Have you guys also noticed this? I’m not talking about “Oh my family isn’t privacy conscious” I honestly get that for ur average moms and pops, they don’t know any better.
the problem is with how these big tech companies effectively poisoned the everyday Joe to think that handing over ur data like a good boy is the norm and breaking out is “weird” and “too much”, this blame also goes on Hollywood.
Yesterday my friend called me " Mr robot" for just taking my privacy seriously I thought it was funny.
some people also fired their single neuron and told me “People only do this when they have something to hide”
These remarks that I face from time to time really highlights the mentality of the general society where if you break out of the norm, even if it doesn’t harm them, they would find a way to make off handed remarks about it almost like they’re dissatisfied that you’re fighting.
Yeah if I talk about how everything is routed through VPN people just assume I’m deep into porn or worse.
You are becoming one of these “privacy weirdos” as some think. Fighting for own privacy and using all means to keep it in tact is a lonely battle. Its tough to find someone irl who share the same values. It looks like everybody just got into the same train and go with the flow. For them you are disruption, something uncommon, strange.
I work in IT and even a coworker called me out for trying to protect my privacy by leaving google services as much as possible and using GrapheneOS, running PiHole with unbound. I don’t know how people can work in that field and still be blind to all the privacy concerns.
The really creepy one is stuff like 23andme where your genealogy obsessed extended family all does it and now they can statistically estimate your genome from your known family history and it’s all in a database for sale and Trump’s DOJ is likely buying
Look, you might be saying it’s the fault of people around you, but look at what you’re doing here, you give out your real name without a second thought, Mr. Robot.
;)
Was very cool getting doxed a few weeks ago when somebody thought they should post something about me online since I didn’t have a Facebook/Instagram/twitter to post it myself.
I think people reject that it’s as bad as they’re told because that don’t like to believe it’s that bad, or that there’s no way companies would do that to them. People don’t accept being told “you’re making a big mistake” and to feel dumb about it.
That’s my take. I had somebody at work ask what I do regarding privacy and I realized I lit up with excitement to share and had to immediately dial it back to not freak them out. I started out small and simple and emailed them since basics after chatting. Said, if they wanted additional info let me know " so that it’s up to them to continue the journey (down the rabbit hole lol).
But just glad to see others gaining the knowledge. My journey wasn’t immediate, it’s gradual, so I have to be mindful of their process too.
I always gotta love the “why do you refuse the cookies? The site might not work!”.
Sweety I need you to understand that I do not care whether or not the site works. If it doesn’t then it’s not worth my time.
Its wild, I remember when my first paycheck came in and a family member posted a picture of it to their social media… with my name and all on there.
It also doesn’t stop with privacy, I remember expressing my distaste for generative LLMs to the same person, and the first thing the next day they post in our discord is some shitty ai meme of me and asked if I liked it? All I said was “ah, I tell you I don’t like LLM art and you upload my face to their database, pretty thoughtless of you.” The comment went right through one ear out the other.
I don’t talk about privacy with normies. If they bring it up, I’m happy to discuss.
I think privacy is very slowly becoming more mainstream and a large part of that is thanks to google. Installing “ai” on devices, deleting peoples’ accounts, making installing non-play store apps more difficult, will ultimately encourage more people to degoogle their lives.
Idk why tf they’re so hell bent on AI, I get that they need a return on their shitty investments but my god the level of detachment from the general public is insane
Because AIs don’t need salaries, don’t unionize, can work 24/7.
For some tasks, AI has already completely obsoleted humans. An AI can write a shitty PR filled newsletter faster and cheaper than a human. It keeps getting better at certain tasks, like programming.
All AI companies want to be the one that controls the best AI. Because if they do, then other companies will pay them to rent out AIs for cheaper than human labor.
Companies fear falling behind. So they dump loads of money into AI. And currently, investors like hearing about AI. So the more companies say and push AI, it increases investment into the company.
It’s way more insidious. “AI” is very much LLMs, or Large language Models. The one thing they excel at is ingesting large amounts of text and summarizing, or looking for key points, as directed, and sometimes with non-exact directions.
Large amounts of text, like your browsing history, your personal cloud-stored files, your chats and messages your email. Your taxes. Your bank records. Your not-yet filed patents. Your medical research. Your political donations. Your protest plans. Your sources for the journalism you are doing.
At scale, society-wide. Zoom back and predict the markets overall sentiment. Zoom in down to a single “undesirable”.
All that “it’ll do human creative jobs you have to pay so much for, and if you reduce headcount you’ll get a nice bonus” is for all the short-thinking middle management and vapid C-levels to get suckered by the Mechanical Turk show into think they’ll get a bonus this quarter by putting all their sensitive information on someone else’s computer.
And once their IT staff is minimized and hardware is out of reach, you have achieved vendor lock-in.
And it’s absolutely incredible how literally everyone seems to have fallen for this shiny turd.
I mean cmon, “Palantir”? They were literally created for this purpose.
If you happen to want to know more on why, there are 2 podcasts that talk about this on a very regular basis:
- Deep Questions with Cal Newport - super chill guy that every week has an episode on ai reality check. Usually explains quite at length why something is happening on ai why is factual or not
- Better offline - Ed can be quite opinionated and sometimes borderline ranty, but he also tends to breakdown stuff like financial numbers on ai investment and why (or why not) you should break those down.
thank you for this, I’ll def check it out!
Yeah, I don’t get it either. I read that only 3% of companies using “ai” saw a return on investment. Companies started re-hiring the humans because the “ai” turns out to be shit. We can’t even produce the power to run these models at scale.
Agree. One thing that I’ve noticed is that if it’s about social media I say I “had to delete it for mental health, that shit is so bad for you”, and generally get a much more receptive response than when I explain it’s primarily for privacy and that I don’t trust them with my data.
Though Zuck and others are making it way easier to point out how creepy their platforms are, so that becomes a good entrypoint re: privacy also.
only if mark would give me the zucc
also yeah they make it so easy to see how predatory they are, people will still pick sides and defend them lmao
Yeah absolutely. My friend asked if i wanted to go to a palestine protest… over sms. Told him I wont talk about politiical activity over insecure means. On his part he did agree at least… but then refused to download signal
It’s good to be conscious about these things, but it’s also important to have a correct analysis of the threat level.
Do you have a good reason to believe authorities might be monitoring your phone specifically out of the hundreds of millions of people the could pick from? They don’t have the capacity to monitor every single phone or conversation. They will have their own threat analysis and only put you under that type of surveillance if you are or if you have the potential to become an active threat to them.
If you just go about your life minding your business then you can be certain the feds aren’t reading your sms.
It’s true that better safe than sorry, but at the same time you can’t let safety paralyse you and stop you from acting.
Yeah i see that.
im fine if the gov knowing i went to that protest. Im proud to attach my face to it. However comms over sms becomes an issue when we decide to go to an illegal protest, which will become more and more of an issue over the next decade, at least in my country.
So by establishing the general rule of secure communications for political activism, i hopefully avoid a friend making the blunder of sending a photo/talking about a protest that was explicitely said to be illegal and punishable by a fine or worse.
If you just go about your life minding your business then you can be certain the feds aren’t reading your sms.
Until you show up at (or even just walk by) a Palestine protest, and then you’re on the list and your text messages are fair game.
On situations like this, redirect the people to recent incidents that prove the point. The last typhoon attacks on the USA make super clear on how brittle the network infrastructure can be, but also how insecure some legacy protocols are. EDIT: also the odido data leak on the Netherlands also proves a lot this point as well.
maybe start doing pgp encrypted sms lol
he has the right motives but misguided haha
I think a big part is never having used the “privacy muscle”, and atm its atrophied. I was like that before taking privacy seriously
That’s par for the course my friend. But the response to these cliché statements is what can start to change perspectives! I like highlighting how Big Tech knows them better than they know themselves. Then get into how this means big tech has the ability to change how they view a topic based the specific search results. I then zoom out and explain how this happens for every user similar to them, as well as for every other “group” big tech classifies people under.
I often get something like “But what can we even do about it then?” in response, which more often than not, eventually leads to them admitting they’re lazy and things are too convient to switch away from or stop using lol
I usually point out that they were the ones saying that their phones are listening to them and making changes to their instagram\shopping algorithm.
oh trust me I can argue, its always them being lazy and giving up on their rights
I knew a guy once who would upload party photos to Facebook and other sites, tagging the people in it. Did that with passed out and way too drunk people too. That was my call to never party with him… and to maybe drink less over all.
what a mess lmao
It’s by design. If 80 to 90% or more of people blindly agree to share their contacts and email then the rest of use are caught up in it every time we communicate with them.
You cannot both participate in mainstream social networks and communications platforms and have any real privacy.
that’s big issue but I’m referring to is the social stigma that these big tech companies and Hollywood have cultivated.
People automatically think ur too shady or paranoid if you even think about being private
I’ve heard you can ask those people, “if you have nothing to hide would you be OK with a camera in your shower? Recording you have sex?”
I like the saying that privacy is like cancer. Just because you don’t have it doesn’t mean its not vitally important to solve for society as a whole.
