I’m sure you’ve all seen it before - those instances where someone asks a question and they are hyper focused on some privacy aspect that is sort of a moot point when you look big picture. And it’s not due to a lack of knowledge or confusion about the topic, it’s something where obsessive actions are piled on top of misplaced worry. Stuff like “The government is tracking me with my phone so I need to delete the Facebook app and that will keep the three-letter agencies from knowing what I do.” Not the best example, but you likely know what I mean.
Are there resources out there to help people who are viewing the legitimate concern of most of us living in surveillance states, and taking that to an obsessive point? Obviously none of us are mental health professionals or capable of diagnosing mental illness, and it’s a sensitive topic to broach with people. But it would be nice to know if there’s anything out there at all as a starting point.
Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor and can’t give real medical advice. This is my own subjective advice as a forum friend and fellow privacy advocate who has been in therapy their whole life and dealt with anxiety, depression, PTSD, and ADHD.
The caveat here is that mental health therapies are still in their infancy and rapidly evolving. We now have much cheaper neural imaging that are enabling larger and larger studies to better understand out grey matter and constantly learning new ways to diagnose and treat different ailments. What we know now as far as general advice goes is that there’s no general advice and just a LOT of variance in how every person needs to be treated.
Seeking out professional help is certainly the best way to acheive real progress IMO as well but you should do your due diligence on verifying the professional you work with is actively and deeply engaged with newer research as this stuff changes weekly. As someone with ADHD and GAD, digging rabbit holes is like an acid trip for me. It can be euphoric to let my brain wander and learn but there can also be ruminating “bad trips". Having a diagnosis of your “panel" of neurodevelopmental and/or emotional dysregulations and finding a doctor who specializes in those will be far more effective but requires you do a lot more homework and spend money and time which given the enshittification of the world not everyone has.
To add onto this, you equally need to find a doctor who doesn’t see seeking privacy in general as erratic behaviour or solely a response to anxiety. Dont forget that doctors live in the general population as well and don’t have your technical background so it’s possible they misinterpret your concern for privacy as paranoia. Adding this requirement to the list of “the perfect doctor" and you’re looking for a unicorn, so what’s more important here is to ensure that a doctor is at least open minded and curious about why you care about privacy versus asking some pointed questions and making their assumptions ahead of time.
If money, time, and insurance resources are scarce as is increasingly the case, I’d recommend taking time to simply talk and be with other humans and build relationships with friends and family. Try to increase exercise and mobility. These things in general should be a part of any mental health plan, but can be executed with or without professional help. Maybe look into joining free or cheap community health programs where you can be around others and move your body and leave your phone in the locker.
Once you’ve removed yourself from the cyclic spiraling a bit, you may be able to do a bit of self-diagnosis and get a hunch about what may be causing the spiraling and read journals and books on the subjects from medical professionals. The self-diagnosis should be treated with scrutiny, but often it’s a good idea to develop your own critical thinking and ownership over ypur mental health while maintaining a balance towards seeking information from lrofessionals. This should not be seen as a replacement to seeking out professional healthcare in the long run, but something you either do if you currently lack resources to seek professional health or to do along with it.
Suggesting any materials would require us to know a lot more about the individuals spiraling and waaay off topic for this forum though.
My question is how does one explain to a stranger via an internet forum that “hey, man, I think you need to talk to someone” in a way that doesn’t just push them away? Sadly, it seems like many people use “Hey, go touch grass” and “you need therapy” interchangeably, so it seems like it can be easily interpreted as a poor insult if the recipient wants, rather than seeing someone voicing a serious concern about a stranger.
What I’m asking about is when we spot people on here that clearly need help….how do we do try and nudge them towards help they need?
I was hoping that in a perfect world, there might be a “hey, are you worried about privacy and taking it to the extreme? Here’s some signs you’ve gone off the deep end and need therapy instead” type article or video or something that we can link to when we see someone here or IRL that is obviously going off the rails. Which is me expecting too much, I know, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.
Your advice on people IRL is spot on, and it’s good advice, but it’s easier to have that conversation with someone you know personally.
And I know what you mean about ADHD and rabbit holes. I’m no stranger to them, either. But what I mean is genuine paranoia.
We get posts (and many more on Reddit) that are obviously seriously misplaced effort with a level of intensity that is not warranted by misunderstanding. And very often it veers into something like “the 3-letter agencies/Illuminati/Beyonce/Google are listening to my phone calls and I switched to Tuta and it’s not secure enough and why does it always show where I am in Google maps?”
Just ignoring people obviously in need of help just seems cruel.
There’s only so much you can say and the way you say it if text is the medium of communication because tone is hard to set this way.
I would begin with explaining what you’re feeling and why about them. Give a few examples. Explain your rationale and thinking. And then encourage them to go seek proper help.
The more detailed you are, the more likely they will be to fathom all you mean, why, and how. And the more likely they will actually go seek help.
Besides that, I don’t know think there is anything else you can do if they are strangers online. If it were someone you knew, I would call a wellness check on them through the local authorities at most.
Uffff yeah man I feel you. Unfortunately this is something akin to seeing news in Gaza and repeatedly being reminded families are being killed. You see the images like the suffering is right there in front of you but there’s too much of a disconnect to feel like you’ll be able to do anything. This repetition of seeing all this bad news in the world can breed a sense of apathy or disconnectedness as its like staring at a huge set of problems that feel much bigger than you can solve. Peter Singer’s famine, affluence, and morality was one of the earliest cries for the western world to stop ignoring the suffering outside of their perviews as its just as inhumane to ignore a nearby child drowning as you walk by them as it is to ignore suffering when a child is across the world.
However, it is too much for one mind to comprehend all this suffering at the scale and reach of the internet after some time and a common criticism applied to Singer’s work is that it is hard to apply the same logical conclusions of his work at global scales of people. Imagine extending the drowning analogy to 500 drowning kids. Which do you save? You can’t save all and some will die and that will be traumatic for you.
Another consequence of utilitarian consequentialism is that it assumes the help we give to others both in person and online are actually helpful in the short or long term. How do we know we aren’t responding and most people aren’t just seeing any attempt to help them as a “touch grass bro" sentiment? How do we know we were successful at helping someone or making things worse in the long run when sharing some resource? We don’t according to Kantian deontological ethics. We can only objectively improve ourselves and the more we do, we can be available for those within proximity. By taking care of ourselves first, we can establish more empathy and care much easier in person, but this can be online as well. What’s important is not making it a numbers game in your direct interactions but to really focus on helping people when they want to be helped (ie when they ask for it) otherwise you’re likely just doing it so you feel better about their situation. But then how do you help people without offering it?
I think the best way to reach people is through building valuable resources that are good enough to warrant people sharing it. The best way I’ve seen this happen is to build communities much line PG does for privacy that fill voids for topics like mental health in tech and privacy applications. If you really feel crushed by seeing others experience this issue, it could make sense to build up resources and tell people you are trying to get more information about what people tend to fixate on or causing them the most harm and then build a readme page that documents that. Then maybe build something more formal. Don’t avoid building your own resource because you may stumble onto something similar or it overlaps with some other work. Worst case you can join forces like PG did with that Dutch privacy community. But often you’ll find that to reach people the same message needs to be said 1000 different ways with different areas of focus. These resources can act as a guiding light and help people read what you tend to see within and gives them the space to either identify or not with your viewpoints and potentially seek out more or even better, offer criticism to your work to improve it for others. As a curstor of the information this then invites them to have the conversation versus seeking it out with them when they are not ready to.
Grow yourself, write your learnings and references down, share, mentor and learn.
This article will not help for people who genuinely need mental health support, but it might help for the ones who are simply new to privacy and trying to do it all at once in a sudden panic.
I think a lot of it has to do with proper threat modeling.
Unless this person is Edward Snowden or some other individual, they are most likely not the target of these three letter agencies. I said this before in the forum, but the most Americans are not usually the target of three-letter agencies if they are not considered a foreign agent. Even non-citizens are protected because chances are, you are not leading some organization or some major political figure.
Worrying about data collection and your personal life being leaked for some advertising campaign is a valid threat model for the average person. Worrying about the NSA spying on your webcam is an unhealthy obsession if and only if you are not even close to a viable target.
It may seem that way. However, no one is obligated to help others. People may not have the confidence, ability, understanding or trust to help someone. The wrong “help” can cause harm, even with the best of intentions.
Further, no one is obligated to receive help. Pushing unsolicited “help” into someone’s face is disrespectful. We shouldn’t be policing this forum or any forum to see who might need mental health support, referring people to mental health services without consent nor calling for “wellness checks.” It is disrespectful and risks wasting support resources, even potentially dangerous for the person the “help” is intended for. Those who need help should seek it or make it obvious they need help. Then, it is up to a trusted person or community to provide help that is appropriate for the person.
Another thing that complicates helping others, especially on the internet where text is the sole medium, is determining whether or not someone actually needs help. Something disturbing that someone writes could be just an intellectual misunderstanding and not an actual mental health case. Unless you personally know someone and they explain their problem to you, it’s not obvious.
For a forum like this, I think the best option is just to make it well known there are support services available. Like you suggest, an article or video about the topic may serve useful.
If you’re privacy conscious, going to “therapists” might be a bad idea because they’re effectively government informants with bad security practices. Its common practice for “therapists” to keep notes of your sessions in electronic databases, and you may not be able to delete them or even see what they’ve written about you. Even if the government isn’t a concern, they have a horrible track record of keeping therapy records secure.
They can, and in many cases are required to report suspicions of breaking the law. Depending on the person, suspicion can be roused by steps to hide your internet behavior. Therapists are likely to ask “What do you have to hide?” if you mention taking steps to keep your internet activities private.
In some western countries, law enforcement partner with medical providers to monitor for possible signs of “radicalization”, such as sudden social isolation erratic behavior. If you seek government, or military employment, they typically look through mental health records first.
If there is a legitimate concern behind needing privacy - i.e. you suspect you have a stigmatized condition, sexual attraction or gender identity, are concerned about actions your government is taking (i.e. war), or if you have or will have a strong public presence, then it is perhaps safer to not go to a therapist.
Talking to a therapist can be a bit like posting to the internet; once its out there, you don’t have real control over your data, and this could effect you years down the road.
It sounds “paranoid” but this is just the reality of living in a modern surveillance state, and as seen above, many people have suffered consequences because of this.
Are there resources out there to help people who are viewing the legitimate concern of most of us living in surveillance states, and taking that to an obsessive point?
Talk anonymously or pseudo-anonymously, or better yet offline about these issues with trusted individuals who have went through similar experiences. As @KevPham mentioned, privacy burnout is often a threat modeling issue, and reducing it is merely a matter of taking reasonable and practical steps against the most likely threats.
For example, I had recently began to withdraw from family members by texting because I didn’t want family drama intercepted and stored indefinitely about a third party. After some discussion my family and close friend circle recently adopted SimpleX as our go-to messenger and calling app, and this healed my concerns and helped restore family relationships. But an average therapist isn’t going to come up with solutions like that.
Thanks @KevPham and @em for your responses, and I think you’re both hitting the right points here in terms of how to subtly communicate to someone that they can determine themselves if they’re going overboard and need to take a step back. Which is the only way to really get someone to take a step back, if they think it’s their idea.
Em, I think I read this article over the summer and hadn’t put it in this context; thanks for bringing this back around.
Kev, to your point, since anyone that has a legit worry about being tracked by three-letters isn’t posting here asking for advice, that’s a good route to go. Those people have people and/or training, and aren’t setting up their own android phone they bought themselves.
That is an interesting topic. I started my privacy journey many years ago and eventually went to some extreme obsession. While I learned a lot about security and privacy, I also realized my past errors and current ones. My new knowledge about security was helpful, but my new understanding of privacy was… different. Now, I don’t care much about commercial surveillance, especially technical analytics data rather than personal data. Because that is nothing compared to government surveillance — they already know a lot about you (and that’s okay). If you start going to extremes (like using Tor, for example), that just raises even more questions about you (or sends you to a doctor, lol). I see how people do weird things, obsess over the wrong threats, obviously being paranoid, etc., etc. I hope PrivacyGuides could focus more on explanations and details rather than just saying “use this” or “don’t use that.” I don’t need those anymore, but I needed them before I jumped on this privacy train. Thanks.