I’ve had people tell me that this is (their words, not mine): “mental illness”
Yes, privacy is very important, but I’ve seen also a lot of tin foil hats arround here which don’t know really what is worth to protect and what only make browsing slower and more difficult. PEBCAK
A few weeks ago, I would have said 100%. I am needlessly careful.
I know I’m protecting against privacy threats that are technically possible, but unlikely. Preventing the tracking is just an interesting hobby, to me.
But earlier this month, we learned that Meta went “all-in” on what I consider some fucked up shit - running a mini localhost server to track the vanishingly few people who bother to block their tracking.
So now I guess I’m only about 30% sure I’m being needlessly careful.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently. I live a life where OPSEC is relevant. Its something that I have had to consider always, and has been for 2 decades. Even so, I wasn’t as concerned this whole time as I am these days. The fact is that technology is making it such that its no longer “im not a person of interest they wont spend resources on me” because data crunching is happening to such an extreme, on such a grand scale, that person of interest doesn’t even matter. Do you exist, yes. Do you have a digital foot print, yes you do. Even if you dont do a lot online. Your metrics are being captured and being inferenced, and systems are using predictive analysis to determine what you “may” do in a given situation. Depending on who controls those systems they may decide not to give you a chance to make that choice.
Ill I can say is that there are a large number of groups that want your data, for a lot of different reasons, and none of them are for your benefit. So, are you going to let them have it, or are you going to take steps to reign in the amount of info you leave about?
While certainly some people take it to a point that could be considered too far, I think that the reality is that you have to go very far if you want actual privacy today. I think most people either don’t know all the ways that their daily lives are being tracked and their activities are sold or they simply don’t care. To vast majority, doing anything that isn’t trivial is probably too far, and the more you talk about it with them, the more they will think it’s crazy. Most people of the older generation probably don’t “get it” or think it can be real, and very young people have probably never known privacy in their lives to much degree, so it can be a tough sell. I think Late Gen-X and Millienials are the main group that got to experience privacy when they were young and then saw it slowly eroded away in increasingly gross ways until it was gone.
Like most things on the internet it’s a game of one-upsmanship. User X uses Firefox with Incognito. User Y say’s that isn’t good enough for his own inconsistent definition of “good enough.”
So User-Y suggests Firefox with 14 different add-ons and only browse through an immutable VM. But then user-z comes along and says that if you are using windows at all, you don’t really care about privacy, so you should be using Icefox on some obscure fork of ubuntu through an immutable VM, with a pi-hole.
Then user-w says well if you aren’t using a VPN none of this matters, so Obviously you need to rent an Alibaba cloud server hosted in China, that you only connect to through a privacy respecting VPN, and then you only browse through TOR.And so on. By the time a user is asking about how to stop google ads, the only “serious” answer by the community involves using Packet over Ham-radio -> and spending thousands of dollars a month on 4 different cloud providers, rented through several shell companies set up in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and China, while only typing in Esperanto using an ASCII-only font.
A year ago: yes.
Today: nope.
Yes, paranoia is not healthy. When people can’t formulate a realistic threat model then usually to be “safe” they assume everyone is out there to get them … while failing the most basic steps, e.g. not relying on surveillance capitalist fueled tools voluntarily.
Yeh my family treat me like I am a nut job. I only swapped away from google and ask them to think about the orgs they spend their money on for example Amazon.
It’s amazing how many people got on board with Covid conspiracies but questioning where you data goes, who’s using it, what for, no that’s a bit far lol.
As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.
If you’re not having fun switching mail providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.
are you guys doing this for fun? i take some privacy precautions so i wont be mass targeted for anything i do today in the future.
I’d sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one’s time.
They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions (“what is Google doing this week?!”).
If you’re not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.
For example, I wouldn’t recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be “more secure”, but they have a job to do and can’t keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn’t “phone administration”.
LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It’s okay, I do it too. However, it’s not approachable or understandable to people who don’t share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.
There are probably some people that go too far, but that is true in any community. There are also people with a very legitimate threat model, for example if they are from insert your favourite dictatorship here and they have insert opinion against said regime
Yep, and then there’s probably a good number of people who have no idea of threat modelling who just copy those actions to say they have “good privacy”.
Tbh, I’m closer to the latter.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity
Relevant XKCD;
I feel that it is closer to the fact that the communities forgot most beginners are completely new to this in general. They might not even know what exactly a ‘browser’ is, much less cookies and stuff.
Hence when we try to spoonfeed them information, it comes off as overwhelming and forced.
Agree that there are some extremist, but they mostly act in good faith tbh.
Another thing I noticed is there are more preachers of ‘how’ than ‘why’. Having a beginner go down the route of privacy without giving them a purpose to do so is quite off-putting.
I dunno, considering that Facebook data has been used to go after people, we’ve got fascists using every method possible to target their current hated group, and police everywhere ignoring or bypassing due process by just buying data, I don’t think it all paranoid to think that privacy concerns are already huge, and could get worse
It’s just a conscious approach to tech.
We have people telling us the earth is flat. Them saying so doesn’t make our good old planet any flatter ;)
I mean one can find excess absolutely anywhere, that doesn’t demonstrate much imho.
I think that “mental illness” kind of comments would come from people whose attitude for safety in many aspects of life is “that’s never going to happen (to me)”. Those people exist, so sooner or later you’ll see comments like that.
On the other hand everybody is trying to find a balance in convenience and safety and the situations and environments and life on general for one person can be quite different from that of some others’. So what’s adequate for one won’t be for another.
It’s like PPE or personal finance or many other things. There’s no one size that fits all and finding the right fit isn’t easy. For a lot of us it’s work in progress. Sometimes you know what’s definitely needed and tweak the details. Sometimes you know something is not going well and needs to change.
Maybe it’s enough to say that it’s complicated and have some compassion and support for people that think it isn’t. Or people that think it’s all too much to handle.
