Doing anything online that requires you to break strict anonymity… breaks your anonymity, hence your privacy. The two should be separate subject matters, but the corporate surveillance model ensures that if anything can be traced back to you, your privacy is as good as gone.
You say you do Facebook… There’s your answer.
I’m a bit confused by your question: it sounds like you want to advertise yourself and your work. Why don’t you let AI scrape your information? If I were you, I’d want a chatbot to spit out my details when someone asks it to name the name of someone who does what I do.
I’m violently anti-AI, but this is the one use case I would happily feed it information: to use it as an amplifier to spread public information I want to broadcast as far and as wide as possible.
Privacy used to be priceless. It still is for my generation. I work my ass off to maintain my privacy, which is harder and harder in this increasingly dystopian world, and I lose out on more and more services and conveniences everybody else enjoys as a result. But privacy is non-negociable for many people my age.
For younger folks, sadly they were born in the dystopia - or an early version of it - and they never lost the privacy they never had. For a lot of younger folks, not enjoying true privacy is their normal. Many of them are waking up to the obscenety of what Big Data does to all of us, but of course it’s harder to wake up than to resist someone trying to put you to sleep.
And finally, the assault on privacy is so relentless and comes from actors with so much more clout and resources that many simply give up, because it’s just too much. I’m one of those who refuse to drive and take the bus because cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance. But most people are not willing to accept that level of loss of quality of life and it’s fully understandable.
Privacy isn’t a cutesy. It’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, just like not doing stupid shit when you’re a teenager, you get to find out how important privacy is years later when the stupid shit you did years before comes back to haunt you and it’s too late.
The problem of course is that Big Data has made it exceedingly difficult and painful to maintain your privacy. Because of course the last thing they want is for you to have any. It hurts their bottom line.
Because of the corporate surveillance collective, in 2024, if you truly want to maintain your privacy, your life becomes significantly crappier than if you didn’t bother. But that doesn’t mean privacy isn’t as important today as it’s ever been.
I think privacy and social media are inherently at odds
It doesn’t have to be.
I’ve spent decades online on Usenet, IRC, Slashdot and elsewhere before modern social media, and today on (some) social media sites, and nobody knows who am I because I’ve always been super-careful to keep my online personae and my real identity totally separate. It takes a bit of paranoia, but it’s possible to have an online footprint that’s watertight and completely divorced from real-life.
I have many, many online identities and none of them tie back to the real me. But Big Tech sure is aggressively trying to deanonymize me, and it takes a lot more care and effort than it used to to make sure that they never do.
Actually I use Freetube with sponsorblock on the desktop and Newpipe with sponsorblock on Android. So I mostly don’t see shitty sponsors anymore.
But my Formuler TV box - which runs Android - has some weird crashing problem with the default Newpipe player, so I have to use an external player (MX Player) which doesn’t have sponsorblock, sadly.
So whenever I want to watch Youtube videos on my TV, I have to eat some NordVPN shilling - at least a little bit, just time for me to grab the remote and skip it - and I’m too cheap to replace the TV box.
Ok and if you don’t trust anyone, you don’t have any protection at all.
Correct. I assume I don’t, so I’m always super-careful not to give away any information I don’t need to give to begin with. Or I give fake information whenever possible, to pollute the well. For the rest, as the old saying goes, if it’s on the internet, it’s as good as public.
They are never American.
Agreed. If you have to trust a company with your privacy in any way, don’t use an American company. It’s not even their fault: they operate in a country that’s fundamentally dangerous for your privacy.
My email provider is in Norway. for instance.
half of the video is solely a critique of NordVPN
I don’t know how good or bad NordVPN is. I have never used it. But I never will. EVER.
You know why?
Because they paid so many interesting Youtubers to shill their stupid VPN service, ruined so many otherwise interesting Youtube videos and wasted so much of my time that I swore I would never give them a single dollar of my money.
I can’t stand advertisement and advertisers, and NordVPN has been truly heavy-handed. They’re not the only ones: Brilliant comes to mind too. They can all fuck off. They’ve achieved the exact opposite of what their ads was supposed to achieve with me: I’ll never patronize them.
But you can trust some of them. You need to know which ones have a history of caring about privacy
All I see in the tech world is the companies that have been caught red-handed doing shady stuff and those that haven’t yet.
You say you can trust some of them based on their history of caring: can you? What’s their history of caring other than how long they’ve sworn to do the right thing and haven’t been caught doing otherwise yet?
Like I said, tech companies don’t resist the lure of big data money for very long these days. If you think any VPN provider isn’t at least seriously considering monetizing the traffic you send them to make more money on you than the few dollars you throw their way every month for the VPN service, you’re deluded. I would never trust a VPN with all my internet traffic. That’s just too much of a risk.
Is that any different than the trust we place in our ISPs?
It’s not. Your ISP is probably selling your data, and your VPN may or may not do that too. Just assume everybody sells your data.
The difference is, when you leave home and you connect to a wifi, you start using another ISP. If you then lose the wifi and connect using 4G, you’re using yet another ISP. If you use a VPN, you funnel all your traffic to a single provider all the time. In other words, instead of distributing the risk over several potentially bad actors, you concentrate it on a single one.
Like I said, that’s a lot more trust that I’m willing to place in a single company that only essentially pinky-swears won’t put me under surveillance.
Firstly, using a VPN ultimately consists in trusting the company providing the VPN service that it won’t be fucking around with your privacy. Considering that all your traffic goes through it, that’s a lot of trust to place in one company. And I generally don’t trust any tech company to resist the lure of selling your data for profit for very long in 2024 - even those that profess to be privacy-friendly.
Secondly, modern corporate surveillance doesn’t rely on IP addresses anymore. So if you think a VPN protects your privacy, it really doesn’t. All it does is tell Google et al. which VPN provider you’re a customer of - i.e. you’re giving them even more data that they don’t need to have.
That’s why I don’t even bother with a VPN. I only use one to evade geo-blocking every once in a while.
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…
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.
I found many many old movies video files on archive.org. If you like old movies, it’s a treasure trove.
I applaud your efforts and I admire your idealism.
Unfortunately, the minute you get the bill from your internet provider, you’ll need to find a way to pay for it, and your good intentions will instantly dissolve in the murky realities of modern corporate surveillance capitalism.
But at least while you haven’t gotten your first bill, it’s refreshing to watch your enthusiasm.
From TFA:
The Brave-haters are almost certainly foaming at the mouth reading that paragraph. They’ll cite concerns like Brave’s affiliate link scandal, the collection of funds ostensibly on behalf of creators without telling them, the installation of programs without user consent
You don’t have to hate Brave to distrust Brave.
If any of your friends in real life did something fishy to you once, you’d immediately stop talking to him. Possibly, maybe, if your former friend apologized and swore he’d never do it again, and he was convincing enough, and he treated you right for quite some time, maybe you’d take him back as a friend. But even if you did, if he did something fishy to you again, surely you’d dump him for good this time - and probably punch him in the face too.
The Brave company did this THREE TIMES and there are still people who trust them?
Me, I don’t hate them. I just don’t trust them. I wouldn’t trust them to run a calculator utility on my computer, let alone something as critical to my digital life as a browser. They lost my trust not once, not twice, but three times.
In addition, their cryptocurrency thing doesn’t help build trust either. I classify anybody who dabbles in crypto as instantly sketchy by default, and they’d have to work extra-hard to earn my trust. Brave has done the exact opposite: they’re a crypto-scheme-running bunch who made a supposedly privacy-friendly browser, and I could kind of believe they needed the crypto scheme to make a living. Kind of, but I chose to believe it for a while. Unti Brave did their first fishy thing, and then I instantly uninstalled their browser, never to install it again.
Brave is NOT trustworthy. In my opinion, if you trust them. you’re gullible, or you actively want to believe them too much. It’s not hatred, it’s just plain common sense.
I get you want privacy, but there’s a line where it just stops making sense, and your personal info isn’t that valuable. Anyway
Actually, you don’t need perfect privacy. You just need good enough privacy, and here’s why:
If you’re a low-value target - i.e. a random internet user, that’s you and me - always remember that your value is low: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook… expend a certain amount of resources to fish for enough of your data to earn them a return on their investment. We’re low-value targets, so they first and foremost go for the low hanging fruits: the people who don’t know, don’t care, wallow in social media without any restraint and make it particularly easy to gather data from.
All you have to do is make it hard enough and expensive enough for the corporate surveillance collective to lose money on you: create accounts full of fake data and don’t post personal information - or make up fake personal information in your posts - to poison their wells. Don’t post photos of you or your family. Use throwaway email addresses. Use a deGoogled phone. Don’t browse without an ad blocker set on reasonably high. Use a browser with anti-fingerprinting. Don’t fill out Costco membership cards. Pay with cash stuff that you don’t want anybody to know about. Etc etc.
In other words, adopt a reasonable-enough privacy hygiene so that you’re not part of the low hanging fruits. It doesn’t have to be drastic, just good enough to make you not worth the sonsabitches’ time and effort.
If you’re a high-value target however, a Snowden or an Assange, that’s a different proposition. But for the rest of us, private enough is good enough.
You’re correct: certain facial features always stay the same, such as interpupillary distance. But you know what? On my selfie, I’m blind in one eye: ain’t that a shame for the poor algorithm eh?
Besides, they’re not the police: they don’t have a database of facial features of everybody in the world. So even if they do have my exact facial features despite the makeup, what are they gonna match it against?
It would only be of use if they went to the Dominican fuzz with my selfie, who then would have to contact the police in my own country, to have a chance to cut through my disguise. Good luck with that…
And at the end of the day, the aim isn’t necessarily to be 100% impossible to identify: it’s just to make it as hard and least cost-effective as possible for the fucking data brokers who sell our lives for pennies on the marketplace.
I sell specialized content on one particular specialized platform. That platform requires a scan of your ID card, and a selfie of you holding your ID card to your face when you open a seller’s account.
For payouts, they partnered with one particular payment processor that also uses the same system (ID card scan + selfie with ID card) to open an account.
Well, I opened both accounts using a fake ID and heavy makeup - of course under a fake name and with a Tutanota email account. I bet they didn’t actually check the ID and they didn’t:
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In the case of the content platform, how would they?
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In the case of the payment processor, in theory they’re supposed to abide by KYC rules. But they’re headquartered in the Dominican Republic, so I bet they only paid lip service to KYC and it seems I was right: I’ve had both accounts for over a year and earning money from my content without any problems since.
So it’s just a matter of knowing who you can feed fake information to and what the consequences are if you get found out. In my case, the only risk is having my payment account shut down and losing whatever earnings I haven’t withdrawn yet.
Of course, don’t feed fake information to your real-life bank, your employer or the IRS or something… But for internet content, that’s your pretend life: unless your content creation activities are frowned upon by the real-life laws of your country, assess you risks feeding the platforms BS and have at it.
“I’m looking for a privacy respecting vacuum robot” must be one of the most dystopian sentences I’ve read in quite some time.
I mean there is no lack of dystopian stuff going around these days. But if you imagine someone saying that 30 years ago, that someone would have conceivably ended up in a lunatic asylum. In 2024 however, it’s a perfectly valid and apropos question.
What a sad, sad world we live in…
The fight for privacy is not new, and it predates the internet by far.
The problem is that, in the past, the state was on your side in the fight for privacy. Today, it sides with Big Tech and whoever offers it the most data to conduct its own privacy violations, or pays our elected officials the most.
It’s a bit overwhelming when giant, unchecked and unaccountable monopolies and your own country, both with almost infinite resources and legal ways to do whatever they want with impunity, gang up on you at the same time.
It’s not very likely, unless you’re a heavy sleeper who happens to sleep in unsafe places regularly - or your partner at home is up to no good.
Also, implants are kind of finicky with respect to reader placement, because they’re sitting under a layer of skin full of conductive water, and they’re usually not symmetrical, so the reader has to be positioned a certain way to score a good read. You as the implant owner know “the move” (in fact, it quickly becomes second nature and you never think about it anymore) but unless you explain it to someone or they know about this shortcoming, they’ll have a hard time getting a read. That’s assuming you don’t wake up because someone is touching you, because the read range is very short - like 1/4" when the reader is ideally placed - and you don’t hear the loud bing from the cellphone.
But yeah, you’re correct: strictly speaking, if you have a good memory, a long and complicated password - or a mental “recipe” to make one - and a healthy habit of changing passwords regularly is better. Or better: a password in your head and an implant as a second factor.
You don’t have a disability. Just saying.