You need to be prepared to avoid saying naughty things on the internet. Otherwise, perhaps someone will figure out that you great-great grandfather didn't sign in the right spot in 1897 and you're presence in the United States is void, retroactive to your birth. Off to El Salvador with you, enemy of the people.
And so does my response to your comment.
But I do wonder if self-censure is really the best strategy.
Take the Utah Data Center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center), combine it with the Disposition Matrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix), informally known as a kill list for even US citizens, and it does seem like you're getting a Police State!
Three letter agencies have way too much power and they've shaped our culture+laws for the worse. Osama Bin Laden has done way more damage to American citizens' lives than he could've ever dreamed of.
Just like the KGB and Putin's minions, Bin Laden correctly saw fault lines and weaknesses in the US an exploited them. He did what he did with a long-range context in mind. The "three letter agencies" were neutered in the 90s as part of the peace dividend which is why he was successful. The Russians used "active measures" with intelligence in the US 2016 among other times and Bin Laden chose terrorist violence. The Russian misinformation strategy is tried and true and corporate actors now use it successfully as well.
The whole thing sucks. This Iran adventure lays the vulnerability of the US military machine pretty bare. More, escalated conflict is probably in the world's future for decades to come.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gov...
In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.
In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it.
Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.
You see this exact pattern with real health care, common sense gun laws, investment in mass transportation, probably more that I'm not thinking of.
I read that as "we're not going to sit with the uncomfortable implication that the places being held up as policy exemplars are also the places criminalizing speech."
Self host. It's still possible to buy computer hardware and install FOSS replacements for most/all of the services you need, and plumb it all through to your mobile devices using wireguard/tailscale. If you're behind a CGNAT you can proxy it through a cheap VPS that won't fuck you on bandwidth costs. Thanks to Proxmox, I probably have better uptime on my services than e.g. Github these days.
When it becomes impossible to get open PC hardware, I don't know. I like to think I will just stop using the internet for anything besides the bare minimum NPC type activities that are required to engage with the institutions of society.
Startups that initially choose the more private implementation version often face a disadvantage. They may not see immediate benefits and instead experience drawbacks, such as caring a bit more than their competitors. For example, an AI plugin using local large language models for privacy might not be rewarded as much as a competitor who fully embraces cloud-based solutions.
but the advice is basically the same as it always has been:
- talk to your friends and family about it. do it with passion, but without hyperbole or conspiracy or aggression. any person you can convince to care is a win. organize with like-minded people.
- talk to your representatives in government. vote for representatives that are pro-privacy (when possible). convince your like-minded friends and family to do the same.
- to the greatest extent possible, dont purchase/use products/services which are facilitating the trend. (but, you also need to be realistic or you will burn out! and that is a bigger loss overall).
- if you are a decision-maker at work, or have any sort of input, leverage it as best as you can to make pro-privacy business decisions. however, similar to the above point, recognize that you still need to be realistic and dont get yourself fired arguing some decision. it is better to make 1,000 nudges in the right direction than it is to be fired/burn out trying to make 1 big nudge.
- support organizations that align with your beliefs. this can be monetarily, or by volunteering, or by spreading awareness of the organization itself. for example, many people have never heard of the electronic frontier foundation and have no idea what they do. lots of people dont know of the ACLU either (or, maybe they have heard the name, but dont know what they do or why it matters).
That's not what I am seeing on the ground. Many discord users I have seen talk about this issue frame this as an attack on freedom and privacy by hiding it behind the same narrative that has been used so many times before of protecting children. You can only push fake narratives so far until people start getting the message that people are hiding nefarious attacks on society behind fake movements.
good! ideally, someone is helping them organize and action those thoughts and feelings outside of whatever discord channel you are in.
i am referring to how it is being framed by the people pushing the agenda. age verification laws (as an easy example) arent being advertised as "we want to spy on you", they are being advertised as "this will protect children from harms".
talk to debbie in accounting instead of babmorley420 in discord, and ask her opinion. she is not likely to frame it as an attack on privacy/freedom. she is likely to frame it as a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. and her opinion also matters, she also votes. we need to convince the debbies of the world -- they outnumber the babmorley420s
i teach tech in college and just earlier today made a post about how i am not seeing the same when i compare my current students to students 5, 10, or 15 years ago. i hope that i am the one in the bubble.
On one hand, I think a lot of the larger issues and divisions we’ve seen in society over the last 20 years are a direct result of our primary means of communication, entertainment and information being one that allows such ease of impersonation. While most of us here understand just how much Internet content is created with influence as a goal, and the posted by accounts with false identities, a majority of people still don’t. (And many who do don’t understand just how prevalent it is). I also think that sadly we’ve demonstrated that when people feel they are anonymous and beyond consequence, they’re willing to say and advocate for some terrible things which they might otherwise not have, and seeing others say those things reinforces their willingness to say and do them. If social media and internet norms of today had held the original Facebook model of requiring verification of your actual identity (back in the day .edu email days), I truly think we would live in a much different and in many ways better world.
On the other hand, I fully acknowledge that many of the people pushing for the removal of privacy and encryption are not doing so for altruistic reasons, but so that they have a more data to mine and monetize, or have the ability to monitor to a frightening degree, and that these tools once available will be available to any regime or government, so even if the ones currently pushing do have naively good intentions, the next ones very well may not.
But, I also struggle with the knowledge that for sophisticated parties, the privacy that most people think they have is a sham to begin with. There are already many tools available to piece together information sources and build a horrifyingly complex and accurate picture of individuals activities and identities. So I wonder if the illusion of privacy isn’t worse than the public at least being forced to confront the fact that they have none in the first place, and therefore being able to truly see and address the issue, while the security minded and technical individuals will always find a way obfuscate their identity and activity, just as they always have.
Switch to decentralized, e2ee alternatives, support https://eff.org
Not directly to you but in general: I do not think (most) of Europe is going the same direction as US. I actually see a lot of hope in response to EU leaders about digital infrastructure, communication & security. we have started to stop realing on America, but it will take 10-20 years before you see the entire crash trump made
Is it because this kind of phones are a very niche product so they can't benefit from the economy of scale?
Maybe android phone manufacturers can get better deals from chip manufacturers because they buy chips in large quantities?
Any primer/link on what current libertarians believe is welcome.
All my anarchist (left libertarian) friends are pretty consistently opposed to state and corporate surveillance. There is plenty of theory in a canon of literature that goes back to the mid 19th century, even as there are many subgroups and spurs off that general line of thought all with their own sets of (usually somewhat) consistent lines.
If you want something short and brutal, I am a fan of "Desert" by anonymous, but "A Utopia of Rules" by David Graeber is not a bad thing to read and probably closer to a popular line. Or the CIA-Coded Yale academic James Scott has a lot to say, "Two Cheers for Anarchism" and "Seeing Like a State" both seem to have influenced a lot of people.
Historically "right libertarians" (the US Libertarian political party, for instance) have been, uh, "less consistent" in their thinking, so you might have a hard time finding anything that looks like a "philosophy" in that branch of "thought". Plenty of goofy-ass ideas, but little consistency except a strange ability to begrudgingly conform to GOP politics at the end of the day.
Having seen how things work where freedom is not the default, I much prefer freedom.
There are rarely laws around preventing collection of said data or using said data for some new service.
Sometimes people talk about GDPR being only the cookie banner, but thanks to it, its forbidden to collect that kind of data.
The qualifying criteria is probably just having picked an offer for renewable-sourced energy in the past, indicating that it has some importance to you. So you will be given more green energy offers in future.
Every company segments its customer base this way for marketing. Sometimes it’s even useful.
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them doing it because they believe in it.
Fundamentally I think that liberal democracy won't be able to survive compute, communication, and storage being cheap, combined with asymmetric encryption. I really think there should be an article illustrating just how much that last one is fundamental to making the apparatus of control cheap and effective in a way that 20th century regimes could only dream of.
internet is a service that you choose what to engage and how. don't like a platform? find another, build it or stop using it altogether.
personally, i find these things really great has it helps nudge people into the more decentralized web. a few years ago those who were pushing for privacy respecting apps and platforms were deemed too paranoid.
But you're absolutely right about Instagram's evolution. It's crazy.
the only social circle that truly matters is the geographically close one. no amount of E2EE or fancy chat app will replace being physically present.
I mean, okay? Next time just say social media is a cancer, and don't waste our time moving goal posts.
You don't have to wait for everyone to switch, in fact it's pretty normal to reach different people on different chats.