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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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I’ve long since started assuming I’m getting data-raped by tech companies until solidly proven otherwise. I am rarely proven otherwise, let alone solidly.
Also, don’t fall into the cloud services trap - coyly called SaaS or PWA: those “apps” don’t run on your machine. Your machine is just a fancy terminal. The trap is, even if your machine runs free software, it’s still a terminal and you’re still getting data-raped.
That’s why cloud applications need to be fought every step of the way. As long as the application runs locally and it’s not closed-source code made by greedy big data for-profits, there’s a way to escape the corporate surveillance. If any one of those two premises is missing, your privacy will be invaded with 100% certainty.
God, I said similar in the 90’s when everyone was jerking off over the idea of SaaS, and people called me a Luddite.
I’m probably a bit older than you, and when I saw the first interactive web things coming along, I thought “Uh oh… This is the mainframe-terminal model coming back to haunt us”.
You may not remember this, but the PC revolution basically freed us from the shackles of big computer companies dictating who could do what and at what price, and BOFHs thinking they were gods because they had absolute power of everything anyone could do on “their” systems. Suddenly ordinary people had their own computers at home, installed (or programmed themselves) the software they wanted and gave IBMs and the likes a giant middle finger.
But at some point in the early 2000’s, the giant companies figured out a way to get control back through “Web 2.0”: they sold it as a convenience and people bought it. But the ultimate goal was to claw back control. The corporations had found a way to subvert HTML, which was just a document model thing, into a framework to relocate part - and now, all - of the computing back onto their mainframes.
I’ve been saying this for 20 years. And now here we are, running things like CAD programs, word prcessors and spreadsheets over the internet, with the software vendors essentially free to do whatever the hell they want once more. The mind boggles…
I guess people only learn from the past when they get old enough to remember it, and too old to do anything about it…
Leaving aside that during the PC revolution you were most likely running a Microsoft OS on an IBM compatible (which IBM didn’t exploit purely because they were clueless not because they didn’t want to);
Not sure what is stopping any of us from running our own PC with our own software. Nowadays Linux is a really solid option as an OS, home connections are reliable and fast, you can access lots of services as a hobbyist, you can self-host a lot of things to your heart’s content.
Running software remotely doesn’t stop making sense when it’s being taken advantage by corporations.
If you want to decry something decry the rising tech illiteracy. The mobile phone caused that not distributed software. The PC is doing fine, it’s just that fewer and fewer people are using it.
I run only local software on my PC. I refuse to use web apps - they suck in every way.
It does mean I use older versions some times, but that’s never been a hindrance (currently using Office 2016, Visio 2007, Publisher 2006,etc).
Tech illiteracy is so frustrating. It’s one thing when my older siblings/family “can’t be bothered” to learn - at least for them computers were science fiction (or at least took up a room), but seeing it among people younger than me is incredibly frustrating, since they grew up with it.
Clearly behind you.