Hi Everyone! Today’s new article is about learning to celebrate the small wins in data privacy and adopting a nuanced approach to appreciate each advancement.
Privacy is definitely not dead, but we must keep fighting to improve it. Slowly but surely, in the right direction 
Yay, new article!
Hardest challenge: convincing a friend to actually update their phone 
Good article, “I have nothing to hide” and “Privacy is long gone” are the most often things I heard when people talk about privacy. I find this article more useful for people who are “too” passionate about privacy.
We cannot achieve good level of privacy just by ourselves unless we have ZERO social interactions with others, our level of privacy also depends on the our social circle. Like holes in a bucket, we should plug the lowest holes first, rather than the top ones.
its gonna take a while before we start getting benefits, privacy cautious folks spent tones of time to learn privacy related matters, and spent even more time to adopt good practices / services. They should allow the same to others.
Take it easy, make it slow, and if possible, make it fun.
Thank you! 
And yes absolutely! I completely agree and I love the patching holes in a bucket analogy!
I want to upgrade my in-laws phones but I become their IT staff… 
@EmAtPrivacyGuides I get you but when do I prod them with other things? About a week or a month sounds good?
Ah yes, this is the difficult task haha
I think a week or a month sounds reasonable. Of course that all depends on the type of persons they are and how difficult was the last improvement to implement. The goal is to not make people feel overwhelmed or discouraged.
I’m sure they greatly appreciate your kind IT services 
Someone once asked me, with some concern, “what’s wrong with Telegram?” as they had just switched to it. Seeing the trap for what it was, I stuttered out, “n-nothing, it’s fine.” And that was where the conversation ended.
Privacy progress is a fragile thing, and even one step in the right direction is a big achievement. It’s more than most will ever take. I didn’t have it in me to point out any of the problems with Telegram…and at the time, it was considered far better than Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger. That’s probably still the case, I don’t know.
I do what I can these days, but I’m not as stressed about it. I’m a pretty bad spokesperson for the idea anyway, as when asked directly, “why have you spent so much time learning about privacy? What’s the point?” I wasn’t able to come up with much of an answer on the spot. The best I can do is encourage people who are thinking about taking steps of their own.
It has been a very long time since I have seen anyone around me take any steps toward privacy. It’s not something people think or care about. It rarely comes up in conversation and I’m definitely not going to bring it up. People’s attitude tends to be that privacy is already forfeit.
This is another, less-obvious trap. If I respond to this by saying, “Signal is a private way of messaging people,” the other person will start grimacing and handwave the idea as being too much work or otherwise dismiss it as unworkable because they wouldn’t be able to get anyone else to use it other than me. When you see a news story about a data breach or something similar, the “privacy is dead” response is common. What I didn’t realize at first was that this really meant the other person doesn’t care and was their way of dismissing the news as trivial.
And that’s fine! I don’t expect anyone to care about the same things I do. Unless someone asks me for advice, I don’t bring up privacy. It’s way too easy to discourage somebody from seeking privacy through impassioned conversation about it - at least in my experience.
I don’t trust Telegram but you probably gave the right response in the moment (if they thought they were upgrading their privacy). Next time (and I’m speaking to myself, here), maybe ‘That’s a great start! Just remember to turn on encryption’ (or whatever the issue with Telegram is - I don’t use it either.
Thank you for this. It think it’s so important particularly in the privacy community where we can go deep down the rabbit hole.
Telegram isn’t E2EE except for secret chats.
and outside of that Telegram has issues with it’s encryption, iirc the protocol calling it MTProto.
So I would say to make them use signal when the time is right.
This needed to be said for a while, glad we have a post we can link to every time someone falls into this trap.
Apathy and inaction is a tool to make you weaker, and it takes away from what you can and must do.
This whole “Privacy is dead” thing is propaganda, and it only benefits the rich and powerful who want to normalize selling out every bit of our lives to them.
Random personal anecdote: I was so ignorant and paranoid about privacy when I fully committed to it back in 2022 that I literally wanted to live in the woods (and probably kill animals to eat and survive). Funny how things have changed.
This is why I think it’s very important to spread the word! <3
Privacy is not dead, except for Australians who have already attained a “pro-vacy” level status of privacy deficit, With no individual rights to privacy protection under Federal or State/Territory law, and ISP’s legally obliged to log and retain subscriber metadata , not withoutlegal loopholes providing access to the data well beyond the interpretation of the law would lead you to conclude, the death is gifted to us upon birth courtesy of our government, The entire West blew up over Snowden’s reve;ationa, the name forever linked to the topic of privacy, and the NSA the big bad wolf. Our government did it in plain sight, introduced it as law, and it would be terribly un-Australian to challenge the establishment.
It took over 100 years for this country to properly recognise the First Nations people of this land, and they had the oldest rights of the lands across the globe, Just ask any 5 year old, they’ll tell you if you’re first one there , it’s yours. How many centuries of playing the Tortoise will it take, to catch the Hare which is continually lapping us, removing one taken for granted everyday life one day, illegal the next. I’m no legal enthusiast, but i’d be quite surpised if there’s even grain of sand from all the beaches worth of laws that have been unwritten once forged.
We claim to be a nation of one, but we’re a nation of ones. Whilst one is not directly impeded in their daily life, it’s not a problem. Disrupt a who’s interests align, and there might be a few echos of outcry, those impacted the most, but the alliances that formed to create the policy and have it enforcedare quickly disbanded back to individuals without any say in the matter.
I’m sure at least once a week on the Privacy sub-reddit someone is asking which data deletion services cater to Australians, who become just another swatted away and told there isn’t any, but i really feel like very few stop and consider what that actually means, and how bad the reality of the situation is. I don’t know if it’s a Hollywood American content digested belief in “how things work” on a broader scale than day to day life, if it’s a nation of ones syndrome who colloquially say they’re powerless as one, or if people just don’t care,
For my personally, from my viewpoint having impacted a certain liberties being taken away, and seemingly without my active awareness of it happening until it popped up on ny radar as one more layer of freedoms stripped away each time, privacy IS all or nothing. To me it’s tangible, you either have it, or you don’t. Without a legal right with which to claim against, can you ever claimed to have privacy? Applicable now more than ever, whereas previously there was a viel of perceived privacy for most, it wasn’t a matter of whether those rights existed or not but a matter of it was of little significance or impact on an analogue past. As life transitioned towards digital, legislature was drafted and passed which tightened the chains on that underlying freedom and much like anything Australian policy makers do is to ensure they cast a net as wide as possible from the beginning to ensure you can control it as it pleases futher down the road.
All it takes is a day of browsing to piece together more information than most realise, which is something I can never regain control over - disregarding every interaction linked to me previously - the only option going forward is total lockdown mode, air gapped from this future that we so desperately need to have, or i accept that controlling my information online is something i dont have much control over if i want to interact with this world. I can make smart choices, and i can not hand it on a silver platter without much additional effort but anything beyond that is frivolous. You either have an interactive voice assistant enabled smart home, and one of the top3 knowing what you’re doing at any given moment, or you have a much more stripped back disjointed experience that would be more effort than it’s worth. Yes the ability to self host services all the way up to voice enabled LLM’s controlling smart devices, however the population is still in transition to a wholely digital native population, and the costs associated are barriers that can’t be broken, only time can solve.
In that time, tomorrow will come and it will be looking a whole lot different that it did today. Privacy is certainly dead to me, and i’d sooner discontinue use than put the effort into completely remodelling the way I live, because at the end of the day, the “new life” my grandparents and father sailed halfway around the world to begin their journey was immigration propoganda to fill seats in a vast rather isolated land, it’s much easier to control the narrative in any way it serves the administrations needs. This post alone is far too much effort put into a frivolous task, but it’s midlife crisis time, the period of reflection upon what is there to show for my existence and when i’m gone, my name known only by a number in a database - Will now begin to have some content associated to it, and maybe i can still leave pieces of my presence behind, in the world where nobody knows my name, is the place where you’ll find pieces of me. I’ll release my own meta bundles periods where the buildup, backlog nd cleanup too great that taking a snapshot, wiping the slate and starting fresh on increasingly regular intervals. I archived 17,000 websites, 1,300 cookie monsters, 27 full contact forms, 900 open tabs (that was on my phone), that meta dump was a whopping 2.6MB of meta, bundled up, unencrypted and stored alongside old documentation of home networks over the years with IP’s, plaintext passwords that will provide access to devices or software should they be locked. Internet gets my data, charity any finances that remain, and thats the end of that horror show called life.