Yeh, it’s not like virginity, the organisations chasing this data don’t live entirely off of new additions to their databases, the data is valuable to them when it’s a constant flow so if you are interested in guarding that data and stopping it from being shared too widely then there’s never a point at which it’s entirely too late. It is worth noting that it’s near impossible to maintain the type of privacy you might have expected maybe in the 90s, early 2000s but, if you succeeded in reducing how much data you give away even to some limited extent then you are successfully starving those that seek that data of something valuable. Information about you that’s years old is probably not worth very much. It all feeds in to the machinery of this surveillance economy so I’m sure it’s useful to some extent, but that machinery seems to be endlessly thirsty so it obviously needs a continuous supply.
I don’t, in general make this same bargain, and I’m not more than happy to give my data, and thus sacrifice my privacy. However, I have had to reckon, and I think many of those who value privacy must too, with the fact that it isn’t inherently valued by everyone, that simply adequately communicating this in a way that’s better understood won’t translate to people suddenly realising what they’re giving up. We aren’t always simply one great analogy away from changing every person’s world view and likely many have come to their view from a place at least as well informed as those of us who jealously guard our privacy. I also have to reckon with the fact that to some extent, my own desire to protect my privacy is at least not fully explainable by logic and rationalism, especially in light of how difficult it is to protect and how easy it is to have unwittingly ceded it. You might call that defeatism, and to simply conclude “well I lost some privacy, so I might as well give it up completely” is accepting defeat, again not something I’m yet prepared to do, but it is also perhaps important to acknowledge and factor present realities in to one’s thinking. It might sound defeatist to point out an enemy’s big guns pointed toward you from all sides, but it’s insane to ignore them. That quote that you’ve produced, while antithetical to my thinking, really isn’t irrational or illogical, and only defeatist if you were onboard with fighting to begin with. If you do not value your privacy and you get something useful in exchange for its sacrifice then it would seem obvious to part with it gladly and it’s difficult to offer a rational reason why someone shouldn’t. My strongest motivation for protecting it is more idealistic than personal and has more to do with a kind of slippery slope argument and a concern for hypothetical power grabbing and eroding of our rights and autonomy. I like to think that’s reason enough, but at least right now, for almost everyone, none of those concerns represent clear nor present dangers and I can’t prove it definitely will become such in future though I certainly feel like it has accelerated trends firmly in the direction of my fears.
As part of just living in… the world, I already kind of assumed it was possible for some parties, credit card companies in particular, to pry in to my financial activity and also interested governments to compel banks to hand over whatever they had, and/or possibly just hand over everything about everyone to government all the time automatically. This was bad enough, however, even I was surprised and shocked to learn how bad it was with my own bank when they sent me a letter gleefully telling me that as of the date of the letter they had now managed to sell my data to even more 3rd parties. I was not, up until that point aware that they were selling my data at all, and that 3rd parties (other than the credit card company) were getting access to it not just because of powers to compel, like people might expect of governments, but purely because the bank was literally handing it over to whoever was willing to pay for it, no consent on my part necessary. I don’t know what changed that required them to apparently have to now disclose this to me, but I assume that they were forced, hence the letter. The sneaky motherfuckers didn’t frame it that way though, not “due to recent legislation the bank is obliged to inform you blah blah blah”, no just “good news removed, we were selling your data, we still are, but we used to too, and now we’re selling it to more people, hope you like egregiously unethical behaviour because we put a travesty in to our travesty so you can experience a travesty while processing the first travesty”.
Nah they really like it, it’s making me feel like a weird uncaring sociopath that I’m just really not that interested in the multiple daily photos, but the rest of us around the person sharing can’t seem to get enough of it. I don’t know why I don’t care so much, I’ve met the kid and they’re nice enough, I hope I’m someone they’ll be glad to have in their lives and form an affection for but you can’t really convincingly fake intense interest and emotional investment and much as I’d like it to be, that just isn’t my natural reaction. I like to think if I have ever have kids it’d be different otherwise the poor kid would have to deal with someone totally uninterested for the rest of their lives.
Hmm. But like there’s stuff in there that isn’t even part of the substance of what you said. Like the call to action at the end. That’s the type of thing you’d want to be pretty sure you really wanted to do in some circumstance where you want to communicate on a matter in plain sight but obscure your identity, as such a matter would presumably be pretty important and high stakes.
This sounds good and promising but it’s should be noted that they do not have to answer to the FTC according to this article, it has merely been recommended in a letter to the FTC by one senator that they should investigate some specific car companies. There doesn’t seem to be any new way in which they are more or less accountable to the FTC than they were or weren’t already and there’s no obligation on the strength of this letter to do any investigation nor any guarantee of a positive outcome if they did. A rare and nice little show of support from a member of the political class for privacy rights but nothing substantive or concrete.
I really feel very uncomfortable with the notion of tracking the kids anyway. Arming them with knowledge as best as possible, and as usual showing interest in their behaviour to try and look as best as possible for signs of problems but ultimately kids are still people with their own lives even if people in development. Yes you need to protect them, to a certain extent, but ultimately some of this is no business but their own. You can try to educate and forewarn and hope some of it sticks but the tendency from my memory of being a kid is that that tends to be met with an eye-roll, this is probably where the temptation comes from to track children or drastically restrict the choices they’re able to make so they can’t ignore you but this is hardly a great way for that person in development to ultimately… develop.
This is dicey though, not least because as yet another random person on the internet offering their unsolicited opinion, I don’t even have kids, and if you follow my logic to extremis, you basically have, “let the kids just figure it out on their own they’ll be fine” which definitely won’t apply to everything and can have disastrous consequences in some contexts. But nevertheless I think this concept of tracking, either covertly, or overtly with the intention of making a kind of panopticon effect for the kids, is likely ineffective but even if effective, is indicative of something going wrong with the intent of the surveillance.
I’m new to Simple Login, though I’ve used throwaway addresses like mytrashmail (with no link to my real email of course) for a while. What I wonder is, if Sony are fussy about Proton, why do simplelogin domains not trip them up? That would seem even dodgier if you thought only services like Google’s were trustworthy.
Shit scared of this myself, that’s why I have an email client even though I was pretty happy with the web browser. At least there’s local copies. Already lost my hotmail account in a similar manner. Suddenly my password was considered incorrect, no means of recovery because I wasn’t keen on giving them personal info. I guess this somewhat proved their point but it all seems a bit fucked. My password was fine, had been using it since 1998.
I had this before, though not through a direct communication. Someone had gotten my email credentials somehow and installed a company’s app and made an account. When I went through the support pages on the company’s site to find out how to delete the account the only listed way was through the app itself.
They were accommodating and helpful when I emailed the company about it though. I just told them that I can’t agree to the privacy policy and thus cannot install the app but still need the account to be deleted. They did it.
This one’s interesting to me because I haven’t really used Linux since about 2009 and that’s because I had to start using Mac for work around that time and found that I liked it and after running a “real” Mac into the ground, I ran a hackintosh for many years to replace it so Mac OS is more my personal wheelhouse.
I’ve found it to be simultaneously one of the most restrictive and “free-est” platforms I’ve used other than Linux since a surprising amount of stuff is initially disallowed in a very noticeable and in your face way when you start using it and other capabilities seem not restricted but sort of… hidden, because of a general gist of a push towards Apple’s way of doing things and Apple’s walled garden (although it’s a nice comfortable pretty garden). But then at the same time I find that you can pretty much just ignore all of the gentle nudging towards certain ways of doing things and tell it NOT to restrict you when you find that it has and it just steps out of the way dutifully. I’m surprised then that your colleagues found an actual hard limit but it does sound quite beyond anything I’d be doing.
While I say it steps out of your way if you tell it to, that does somewhat beg the question though of why bother with it if you’re just going to ignore the whole Apple side of Apple Mac OS when it is kind of the main thing they’re offering with the platform? Actually I find I have an answer for that which is that’s it’s just really nice to use and I can dabble with Terminal and adjusting things here and there and using open source command line tools from package managers via terminal or with front ends and then also on the same system go completely commercial and use very mainstream software and tools. As you said it feels like some kind of Linux distro although certainly not in spirit and in your estimation a downright “shitty” one.
Maybe if I try it this way around. If you suddenly had to switch to using Windows from tomorrow onwards, besides the usual teething period of adjusting to something different, would your capacity to do your work be impeded in a meaningful way that would be inherently impossible/not worth it to overcome?
Also, though you didn’t say it yourself I gather some like the idea that if they wanted to try something unusual they could tinker with the kernel even if they probably wouldn’t, but even in the unusual case, why would you?
Going back to the car analogy I think that puts it very well, but actually it does also circle me back to my initial source of interest. I mentally always put Linux as the highly capable sports car with Windows as the Yaris, but I realise that I am just assuming that’s the case without knowing exactly what makes that inherently so. With cars for example I will assume that the “sports car” is faster and has a lot of features to make driving fast work better like increased safety structures and better handling so when you’re actually going fast you can steer without crashing. What’s the broad and general basis of comparison in the context of computing?
Do I misunderstand emby or does it just not seem like a good deal on the basis of it being an ongoing subscription? I use the free version of emby and it’s really great. There was at least one feature that required payment to unlock. I like emby already and when I tried using jellyfin, the core features that were on both it and the free version of emby worked far less reliably and the paid feature on emby that was free on Jellyfin, worked extremely unreliably. Obviously resources and development had been spent to make something that worked very well and their paid feature probably would too. I use emby to make it easier to cast media locally to my chromecast and to access media on my computer, from my phone in my bedroom, so for me, it’s a fancy file browser and media player. The feature I wanted was to do with free to air tv streaming and I was thinking I’d be happy to pay for the Emby software to unlock this since they made good software that works. But here’s the thing, it’s FREE to air TV and yet they want me to pay, ongoing, in a perpetual arrangement to use it. I don’t get it. I use it to play media, but the media is my media stored on my machines. I understand software development isn’t free, I was happy to pay ONCE, but why would I keep paying when they don’t actually produce the media I use it to play? That seemed unjustifiable.