There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.
Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!
Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.
Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!
And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.
Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.
the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough
I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.
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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After reading about Snowden leaks and what world governments are capable of technologically, I’ve come to the same conclusion that privacy is now an illusion. Sure, one browser might send less data to corporations, but the government can see whatever they want on anyone’s computer with an internet connection. The answer is to take a step back technologically. Interact with people in person. Read books at the library. Shop locally instead of online or at big box stores. Buy thrifted DVDs. The further you remove yourself, the more private you will be.
Another user, in a similar thread, shared this speech on enshittification. Addresses a good bit of what you are talking about and why mass action is hard in the current legal framework. We need better laws.
https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=pdDRwugtHefZACcd
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rimtaSgGz_4?si=pdDRwugtHefZACcd
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
At the moment, there is no way to avoid having your information taken by corps. But what if we fought back by trying to pollute the information they gather? Instead of just trying to disable data collection, we could try to interfere with it and make it collect all kinds of useless crap that cant be separated or distinguished without serious effort. This way you could achieve same kind of anonymity as standing in huge crowd.
Another way to do it could be having huge community data pool that every participant adds to and also claims as “their own”. I bet its really useful to see 1000 people with almost identical dataprofile and no way to distinguish which entry belongs to who. How do you even use ai to sort it out?
I think that is something we could do about it even on individual level.
On a small scale, that’s what some of these privacy-focused browsers are doing in regards to fingerprinting. Make the data that has to be provided as standardized as possible and randomize the rest that is being tested behind the scenes. That is really great, but we can’t randomize our behavior and there’s a lot of data we can’t randomize for the sake of functionality. Dunno how we handle that. Maybe we all install bots on our devices that act like users and go to random sites and click on random shit while we’re not using the device.
Someone should reverse engineer how the data collection itself works, maybe it could be messed with directly
Welcome to the team, comrade. Wait til you find out why they demonize China and it’s approach to the internet
Because as we all know Chinese companies never collect people’s data
This makes china out to be the good guys, but that can’t be right…
I am interested in hearing more about this if you’re willing to elaborate
You’re aware of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, right? It’s one of I’m sure several groups that organizes & strives to push back against malicious action from tech companies, as well as over-encroachment from governments (at times itself coming from tech company lobbying). It’s based in the United States though, if memory serves, so others may want to chip in and mention similar groups for their region/nation.
At the same time, services/platforms that don’t rely on ads pretty much always welcome donations, e.g. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Gutenberg, as well your resident Fediverse sites, so also keep those in mind.
This post left me thinking in something. What if we could organize, so a city-owned ISP with a built-in pihole exists? What if we can just block tracking at the metropolitan level as we do in our houses? What if we don’t just stop at DNS? What if we made just one city more private? What if we start with that?
This reminded me of an idea of using mesh networks to create an internet separate from the current internet. By that I mean physically running Ethernet cables from window to window between houses. It is unlikely to ever happen because it would need a lot of people to join it all at once, but I think it is a cool concept. Perhaps if I put my Jellyfin server on it and tell my neighbors about the free tv opportunity…
Edit: Forgot to mention, this was inspired by the Cuban networks that were basically the same thing. It is worth a browser search if you are bored.
Nice, I’ll look into it, sounds interesting. I’m definitely community driven and anarchism friendly, real freedom comes from our pairs, not from above.
City owned isps do exist! I don’t know if any have filtered the Internet like this but I doubt it, it might be against net neutrality regulations
You’d basically be harassed by law enforcement and the NSA until you agreed to spy on your users. In the US at least.
I guess your right. My isp shouldn’t have to deal with that. I suppose it’s back on us as individuals to fight that kind of intrusion.
I want to add to this: In my country (Poland, but probably many others) you are sometimes almost forced to be tracked by FAANG companies. For example our mObywatel app, which can be uses as driver’s license replacement requires you to download it via Google Play and have Google Services installed. Of course it uses firebase to send notifications.
Can’t you use a normal license instead?
Firebase really is the curse of modern software development
Could you eli5 what’s bad about it?
It’s yet another service in the hands of Google and a proprietary library, far too many apps depend on it to send push notifications, which isn’t unexpected when Google, which owns Android, has made it the only standard push service by leveraging their position of power and in turn Unified Push and all its free implementations had to come from the community, but almost no app uses it, because everyone is used to Firebase by this point.
That’s the open platform aspect, it is also a privacy concern because it means that most apps will have your notifications pass through Google’s servers, I don’t think they can necessarily read the content, but the time of reception and sending and where it comes from is metadata that they certainty see
The best way to counter publicity is to simply erase from your mind. Turn it into white noise.
I don’t have a clue how I’ve learned how to do this but I can have multiple publicity spots thrown at me that I won’t retain a thing. Sometimes to the point I get a song stuck on loop in my head and I can’t figure where I heard it.
Using tools to dodge or simply eliminate ads is also an option, especially online.
You can take back your freedom of choice to take part of an audience for publicity if you are willing to put some effort to regain it.
I mirror your concerns but as long as there’s money to be made, the thing that makes money will continue to happen. Advertising is part of that, and if they can harvest our data to target ads, they will.
We won’t win the fight against money. What we can do is block/avoid advertisements, avoid (as much as possible) services that are known for this behavior, support services that are known to respect privacy, and educate those that are receptive.
Why do you want advertising to go bankrupt? Just opening it in a private tab or blocking it so you don’t get it is enough.
Devo wrote a song about it.
at some point, we are going to have to boycott everything
consumer boycotts aint shit. we need tech workers, some of the people with the least class consciousness and poorest ethics, to refuse to create and maintain surveillance tools.
when i say “boycott everything”, i mean everything. nothing short of a secessio plebis type of deal
Can someone please explain how they are doing this?
I’m still trying to look up how to prevent ISPs from logging my SNIWell, it seems Cloudflare and other domain service providers have implemented ESNI.Friends, family, and even people you briefly meet, rat you out. Often without them even knowing by sharing their list of phone contacts.
And what happens when you change your phone number? Does that become a new shadow profile? What of they change your name in their contact list? I’m trying to gauge how Facebook handles the inconsistencies of navigating contacts who don’t have Facebook accounts
They do more than just the phone number and name. https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/
It talks about the use of photos, people mentioning you in a post, etc. Sure, facetook publicly said they would be backing off of visual recognition, but how much do you really trust that company to do jack-diddly if there is potential profit? Anyway. If you change your phone number, but the same group of people still have you in a ‘field of contacts,’ their tools can almost certainly fit those puzzle pieces together. Same if you change the phone number. Identifying people is easy if you have metadata.
This is starting to look like a major problem. Are there any tips on how to solve this issue?
We can only guess. But they can probably detect contacts for which the phone number is updated or which have several assigned phone numbers.
Also all Android / iOS apps with Facebook and Google trackers in them share device info and data easy to correlate, icw sites having FB pixels also.
This is why you vote in every election.
which party do i
for if i want antitrust suits brought against tech companies and which party is running candidates who know how to write hello world in any programming language?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/26/tech/ftc-sues-amazon-antitrust-monopoly-case/index.html
Amazon antitrust lawsuit going on as we speak.
where are the rest of them
I gave up on voting when I realized the last however many times I did it changed nothing. I want a real solution, not a distraction.
In 1968, a bunch of hippies opened up a ‘Dick Gregory for President’ office. They had enough money for the first month’s rent and phone, and figured that they would make a small impact. Somehow, someone kept paying the office rent and phone for months.
You not voting is exactly what the people you hate want you to do.
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The would candidates care if people bring up the issue.
If lots of people let their voices be heard, the pols will listen.
You can wait around for the perfect candidate to come along, or you can work to make the change happen.
what the fuck world do you live in where that take reflects reality?
*everybody *knows the TSA is bullshit that doesn’t help anything and yet nobody would dare suggest getting rid of it despite how deeply unpopular it is. Weed isn’t federally legal despite a majority of americans supporting decriminalization in some form. Universal healthcare is also >50% support and they won’t legislate it.
there are similar issues and cases in all liberal democracies, you understand nothing about how politics actually work.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/politics/marijuana-decriminalization-white-house-joe-biden/index.html
Almost as if voting works.
lol you might want to read past the headline on that one chief
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If voting doesn’t matter, why is Trump so mad about automatic voter registration?
You not voting makes Donnie and his friends happy.
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Then I’ll explain it.
Laws decide what large companies can and can not do to gather data. Politicians decide those laws. Who you vote for decides what policies are enacted. If the current parties aren’t working to help you, you might have to go out and search for better candidates.
If you’re not American, substitute any pro-Fascist candidate you choose for ‘Donald Trump.’
I agree with you in all your points and I have also look into why people just give up their privacy so easily , most of the time what I have noticed is that they (we all) love convenience. You want a plug and play camera? Buy ring , Need a plug and play router with a nice App? Buy google and Amazon Eero. Need to promote your business? Where is everyone at? Facebook , Twitter and Google. Most regular people give up their privacy for convenience, they don’t have time dealing with thousands of option on a PF sense router , no time to create VLAns.
because we made it easy to use technology and nobody has time to be an expert in every field.
What may be needed is to first promote the basic idea that doing the right thing is most often harder than not. It applies to a lot of areas including this one, and it’s a hard one to make a habit of. I figured this out many years ago and yet here I am typing this out on an Android phone, wishing that I had spent that money on a more privacy respecting one when I had the chance. But people have to get into the habit of not always choosing the “quicker, easier, more seductive” route all the time, because we all know where that leads.