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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Never.
Just look at what happens on Reddit when Mastodon is brought up in the Threads/Twitter wars.
“Ohhhh it’s too haaaaard to use. What does it matter about a little privacy loss anyway?”
We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.
For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.
That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.
I’m an average Joe and try to minimize my digital footprint as much as convenience allows, but keep seeing people say that this is paranoia and doesn’t matter.
it does matter. its not necesserily about not wanting my own data collected, its about everyones being collected, and big tech controlling our whole lives
This the dystopia we chose for ourselves.
Women I knew started to care when I showed them articles about how google and meta knew their menstrual cycles, and reported on searches about abortions to law emfprcemt
Consumerist pigs don’t care about literally anything past their own consumption and comforts.
Yeah this is true, but I will persist to make the 20%, 5% or 0.1% of aware people move platforms if it means there’s less of this shit.
I hope Threads is juuuust successful enough to fully kill off Twitter so that we can move one step closer to Musk fading into obscurity.
People literally don’t care about their privacy. Anything that is raised regarding tracking is classified as being paranoid and you become a weirdo.
In fairness, privacy issues have been a bit like a “frog in boiling water”. Unless you pay a lot of attention to these things or are completely out of the loop, the average person won’t see the issue.
At least my grandmother’s vindicated now for not wanting to get on Facebook and share those sorts of things
Unless it’s blamed on a foreign country. Then it’s “why aren’t we nuking them?!?!”
People in America love to complain about TikTok is harvesting all sorts of data. My response is yeah that’s awful, let’s stop all the data harvesting, and they’re like no just TikTok, the CCP is the ultimate evil
Because that’s what they are told to think. The notion that they are thinking on their own is laughable.
Oh yeah definitely. The media loves to paint China as some massive villain and the American tech companies as our saviours, while they’re both doing similar evil shit
All govs want to protect or further their personal interests: Monopolies of violence, power, and intelligence. The citizens be damned.
“Oh, look! They are going to track all my purchases and sell to third parties! HAHA ! Who is gonna want to buy info out of a random loser buying coffee?”
- Unironically me, 13’ish years ago
Not until there is a massive data breach that leads to very serious and obvious real world consequences
Like the Equifax hack that nobody cares about anymore?
I still can’t believe that was just completely forgotten about by almost everyone
On a similar scale, but with consequences like zeroing out savings and maxing out credit cards of several dozens of millions of people or violence for political views/sexual preferences/etc on the same scale. Basically, something that will make a large number of people learn about the importance of privacy the hard way.
If it’s violence over sexual preferences I imagine a lot of people will be indifferent or blame deviants as a whole.
Until there’s a massive leak of credit card data from a single incident, nothing will change.
I don’t think even that is enough - people will just have their banks sort it all out. I think only stuff like identity theft as a result of a breach will make people learn IMO
Well, banks don’t sort it out very fast and they definitely won’t solve it fast if it happens to a large percentage of their clients.
never
“I have nothing to hide”
People just want to use the app, like on TikTok “China is spying you, it will be blocked” many started to looking for VPNs to unblock the app.
People don’t care. They will never care.
They will once it hurts their wallets.
removed by mod
well said
my dad barely understands how email works, do you think he even knows what all of these do lmao
I feel very lucky that my mom knows a lot, changes passwords for my dad, and had no problem moving away with me to Signal and we can complain together about website that don’t allow you to refuse cookies
So lucky to have a cool mom <3