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.
I thought you were going in a different direction (Even without a Facebook account, Meta has your contact info because they scanned your friend’s phone) but both are true. I’ve had similar conversations about it and privacy is not a value most people think is worth standing for. The convenience always outweighs what, for them, is a non-issue.
Honestly, maybe I got some charisma or something because I got my friends to take some first steps by using Brave and Bitwarden. Got a couple of them on Signal as well
arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
- Edward Snowden
For as much as your average American loves big government conspiracies, and harping about other people violating the sanctity of their property, they have absolutely no actual privacy and security sense
It is worse than that. They often share your information directly, or initiate services that require your participation, and of course you must prove who you are to do so.
Yeah if I talk about how everything is routed through VPN people just assume I’m deep into porn or worse.
Well, there’s a new War On VPNs starting (ugh). If the Forces of Enshittification prevail, we could see them banned in more countries. And not just the usual suspects either. The idea is being pushed in several US states, in the UK, and maybe(?) the Aussies? It’s being fought in all those ofc. But I’m afraid the political momentum for bans will build and build.
My hope is, that Canada will be chill and not follow the rest of us off a cliff. Come on, Canada! You’re our best hope!
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
thank god my family didn’t use those services
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.
;)
Sometimes I dream of saving the world. Saving everyone from the invisible hand
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.
guhhh but I love cookies!
Ayep. Probably including where you live and what you do for a living.
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
thay have already made the investment and they desperately want the return
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.
I think thatsa great description of Zitron. His editorial style initially turned me off but he is thorough and shows his sources for the factual sides of his arguments.
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.
