.
The op in that post is 14 years old at most. Just look at how that shot is tailored.