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.
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- 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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once upon a time freedom of speech was a thing
As someone that is red/green colorblind… wut?
Did my best, but my European geography identity the best and may have missed a couple:
Germany & Poland oppose. Netherlands, Austria, Estonia, Slovenia and Czechia neutral. Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Greece support.
removed by mod
I understand that this has been a recent topic in the EU but I’d really like to see information on government positions on this in more areas of the world.
Here’s some more information about the world: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/internet-censorship-map/
This is good, thank you. I’m honestly surprised Australia is so open, but not completely.
The Netherlands only remains “neutral” because of the clause that forces companies to detect unknown CSAM and/or “grooming” material (last time I checked). It’s only a matter of one or two countries that can make the difference, with most neutral countries probably having similarly “minor” objections.
At first glance I thought it was only Belarus who opposed it. That’d be a weird world where totalitarian government opposes totalitarian control.
Let me guess: You are an American with no clue about Geography / foreign politics?
Belarus isn’t in the EU. Its position doesn’t matter, independent from which side they are on.
Belarus is part of the big grey blob in the east of the map (alongside Ukraine and Russia). So the map doesn’t state anything about Belarus’ opinion on the topic.
In case you thought the dark green blob in central Europe is Belarus: those are Germany and Poland.
No, I’m Belarusian.
Relying on legislation to get passed or not get passed only gets us so far. Yes, absolutely, write your reps and vote, but also donate to your favorite decentralized, private tech project so they can improve the user experience and get more users. We need to make tyrannical censorship & surveillance not only technically impossible but politically unfeasible. The way we do that is by building better tech and getting more and more of the population to use it.
Folks, this should inspire you to start self-hosting a federated, decentralized chat server with freely available source code by yourself or with a small community. Governments can coerce these big, usually-corpo centralized servers to give up data but good luck if there are hundreds of thousands (of millions?) of small servers with 1–10 users on it & clients not controlled by a single entity for distribution (easier now that y’all coerced Mommy Apple to let you sideload applications & use alternative package managers).
All federated services grossly violate GDPR.
You don’t need to worry about data retention when you own the server & you are the only user. It’s the servers you or someone you know & trust don’t own where you should actually worry about this.
It’s also more problematic with all systems built on eventual consistency models, so best to avoid those since you’ll never be able to get the data dropped. Chat being ephemeral is good.
How so?
If you’re federating the data to servers you don’t control, it’s impossible to guarantee deletion of it. GDPR requires that users be able to request deletion of their data
If you’re posting anything online, it’s impossible to guarantee deletion of it. Anyone can scrape anything and store it anywhere for however long they want.
I knew about that, but I thought it only applied to personal information (with limitations with regards to there being some professional entity collecting it). If I make a statement to the press that goes on print, I cannot demand them recalling papers in order to be compliant with GDPR.
That being said, I am by no means very knowledgeable about this.
I mean, GDPR is a fucking disaster. Nobody is getting it right, same with cookie consent. This is because the last time geriatric imbeciles at the European parliament seen a computer was back at 98.
Since all those people are using it, it kinda doesn’t matter for them. As if not having their data harvested from every single click makes them not care about GDPR and the other bullshit. What a surprise.
Sounds like GDPR is the problem then, not federated services.
Matrix I guess?
No thanks
If you don’t trust matrix.org, then you can self host the server yourself. Plus, the article you included is outdated.
https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/xmpp-matrix/ this better?
My biggest takeaway from this infographic is that norway is not part of the EU, who would’ve thought
Good for them? Idk how good the EU is
You can pry my fishing rights from my cold dead hands!
Norway just like Switzerland are too
richcool to join the club, we are still a part of the European Economic Area and Schengen though.On this map I see a Rastafarian llama with a duck for an ass and tail.
The Nederlands is the duck.
Huh.
Honestly I just wish I could take the steps written in the article but it would most likely be of no use.
I have very few close relationships and am not widely liked or popular by any means, don’t use social media because nobody sees my posts anyway, and the country I live in has a lot of media censorship, therefore the vast majority of the population is very conservative, uneducated and narrow-minded about most political topics.
I’ve been taking a lot of steps lately to reclaim my online privacy, and would hate to see it all thrown out the window by the EU, a union I thought was doing Europe justice before now…
That’s a lot of red
Yes, kind of weird, since chat control is postponed because too many countries opposed it. Is it on the table again?
AFAIK chat control 2. First one was struch down by ECHR.
Why did they let this Hungarian pro-Nazi idiot regime lead anything?
because it changes every 6 months and everyone get’s a turn
If only in the same breath we would make all the politicians text messages public, guess they only want other chats to be controlled but not their own.
Even if I deeply like the Idea, something like this could backfire if it’s done constantly and not just once. But I would like to see a law that makes the usage of government communications mandatory for all government-related communication while storing everything revision-proof on their servers with different access rights. And a second law that makes it possible to access it by requiring petitions to be singled by a low number of people. Less extreme but still makes it harder to be corrupt.
I keep mentioning this idea, hoping to someday make it seem less extreme: the government should be under total surveillance 24/7.
Like, anyone at any time can look through any of the tens of thousands of cameras saturating every government building.
Honestly this is an intersting idea. Albeit, it may be hatd to implement since some buildings have to be private for national security reasons (specifically regarding military strategy and such).
Military’s camera feeds go into memory crystals that automatically unshuffle after like 50 years. That way history is guaranteed to get a full accounting of the conflict, but there’s no possibility of strategic information giveaway.
Open source government, eh? Don’t know if this would work completely but I like the direction.
Army and police get to have non-camera operations of course. They’re still recorded, just not broadcast for whatever delay makes the tactical information obsolete.
Julian Assange tried to do that and he was nearly lynched for it.
And then blamed for ruining the 2016 American election.
Snowden showed the government was spying, had to flee, deemed a terrorist. Assange showed the government disobeys the laws it enforces on everyone else, deemed a terrorist. Manning showed that war crimes are constant, deemed a terrorist, subjected to inhumane torture.
Every time a whistleblower exposes corruption and violations of laws in every country, they are punished. China, Russia, America, England, they’re all guilty of it.
Typically by being accused of acting as foreign agents. Assange was a Radical Islamist under Bush, a nefarious Russia/China double agent under Obama, and an insidious Hispanic cartel boss under Trump.
I don’t know why but I’ve got this strange tingling feeling it might just be a human nature group thing.
Can someone explain to an American what chat control is?
If I understand correctly, its what the NSA “allegedly” doesn’t do to U.S. citizens already. Except, these countries are being public about it. This way they can actually follow through without the “secret getting out”.
Basically scanning communications and breaking encryption, under the guise of predictably stopping child abuse
and technically, how would they achieve this?
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
Working like shit then? Has it made a difference?
Force all the big platforms to share their encrypted data. Banning end-to-end encryption. It’s all very stupid and will never actually catch any bad guys.
I have been running my own matrix server andere cliënt for a while. So if I keep running it and just don’t update it, that would suddenly be illegal? Geus it is time to see how my for relay is doing.
No any self hosted isn’t on the radar. By big, they mean the centralized giants, i.e. Meta, Google, Telegram, Signal(?) etc.
If it actually did catch that many bad guy… would fuck regional court, complete overload. we have struggle deal with number of ukraine immigrant, now imagine deal with all the fake report because ai just bad?
The fuck is with these stupid bots that try to turn every conversation into “muh immigration”
I use immigration as example that our beurocracy in germany unable to handle any large load of work efficiently.
Germany’s workforce relies on immigration, your point has no sense
lol sure loser whatever
A fascist first world is easier for Russia and China than a free one
Originally governments wanted backdoors into encryption protocols, but now they seem to want client side scanning (i.e. scanning messages on your phone before it’s encrypted and sent out)