dislike ≠ hate. I don’t even mention China. Why do you insist on the extreme? It’s pretty clear that the UK is hostile toward anonymity, privacy and VPNs if you read the news recently. It’s true that the UK is not as extreme as China here. That’s true. And you’re right, we’re arguing over the semantics.
Stop putting words in my mouth! All I want to say is that are good reasons why people want anonymity in this situation and I gave you two examples. That’s it. I’m not saying that they should not public their name or that they have bad intentions or whatever.
But you saying this reminds me of the same logic of the statements people say and believe that goes something along the lines of “we don’t have privacy anymore anyway, why should I care about privacy products” or “there is no privacy online and the companies already have all my data, what’s the point of the privacy tools and apps anyway”
Do you see the connection? I think you’re engaging in whataboutism and this derails the conversation from the entity in question here and now. We can discuss the arbitrary lines we draw when we decide to use or not use a particular product simply based on a few facts that does raise eyebrows later/elsewhere. That’s taking a stance on a philosophical level and differences you may have with the people that may be or have funded a particular project.
Same logic can be extended and extrapolated to include the bad bad business practices of all of big tech. And you can take a stance on choosing not to use their products whatsoever. This would effectively mean you not being on the internet because much of the internet infrastructure also runs on the services of the same big tech companies we may despise.
No. Am I engaging in whataboutism or are you dodging my question?
I think this question has been answered:
In other words, “your line” is yours to draw.
What? My question is not that hard to answer. There are many reasonable answers to my question that are grounded in reality. I will only give you three examples, there are many more:
You can say “I trust DuckDuckGo because many of the “experts” said that it can be trusted despite being VC-funded.”
Or you can say “I trust DuckDuckGo because I use the wait-and-see approach and it didn’t do any “concerning activities” during its lifetime according to my research despite being VC-funded.”
Or you can just straight-up say “I don’t trust DuckDuckGo because it was VC-funded.”
See! It’s that easy! You don’t have to be a philosopher to answer my question.
Whatever it is, you can use your answer when dealing with any other company like Obscura and Brave and whatever.
Of course, you can also say “I trust DuckDuckGo and I don’t know it was VC-funded.” It’s a valid answer, just not particularly helpful in this situation.
Also, how can you go from “how can I, as a privacy-conscious person, trust a VC-funded company?” to “privacy is dead because big corpos already have all the data” that fast? I’m impressed.
When a specific topic gets generalized to death
But you saying this reminds me of the same logic of the statements people say and believe that goes something along the lines of “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” and “big, evil corpos infiltrate into every fiber of society, so why should I care about ethical consumption?”
This isn’t the excuse you think it is, Carl (: I encourage you to be more transparent, as the multi-party protocol you’ve worked so hard to implemented speaks for its guarantees anyway!
I know for a fact that Carl’s been online here after he posted this and after I commented on the same because he commented on other things but not this one. To give them another benefit of the doubt, I am hoping a press release of sorts is in works for such disclosures but I can only speculate so much in good faith.
I sincerely hope he gets back soon as I don’t want them to leave a bad taste in my mouth about Obscura.