There's a general trend right now against privacy and in a more general sense against freedom. More and more companies are on board with it. I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard. I feel like I don't know what to do about the internet for the next 5-10 years. Does this particular measure matter very much? No, but it's another brick in the wall.
The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state. The people who control the consolidated tech platforms are either spearheading or collaborating with that process. Privacy as a concept isn't even in the cards.<p>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.
Just want to clarify that "naughty" doesn't at all mean "bad" or "immoral". It means "Anything any current ot future regime will dislike"
>The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state.<p>Take the Utah Data Center (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center</a>), combine it with the Disposition Matrix (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix</a>), informally known as a kill list for even US citizens, and it does seem like you're getting a Police State!
It feels to me Europe and the UK, in the western world, are further ahead on the legal road to surveillance than the US.
Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me.<p>In the USA, we <i>hate</i> the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.<p>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.<p>Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.
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Who's we?
Sure, but I think the point of this thread was (or should be) what can be done <i>in the US</i> to resist this. There's a lot of things the US resists doing because voters who never traveled outside of it can be convinced that what it is as implemented elsewhere is somehow flawed or worse than the status quo.<p>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.
What differentiates correct politics from incorrect politics?
> I'm not sure if anyone in HN has any useful advice in this regard.<p>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.<p>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.
If you don't know where to start check out the Linux Prepper [0] podcast. (I'm not affiliated, just a listener who enjoys the show.)<p>[0] <a href="https://podcast.james.network/@linuxprepper/episodes" rel="nofollow">https://podcast.james.network/@linuxprepper/episodes</a>
I wonder if promoting open-source tooling and best practices could make it easier for new apps to adopt security features like E2E encryption. For example, someone building a chat app might not add E2E encryption unless they have access to user-friendly tools and are encouraged to do so.<p>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.
If you’re a good boy then you have nothing to hide right? Not even your passwords…
unfortunately, since the messaging/trend isnt "we are against privacy" (it is "we are protecting children, which reluctantly means we all have to sacrifice a wee bit of privacy"), it is really hard to fight back without being labelled as someone who is <i>against</i> protecting children.<p>but the advice is basically the same as it always has been:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- to the greatest extent possible, dont purchase/use products/services which are facilitating the trend. (but, you also need to be realistic or you <i>will</i> burn out! and that is a bigger loss overall).<p>- 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 <i>trying</i> to make 1 big nudge.<p>- support organizations that align with your beliefs. this can be monetarily, or by volunteering, or by spreading awareness of the organization itself. for example, <i>many</i> 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).
>unfortunately, since the messaging/trend isnt "we are against privacy" (it is "we are protecting children, which reluctantly means we all have to sacrifice a wee bit of privacy"), it is really hard to fight back without being labelled as someone who is against protecting children.<p>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.
><i>Many discord users I have seen talk about this issue frame this as an attack on freedom</i><p>good! ideally, someone is helping them organize and action those thoughts and feelings outside of whatever discord channel you are in.<p>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".<p>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
You could try becoming a privacy advocate. <a href="https://www.privacyguides.org/en/activism/" rel="nofollow">https://www.privacyguides.org/en/activism/</a>
I’m truly on the fence about all of this.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Facebook accounts today still have identity verification (they often ask for scans of IDs, etc) and yet it doesn't seem to result in a noticeably improved discourse there compared to say, Twitter before Musks takeover. I don't think anonymity actually changes discourse that much.
In my opinion anonymity is a great red herring. The worst offenders on the internet have verified accounts and are public figures. The problem is algorithmic content, prioritizing for engagement and outrage, and then connecting _everyone_. We had what was effectively anonymity in the 90s, but really had NONE of the crazy society-breaking extremism we see now. Getting rid of anonymity will really do NOTHING to halt the march of internet-fueled extremism.
Everything is a sliding scale. There <i>would</i> be improvement from verified identities (and doing so through a zero-trust network is feasible.) I agree the worst actors wouldn't care at all, and in that case we address the algorithmic amplification problem.
This. People don't recognize that a tech company with an algorithmic feed is indistinguishable from a public awareness filter. It allows a couple hundred to 1000's of people to set the Overton window of millions/billions. When we actually didn't go algorithmic and went off more natural filtering (geographic, chronological, scope/impact based), it was a modality that one would be hard pressed to even find a schoolchild that couldn't end up being able to meaningfully navigate the space with due training. This is, of course, exactly why monied individuals foam at owning any of the few consolidated media outlets/tech companies. Societal scale leverage on the machine of public awareness.
I sometimes feel a bit weird about this. In the 90s it felt like "we" won the crypto wars: PGP, the fight over export controls, the Clipper Chip, etc. There was a strong sense that privacy and strong crypto had become settled questions.
> I feel like I don't know what to do about the internet for the next 5-10 years.<p>Switch to decentralized, e2ee alternatives, support <a href="https://eff.org" rel="nofollow">https://eff.org</a>
E2EE on Instagram was never real, trustable E2EE. No open-source client, no way to verify that private key is never sent to server, and encryption of a key with a low-entropy PIN is effectively plaintext.
As a California resident I request to download my personal data from every service I can, and I’m constantly surprised. We each have scores for all kinds of things. The local power company keeps a “Green Ideology” score on me.
When I see the word "score", it reminds me of the CCP social scoring system.
It makes me curious what other scores (I would call them labels) there are.
How is that even legal?
This is in the US. It’s a free country. Things are legal by default (that’s a <i>good</i> thing) until the system notices them and makes a law.<p>Having seen how things work where freedom is not the default, I much prefer freedom.
Because it's not illegal. Most data privacy laws just require that user can see data collected about them and prevent sale of said data in optout fashion.<p>There are rarely laws around preventing collection of said data or using said data for some new service.
But it's not any data, it's political orientation data!<p>Sometimes people talk about GDPR being only the cookie banner, but thanks to it, its forbidden to collect that kind of data.<p><a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/" rel="nofollow">https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/</a>
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How do they know your ideology? Are they scraping your social media or running sentiment analysis on your customer service chats?
It’s likely some customer segmentation label generated through PCA or some other clustering approach.<p>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.<p>Every company segments its customer base this way for marketing. Sometimes it’s even useful.
They probably don't care. It's probably a mostly BS number. But they probably have to have it and have it at least look like they're trying to be serious about generating it in order to qualify for preferential treatment on some sort of permitting or write off some class of investment in a slightly better way at tax time or something.<p>I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them doing it because they believe in it.
In this specific case you can avoid Meta. In general, if you're in the US, you probably have a primary election coming up soon and certainly have a general election in November. Ask your politicians what their thoughts are on these topics and make an informed vote. Continue to pressure the incumbents as well.
You're on a site with a surprisingly high amount of support among commenters for trading privacy and freedom for convenience and comfort where it aligns with their religion/other biases or desired consumer experiences. I don't know if this the best place to ask for advice.
It's depressing to think that after the abuses people suffered during the lockdowns the response has been to embrace authoritarianism even more. It makes me fear how far this could go before people realize how bad it is.<p>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.
i don't understand this doomer mentality regarding the internet.<p>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.<p>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.
Network effects will keep a person on a platform until a critical mass of their social circle decide to leave all at once. I'm no expert, but I suspect that that critical mass is pretty high, maybe more than 50% of a person's circle. So it's not exactly vanilla free-market competition. Entrenched players have a pretty big advantage.
what does your social circle being on Instagram bring to you? seriously, this picture-sharing app has evolved into this content spread machine that brings very little value.
When most of your social circle exists on one platform, you tend to use that platform less for its specific features, and more because of the fact that all your friends are there. I don't personally use Instagram, and this is anecdotal information, but I know a lot of people who only use Instagram to see what their friends and family are up to, and to watch the occasional reel.<p>But you're absolutely right about Instagram's evolution. It's crazy.
Ah Network effect, That's why we all are still using Skype, microsoft messenger and ICQ.<p>You don't have to wait for everyone to switch, in fact it's pretty normal to reach different people on different chats.<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1810/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1810/</a>
Many people make their livings from these platforms. They cant leave without abandoning most of their income stream.