Have you guys also noticed this? I’m not talking about “Oh my family isn’t privacy conscious” I honestly get that for ur average moms and pops, they don’t know any better.
the problem is with how these big tech companies effectively poisoned the everyday Joe to think that handing over ur data like a good boy is the norm and breaking out is “weird” and “too much”, this blame also goes on Hollywood.
Yesterday my friend called me " Mr robot" for just taking my privacy seriously I thought it was funny.
some people also fired their single neuron and told me “People only do this when they have something to hide”
These remarks that I face from time to time really highlights the mentality of the general society where if you break out of the norm, even if it doesn’t harm them, they would find a way to make off handed remarks about it almost like they’re dissatisfied that you’re fighting.
It’s scary to think about how the next generations are essentially being groomed to believe that these invasive applications and surveillance are just normal. But that’s the goal of the big tech oligarchs.
Same reason they try and say it’s only criminals that want to protect their privacy.
that’s what I’m saying,surveillance is the new normal, its trendy, opposition is being an “Extremist” and “Creepy”
That’s par for the course my friend. But the response to these cliché statements is what can start to change perspectives! I like highlighting how Big Tech knows them better than they know themselves. Then get into how this means big tech has the ability to change how they view a topic based the specific search results. I then zoom out and explain how this happens for every user similar to them, as well as for every other “group” big tech classifies people under.
I often get something like “But what can we even do about it then?” in response, which more often than not, eventually leads to them admitting they’re lazy and things are too convient to switch away from or stop using lol
oh trust me I can argue, its always them being lazy and giving up on their rights
I usually point out that they were the ones saying that their phones are listening to them and making changes to their instagram\shopping algorithm.
No the one that pisses me off are the people who understand that computers take effort and the only way to fix that is to have an organization that takes care of that effort for you.
For example to replace discord your only options are: Corporate shit Startups which are a few extra users away from IPO’ing into corporate shit Something open source selfhosted
I get why normal folk don’t wann self host. What I can’t stand is the complaints about using other peoples self hosted servers because you can’t be fucked to remember more than two URLs/passwords as if your browser doesn’t have bookmakers and you don’t have a password manager.
Like fuck sure, its cool you don’t want to do system administration. But the only way an extra site is inconvenient is if you’re incapable of the computer equivalent of wiping your own ass.
These are young anticapitalist, chronically online queers I’m talking about too.
If they’re not willing nobody is and its fucking soul crushing to know.
These are young anticapitalist, chronically online queers I’m talking about too.
Right! They already are familiar with being on the fringes of “normal” society, and have a lot more to gain than a “normie” from protecting their privacy, and yet they just can’t be bothered because “Matrix is too clunky” or “I just really like playing Overwatch”. My eyes can’t roll hard enough.
Many Marxist groups literally use spyware like WhatsApp to organise. I just don’t get it.
My local PSL announces all their events exclusively on Instagram. I brought this up at one of their meetings and they were baffled. “But where else would we make announcements?”
Maddening
Why? They have their creature comforts and platform challenges. Dismissal is elitism, and closes off the movement.
Is it elitist to think bad UX is a smaller problem than core political ideology, especially for a group of people who’re far more computationally literate/flexible than at leas 75% of the population.
Some of these people are tech workers for fuck sake. It would be elitism if these where people without much experience around computers.
Its not elitism if people are just choosing not to put effort into shit they claim matters deeply to them.
I don’t dismiss people for using malicious software products. I just struggle to understand how they can have their eyes so open about so many things but refuse to look at this particular issue.
Ayep. Probably including where you live and what you do for a living.
I had to have a hard conversation with my wife and in-laws about posting pictures of my son online. They agreed but didn’t get it. Once AI deepfakes became common, they got it.
Once AI deepfakes became common, they got it.
Ayup. I try to tell my friends. It’s not how your data might hurt you today. It’s how it can hurt you tomorrow.
You might be 10 years old today. You could be alive in 60, 70 more years. After who knows what changes to law, culture, tech, everything.
Naomi Brockwell said something like “If someday we decide we hate red haired people, we will not look only at the photos people uploaded after we decided that. We will go back through the pictures people posted long ago.”
She was speaking metaphorical ofc. “Red hair” could be anything.
I mean it’s still probably beneficial for a lot of cases. Ad and tracking companies want the easiest route, which is just to farm the people who make no effort to improve their privacy (the majority). Sophisticated trackers do exist, and companies like Meta still do literally everything to get any last bit, but for the most part you’ll knock out 90% of invasion with even basic measures and like 98% with greater measures
I always gotta love the “why do you refuse the cookies? The site might not work!”.
Sweety I need you to understand that I do not care whether or not the site works. If it doesn’t then it’s not worth my time.
guhhh but I love cookies!
Also I’ve hardly ever seen a site not work because I rejected the cookies.
Well there’s nonsense like the guardian (I think?) =>Accept our cookies or they become a paywall. But in general I think it’s a sentiment people have that comes from not understanding what cookies are.
Not a thing with the guardian
Oh damn my bad, I read all the time and ive never had this… what browser are you using? Are you in the US?
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My ublock origin preferences seam to bypass this.
Also “I don’t want to use an adblocker, I find tailored advertising very useful”
Yes I love my brain being hijacked by big tech.
I personally find it easier to use a separate browser for anything I don’t need to be logged in for. It deletes all cookies when closed. No need to trust the untrustworthy.
I don’t talk about privacy with normies. If they bring it up, I’m happy to discuss.
I think privacy is very slowly becoming more mainstream and a large part of that is thanks to google. Installing “ai” on devices, deleting peoples’ accounts, making installing non-play store apps more difficult, will ultimately encourage more people to degoogle their lives.
Idk why tf they’re so hell bent on AI, I get that they need a return on their shitty investments but my god the level of detachment from the general public is insane
Because AIs don’t need salaries, don’t unionize, can work 24/7.
For some tasks, AI has already completely obsoleted humans. An AI can write a shitty PR filled newsletter faster and cheaper than a human. It keeps getting better at certain tasks, like programming.
All AI companies want to be the one that controls the best AI. Because if they do, then other companies will pay them to rent out AIs for cheaper than human labor.
Companies fear falling behind. So they dump loads of money into AI. And currently, investors like hearing about AI. So the more companies say and push AI, it increases investment into the company.
It’s way more insidious. “AI” is very much LLMs, or Large language Models. The one thing they excel at is ingesting large amounts of text and summarizing, or looking for key points, as directed, and sometimes with non-exact directions.
Large amounts of text, like your browsing history, your personal cloud-stored files, your chats and messages your email. Your taxes. Your bank records. Your not-yet filed patents. Your medical research. Your political donations. Your protest plans. Your sources for the journalism you are doing.
At scale, society-wide. Zoom back and predict the markets overall sentiment. Zoom in down to a single “undesirable”.
All that “it’ll do human creative jobs you have to pay so much for, and if you reduce headcount you’ll get a nice bonus” is for all the short-thinking middle management and vapid C-levels to get suckered by the Mechanical Turk show into think they’ll get a bonus this quarter by putting all their sensitive information on someone else’s computer.
And once their IT staff is minimized and hardware is out of reach, you have achieved vendor lock-in.
And it’s absolutely incredible how literally everyone seems to have fallen for this shiny turd.
I mean cmon, “Palantir”? They were literally created for this purpose.
If you happen to want to know more on why, there are 2 podcasts that talk about this on a very regular basis:
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport - super chill guy that every week has an episode on ai reality check. Usually explains quite at length why something is happening on ai why is factual or not
- Better offline - Ed can be quite opinionated and sometimes borderline ranty, but he also tends to breakdown stuff like financial numbers on ai investment and why (or why not) you should break those down.
I think thatsa great description of Zitron. His editorial style initially turned me off but he is thorough and shows his sources for the factual sides of his arguments.
thank you for this, I’ll def check it out!
thay have already made the investment and they desperately want the return
It’s just strange that instead of pushing for return they are pushing for more investment instead
they are. they need people to be as dependent on it as possible so they can then push for ransom.
even then, no way they can get their trillion dollar investment back like this, they are probably just trying to push the pop further as long as they possibly can while maneuvering to be on top when it all comes down.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. I read that only 3% of companies using “ai” saw a return on investment. Companies started re-hiring the humans because the “ai” turns out to be shit. We can’t even produce the power to run these models at scale.
It’s interesting working in the field as a non technical. We talk all day about data security but my homelab has more observability than half the enterprises I speak with. And they all know. And they never have the budget.
It’s literally the first scene of fight club all day erryday in infosec. If the cost of the recall is less than the prevention, not worth it to them.
Yeah. no. “Normies” love AI everything. They definitely don’t install apps from outside the Play store either.
Only thing that bugs them from this list is the deletion of accounts. Unfortunately they’ll happily hand over ID and other things to get it back, or just create a new account on the same site.
Source: Experience.
arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
- Edward Snowden
But that doesn’t give individuals a reason to take action on there own privacy. At least it should mean others will respect you more for valuing your own privacy.
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“i have nothing to hide anyways”
“theyre tracking me anyways so it doesnt matter”
“i dont do anything illegal so i dont care if im being tracked”
these quotes make my blood boil
I’ve also heard
“I’m not important enough for anyone to care what I’m doing.”
I’m like honey this shit is automated at population scale. You don’t have to be important. You only have to be a human.
I’ve recently realized that people have no idea how algorithms work. It’s also eye-opening when you realize how poorly educated many people are and how bad the literacy rates are.
I’ve tried as hard as I can to help people around me. They just don’t get it. I’ve provided alternatives and told them they fund fascism when giving info away. I’ve been trying to help the “I have nothing to hide” club for 15 years now. It’s just no use. I have failed to convince a single person.
It’s by design. If 80 to 90% or more of people blindly agree to share their contacts and email then the rest of use are caught up in it every time we communicate with them.
You cannot both participate in mainstream social networks and communications platforms and have any real privacy.
that’s big issue but I’m referring to is the social stigma that these big tech companies and Hollywood have cultivated.
People automatically think ur too shady or paranoid if you even think about being private
I’ve heard you can ask those people, “if you have nothing to hide would you be OK with a camera in your shower? Recording you have sex?”
I like the saying that privacy is like cancer. Just because you don’t have it doesn’t mean its not vitally important to solve for society as a whole.
“if you have nothing to hide would you be OK with a camera in your shower?
I like, “OK! Please hand me your phone, unlocked. Let me have it for 24h. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow. I won’t harm it in any way. I will only look.”
Or, “OK! What is your bank account number and password?”
I believe ppl know that everyone has something to hide. It’s just an excuse they use.
And those are stupid arguments.
it gets more frustrating when they double down and insist that only criminals have something to hide.
as if the people who own everything and get to make decisions for everybody and decide who is and isn’t a criminal weren’t listed in the epstein files.
I mean everyone has a threat model. We are online they is giving up some privacy no matter how careful you are online.
Its wild, I remember when my first paycheck came in and a family member posted a picture of it to their social media… with my name and all on there.
It also doesn’t stop with privacy, I remember expressing my distaste for generative LLMs to the same person, and the first thing the next day they post in our discord is some shitty ai meme of me and asked if I liked it? All I said was “ah, I tell you I don’t like LLM art and you upload my face to their database, pretty thoughtless of you.” The comment went right through one ear out the other.
I would’ve blocked this person immediately. I would hate anyone uploading my picture on the internet without my consent and also manipulating the image.
I just go full anti tech, which people find ironic since I’m in the tech industry, and they poke fun at that
No matter what you do, no matter what you think or say, people will try their darnedest to poke holes at it
But what you *don’t * do? That’s pretty hard to poke holes at.
“I don’t have a Facebook account” is a brickwall to the conversion. That way in their mind, it’s not that I don’t trust the company, it’s that I don’t even slightly value the product. I have a damn phone, I have to am required to_ pay for the damn phone. It has group chats. What is the value of Facebook again?
Marketplace? I buy everything brand new and keep it until it’s dead
Doomscrolling? Bad habit, not interested
Family connections? I cut most of them off but maybe 4, who know to call/text
Now even thermostats are getting microphones and listening devices, which will absolutely be used to collect data on people from their homes see ecobees new TOS, and the new HoneyWell/ring camera integrations frankly I’m just done with the bullshit. I’m full blown get any phone home technology the fuck out of my house levels of done
But I don’t say that when people ask why I changed my thermostat from the $400 Ecobee, which was a standout feature in my home when they walked in.
No. I say “their servers kept going down and causing issues when I needed it to work”, because people who somehow manage to live without concerning themselves of targeted pricing or snooping practices do care about slight inconveniences, and for whatever reason “they changed their TOS to get people to agree to let them spy on them without legal reprecussions, and if you don’t agree they’ll lock you out of your account barring you from using half the stuff you paid to use” is less logical to their pre-occupied brains than “I got inconvenienced twice a year from down servers”
I just go full anti tech, which people find ironic since I’m in the tech industry, and they poke fun at that
It’s funny, because they’ve managed to draw completely the wrong conclusion. You aren’t anti-tech despite working in the tech industry, no - you’re anti-tech because of working in the tech industry.
The first thing I ask for when buying new appliances is what the have that doesn’t have WiFi or Bluetooth. I’m fucking done too!
The really creepy one is stuff like 23andme where your genealogy obsessed extended family all does it and now they can statistically estimate your genome from your known family history and it’s all in a database for sale and Trump’s DOJ is likely buying
thank god my family didn’t use those services
thank god my family discouraged me from using those services back before I became privacy-conscious
Whenever I hear the “only people with something to hide” comment I reply “oh? Then unlock your phone, hand it to me and leave the room.” They always backtrack immediately.
This one is really good. I always say “then why do you have walls in your house” but it doesn’t work that well.
“Why do you have curtains on your windows” is a little less dismissable than “Walls” for future.
Gosh… why havn’t I thought of saying that
I think people reject that it’s as bad as they’re told because that don’t like to believe it’s that bad, or that there’s no way companies would do that to them. People don’t accept being told “you’re making a big mistake” and to feel dumb about it.
That’s my take. I had somebody at work ask what I do regarding privacy and I realized I lit up with excitement to share and had to immediately dial it back to not freak them out. I started out small and simple and emailed them since basics after chatting. Said, if they wanted additional info let me know " so that it’s up to them to continue the journey (down the rabbit hole lol).
But just glad to see others gaining the knowledge. My journey wasn’t immediate, it’s gradual, so I have to be mindful of their process too.
“There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s.
You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records.
You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.
Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.
Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.”
– Edward Snowden
