(Please don’t downvote just because I need some help.)
I was once a privacy nut. But it’s getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems – global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order… how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.
I do approve of privacy, of course. All this protect-the-children flak is bullshit. I just can’t remember why I thought it was something worth fighting for and preaching about.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
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.
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Being private actually helps with global warming, AI and human rights because it gives the beast less to feed on. Less data or “good data” means fewer computers processing data and wasting energy.
Keep it up, you’ll find yourself in more interesting circles than the mindless consumers
::edit:: On your, your comment of the end of civilization, yeah, being private might save your life or others. Historically data collection and processing makes it easier for bad people to hunt down other people.
Not saying this will happen, and I don’t believe it will, but if you’re worried about some scary future, then keeping yourself private might be beneficial
I don’t know about this. How much energy is really spent processing this kind of consumer data? how much of that comes from dirty energy sources?
Massive amounts. In the US, see Texas and how their energy grid has been under massive strain since new data centers are popping up there. It also uses a massive amount of water and natural resources. Global this happens, it’s one of the more obvious ways of direct impact our resources and energy
For an example: Watching a DVD locally has an immediate energy use, and that use is monitored and then sold to data brokers by the energy companies (at least in the US). Pretty much end of story.
Now the same movie being watched on a big streaming service, they use AI to process and suggest the movie, catalog and analyze every other user data to build their algorithm and AI better, and then usually sell that data to data brokers who then sell to other data brokers… Not to mention the servers needed to route the traffic to the correct computers and all of the computers in between. And that’s just considering a private use of a streaming service directly without a smartTV and an ISP that isn’t also selling their browsing habits…
Which all require energy, water and precious metals, few if any are “green” or cleanly extracted