Taking a stand in your circles

Off Topic
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I can see the analogy too, and I agree that it’s certainly useful when we are talking about convincing someone to hold our values and beliefs.

But one interesting thing to note is that veganism is capable of the live and let let live mentality while privacy advocacy isnt.

I have a vegetarian friend and whenever I invite them over for dinner, it’s always with the knowledge that they will never eat meat. That choice is very personal because it doesn’t require me to change much about myself or how I interact with them. When I invite them over for a party, I just make sure to have vegetarian food options and let them live as they do.

It’s oddly different with privacy. You can’t just let other people live as they do because privacy is inherently an interpersonal phenomenon. The choice to be private is not personal; it conceptually demands changes to the environment.

Where being vegetarian merely requires me to meet certain conditions, i.e., to not eat meat, being a private person requires me as well as the people I speak with to meet the same conditions simultaneously.

The primary difference between vegan advocacy and privacy advocacy is that vegans are having discussions like this about changing people’s minds for ideological reasons, whereas we privacy advocates are having this discussion because it is conceptually necessary for us to individually attain privacy at all. I just thought this was an interesting difference.

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42

Hi, InternetGhost!

Can I ask about what kind of “bad news” do you share on social media? Aren’t most leaks due to security rather than privacy issues and fails? Does sharing about the security fails help people become more aware of why privacy is important too? I’m asking as a privacy noob whose friends and family “got nothing to hide” and are “all spied on on the internet anyways”.

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By “leaks”, I assume you mean data breaches? I agree that data breaches (or leaks) are usually the result of bad security. But the concern for the individual is inherently privacy-related. When I share data breach news to my friends, the usual goal is not to show them that the breached service is insecure (even though that can be a byproduct). It’s to show, rather, that the personal data they give out can now be viewed by other people and that their personal accounts can be accessed as a result of this personal data being leaked. These concerns are privacy-related, even though their origins are security-related.

Additionally, “bad news” isn’t just data breaches. It encompasses a lot of things. Privacy violations from corporations still exist, like Bunq sharing users’ investments with others on their contacts list or Facebook wanting access to people’s camera rolls or LinkedIn tracking medical data.

There’s likely also privacy violations from your government wherever you are. I live in the US, so there’s been a few things coming up, like ICE monitoring neighborhoods without warrants or using personal data to target arrests.

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44

@anon98749087 thank you for sharing! I will add context to Ethos #1

why digital privacy is important to values that people already have

I’ll also add this into solutions:

I have other friends who are hosting like essentially small consciousness raising groups among friends where they cook a meal and give people an opportunity to ask questions.

@ellie

Thanks for your question, I will be adding this “all spied on on the internet anyways” in classics to be debunked.

Although far from complete, you will have some answers in the section " Understand what the barriers to adopt privacy choices are:"

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I dislike th element of waging pycological warfare against our fellow man. WhatsApp users are pawns of Meta so we ‘attack’ them instead of Meta itself. The only way we defeat Meta is to starve them of resources. This is the exact same as the agricultural industry. Those doing harm are protected by government while their consumers become footsoldiers. Vegans saying ‘no thanks I’ll have the broccoli instead’ are percieved as taking ‘action.’ When in reality we understand that consuming any part of a dead animal necessitates the unjustifiable killing of said animal. The animal has a right to bodily integrity. You have the right to privacy. An animal can’t have bodily integrity while you cut out his heart. A WhatsApp user can’t have privacy while Meta reads his metadata.

Most people eat animals without sparing them a thought. Everyone uses WhatsApp so they don’t need to rationalise their decision. Suggesting broccoli or tofu is a revolutionary act which challanges the status quo and must be resisted. Otherwise it forces us to think for ourselves and come to difficult conclusions. We must admit to doing the wrong thing and pocess the guilt and shame. This is why new vegans get angry by the way. We feel the need to right our own wrongs while everyone calls us names.

46

I believe this is a fair perspective and I understand some can feel frustrated about fighting the wrong fight.

I do believe there are many other perspectives though.

A vegan can be a vegan for animal cruelty, but it could also be because of the environment, the food waste, health reasons, etc.

Also, I would link to this story:

There once was a farmer who lived with his son in a small village on the outskirts of the city. They had a horse that they relied on for most of their activities. One night, somehow the horse got freed and ran away into the nearby jungle. When the villagers heard about it, they came to sympathize with the farmer.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” they said. The farmer replied, “Good or bad, hard to say.”

A few days later, the horse returned and brought with him 7 wild horses. When the villagers came to know about it, they said, “Oh, that’s so good. You are so lucky.”

The farmer again replied, “Good or bad, hard to say.”

The next day, the farmer’s son chose to ride a wild horse. But he fell off the horse and broke his leg.

On hearing about it, the villagers said, “Oh, that’s too bad. What terrible luck.” The farmer shrugged and repeated the same thing, “Good or bad, hard to say.”

In the next few days, war broke out with the neighboring country. So, the king sent his officers to nearby villages to find young people to recruit for his army.

When they reached the farmer’s house, they found out that his son had a broken leg, and thus he was of no use in the army.

The villagers heard about it and said to the farmer, “Oh, that’s so good. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Good or bad, hard to say.”

Suggesting something is right or wrong is hard to say. We all have different morality compass and reasons for doing different actions.

Thank you for sharing :slight_smile:

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47

I hate to be pedantic but veganism is a rights based movement purely concerned with morality and ethics. Privacy has a practical element, such as reducing telemetry to save electricity, but ethics are at the heart of it.

In your story the farmer is not a moral agent. Events happen around him. He isn’t proactivily making choices. Privacy advocates are conciencious and upstanding, much like vegans. For that reason we experience the same challenges. There is no good argument for wishing to be surveilled. It makes people feel bad in ways they can’t articulate, so they go on the attack. “Annoying sanctimonious vegans who are always right.” Yes, we are. Choosing Signal over WhatsApp makes most users uncomfortable. We aren’t arguing with a logical mind but someone afraid of the unknown. Afraid of being wrong, so they won’t even consider it.