What companies are you signed up with?

Every fight between people and corporations is a loss cause if corporations continue to control our elected officials.

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*Comfy EU noises*

there is no such thing as a zero-trust society (although I now want to write that scifi story and tease that idea out). As such, the cost of living in a society will always be some amount of infringement of privacy beyond complete anonymity. Even you were comfortable giving your address and name to 4 other parties (under the presumption that only they would use that information), and even then how many individuals within those organizations have access to that information?

Thus privacy cannot be thought of as an all-or-nothing battle. Privacy is a compromise between total anonymity (un-people) and convenience (you can’t get public utilities to your house if they don’t know where you live). The fact is that we have the level of privacy we do right now because of a lot of resistance and hard work. If it wasn’t for all the survivalists and conspiracy theorists and paranoid software devs and whistleblowers and tech journos and anti-authoritarian content creators and anti-surveillance artists and even ordinary joes like me who just want to use online services withouth the digital equivalent of the weird kid in class who stood over your shoulder and watched everything you did (x1000), things could and would be much worse.

If you must think of it as a war, consider it to be analogous to state-vs-collective wars of history: our “opponents” are organizations that are constrained by their hierarchical nature to certain unspoken rules of engagement, and we are a guerilla collective bound only by our shared value(s). Think the Texas Revolution, Vietnam, African National Congress, Zapatistas, IRA, Black Panthers or pretty much anything the Romans did with northern European Barbarians. I won’t sit here and lie to you that the devastation that happened to these peoples and their homelands was “winning,” but I can tell you that the dominators certainly didn’t get their way either.

“Phone company, internet”

Lol, there you go. Your ISP and wireless carrier are THE worst. They also have a lot of your financial info that they sell off. Tracking too. Your carrier routinely pings your phone for get location and records the calls, where you were at the time, how long etc. Unless it’s encrypted, they see and harvest it all.

ISPs don’t have as much liberty but they too track and sell off a fair bit of your life. They also have your financial info as most almost run a background check these days.

USPS sold you out. (If in the US). They literally sell “change of address” updates to marketing companies. You think they survive on selling stamps?

Well, if you didn’t take all the precautions you took, over a 1000 data brokers could’ve had access to your address, and so much more about you.

And while I most certainly don’t like it, I know that I’m still stopping them from learning even more about me, and my search results are still secure.

Everyone I get to talk to me on Signal is having a secure conversation with me.

Everything to an extent is a win, so don’t give up king.

A real war has risk for all the participants.

Here you bear all the risk, and the counterparty, the internet company for example, bears no risk.

If and when you create the risk for the counterparty, where no risk has existed before, then and only then do you have a right to call it a war. In other words you have to in some way threaten the counterparty and make good on those threats to be at war.

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Unlike most privacy concerned people. I don’t believe that privacy is very useful without anonymity. metadata is at the heart of surveillance and tracking. In this regard I was a little optimistic when tor came out and hoped that many technologies will be build around that. that didn’t happen because you can’t build a business and make a profit by providing anonymity. now half websites are systematically blocking tor exit nodes. it can’t be used safely with torrents. and even briar the messenger built to use tor has been compromised by its developers so that you can’t be anonymous on briar . All in all I share the same frustration and can’t see a brighter future for privacy and anonymity .

First, remember that you’re not fighting this war alone. The most important part is educating people who are curious about it around you.

Second, it’s not about winning; it’s about being the biggest pain in the ass possible for people making money off our privacy.

Keep fighting in the way that suits you best.

If I may, might privacy be both a personal, individual endeavor and a collective endeavor?

On the personal level, can’t we foil the corporate intrusion by choosing apps in the Fediverse?

And on the collective level, can’t promotion of the Fediverse help?

I’m aware that city and county records often contain my street address and that doesn’t bother me. I’ve got to pay taxes and vote.

But I look at it this way: that’s my front facing public identity. Basically the one I use at work that gets a paycheck. Not private. And yes, that’s a pity and that war is lost, but I lose nothing because of that.

But then there’s my identity that shares the goals of global groups that chafe against injustice and oppression. All that work separated from my public identity by multiple barriers. Personably not perfect privacy — watch The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola for a discussion of perfect privacy.

Is this kind of approach practical and one that means we haven’t lost?

The big capitalists get to control you, and they get to profit while they do it. It wont happen without organization and real pushback.

Vote.