What do you think about this opinion article? Defeatism is very common nowadays.
Frankly, it’s too late to put the privacy genie back in the bottle. The best you can do is reduce how public you make your life. For example, with not quite a million CCTV cameras in London, or about one camera for every ten people, you don’t want to live there if you object to being surveilled. In the online world, if you don’t wish to have online snoopers tracking you, you don’t want to spend time on heavily monitored social networks such as Facebook and X.
The bottom line is you can’t avoid some exposure these days. For example, your smartphone is constantly tracking you. The best you can do is minimize your exposure by turning off location tracking services. If you’re serious about protecting your privacy from your smartphone, you can switch to privacy-first mobile operating systems such as e/OS.
I could give far more examples, but there’s no point. Today, unless you go totally off-grid, you’ll never have the privacy people took for granted at the end of the 20th century. It’s that simple. ®
Also, why is this author shouting out e/OS? Tech journalists really need to do more research.
Yeah… Too pessimistic and absolutist to take too seriously. I understand that the author, as a person, may have been feeling down when writing that, but it completely sidesteps any nuance in the matter. Having an account on Facebook, Twitter, or any other Torment Nexus doesn’t mean having your entire life on them. (Plus everyone could do with a bit less doomscrolling).
The bottom line is you can’t avoid some exposure these days.
So then avoid the rest of the exposure.
The best you can do is minimize your exposure […]
This has always been the case, any and all types of interaction necessitates some degree of identification.
If you’re serious about protecting your privacy from your smartphone, you can switch to privacy-first mobile operating systems such as e/OS.
This immediately changes the vibe from an opinion piece to an advertisement.
This is the reason why I’m working on my privacy blog in Spanish, because people unfortunately only see the negative side of privacy mostly because they don’t know how privacy works.
Besides, there are pretty decent tools that balance convenience and privacy pretty well and open-source software that are [chef kiss], so keeping up on privacy isn’t very inconvenient.
It’s important to spread the word and tell people privacy isn’t like the Nerf slogan.
The way I took it was it may wake up some people about how much privacy has declined since the 20th Century but may also spread a defeatist mindset to others.
Perhaps the author’s opinion is the thinking that perfection is required to maintain privacy, and some exposure means failure to maintain it.
It’s true that perfectionism is a necessity for some privacy goals. On the extreme end, for anyone with a high threat model, even one exposure of certain pieces of information could be the difference between life and death, or between any other two extremes. Another example is, the moment your face gets scanned, your faceprint will end up in a database and will never get deleted, so perfection would be needed to keep your face out of them in the context of ubiquitous surveillance.
At the same time, the less data about you is exposed, the more privacy you have. Unless your threat model requires perfection, I suspect this thinking is suitable for most people.
I scrolled someone’s account on Reddit recently who basically suggests that any argument to be “less private” is a bot. Literally a bot from Big Tech, telling you it’s ok to have a lesser threat model and to use some Google or Microsoft services so they can collect more info on you. Thus you shouldn’t listen to those people, and should try to be perfect.
The same person had a point about not using Big AI for anything personal, so wouldn’t that make this correct to?
If anything I’m often inclined to agree with the article, if only because of how overwhelming the alternative is.
It is still in our hands, people can ultimately take it back like that (in)famous brother of Mario with the CEO…
Why go for defeatism when anarchism could be a more interesting and exciting approach to life.
In all seriousness, I am near-ish off-grid.
You don’t have much to fight privacy for, in a good way.
But you also don’t have anonymity.
Everyone knows you (specifically, the in-laws family).
People will ask if you stay at their old folks house.
There is no real polite way to go around this. It is weirder to be extra defensive about it. I just say yes because actual lying about it has no value.
In a real off-grid scenario, there will always be a nearest neighbor and they will eventually visit to say hi. You can lie or be honest. But remember if sh*t hits the fan, you will eventually have to rely on them and you better have enough “social credit” with your neighbors for them to help you. Being unfriendly with “extreme privacy” wont help you in a mountain jungle remote home behind 2 creeks scenario.
There is no escaping your neighbors phones, don’t kid yourself. But you don’t have to be anonymous to be private.
You can self host though, and fight back your digital rights. Use a better phone like Graphene, better mail like Tuta/Protonmail/Mailbox. You don’t need to be in the backwoods to use those. You just have to choose where your data goes.
What the journalist does not realize is that computer literacy has also leveled up today. Just because you know how to navigate a UI, doesn’t mean you are instantly computer literate. Part of neocomputer literacy these days involves being aware what happens to your data and taking control of where it resides. That is what we aspire here, but I am preaching to the choir.
Defeatism is what powerful people want over the population. It kills any momentum. Not only for privacy, but e.g. climate change and any other movement.
If the current state is accepted and normalized, that’s how we lose.