In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
I care. I’m just increasingly convinced it’s too fucking late.
Tbh it’s not black and white. I’m sure a big corporation can extract a ton of information on us but there’s still a pretty big gap between having our real names and photos plastered everywhere on social media, or them just knowing where I live and that I spend a lot on steam games. Don’t take the small victories for granted.
It is. They know everything about you. Even every store you have shopped at knows a lot about you. It really doesn’t take much interaction for a company to get a lot of info. It’s relatively easy to get an email and from there, if they wanted, they can get the rest of your profile from a 3rd party who has your data all matched up already. They can also build your profile pretty easily themselves as well.
How can regular people buy this data?
Say I wanted to find out what my profile looks like?
I imagine “you” can’t
you’d likely have to work for some marketing agency and can probably only buy user data in bulk amounts (based on region, or some other desired demographic) with a recurring business plan of course
it wouldn’t be financially beneficial for these companies to sell an individual thumbprint
That makes sense.
So who wants to set up an marketing agency with me?
That makes sense.
So who wants to set up an marketing agency with me?
Yes. I would like this info as well if anyone has it .
If you’re in the US, you can demand a company release the information they have on you, to you, for inspection. It’s more data than you’d think. A LOT more.
You have the right to request access to inspect the personal information a company stores on you. At least, in the US. And I believe the UK and EU as well but I can’t speak as much to those.
If you want to be truly terrified (or enlightened, however you prefer to think of it), pick any big company that you’ve used and request all the data they have stored on you. The amount of data they’ll have is STAGGERING. Certainly hundreds of pages, possibly thousands. It’s insane.
Say I wanted to find out what my profile looks like?
Live in the EU.
I do. Now what?
I think personal data poisoning is going to become more prevalent among privacy communities, I would like to see some tooling for this in the next few years.
It’s never too late. Sure, they already have a lot of data on you but you can keep them from getting more.
Definitely. I’m was trying to state that basic info about you is readily available to companies regardless of how you choose to interact with them.
It might not be. Plenty of US states are coming online with privacy rights. If you live in CA, CO, CT or VA you can submit requests to opt out of information sales and for sites to erase your data.
Im in basically the same position since realistically the change needs to be at an institutional level. I can’t really change anything by myself without excluding myself from most modern services.
We need laws and regulations. But like you I fear it’s too late.
Same here, but that doesn’t stop me from trying where I have the time and energy. One of those ways is voting. So far the government has let these companies wipe their shit onto every corner of the internet, and the 5-10% of us switching apps or emails or… Whatever, aren’t going to change that. It’s not a short-term solution, but I’m starting to think it’s really the only way.
Me. I care I just…fuck. That ship has sailed. I don’t go out of my way to download the big offenders like Tik Tok but…still. Everyone is tracking me. Everyone is selling my information. God knows how many different companies have massive files on me.
They probably don’t know what actually involves giving away their data and what actually concretely means. I’m a tech guy, developer, here in the Fediverse and neither I do know actually what it means. It’s the lack of information the problem. I could imagine it though, but it’s not the same thing. I could imagine that with my data big corps become more powerful, creating more addicting ads, contents and algorithms that eventually will fuck up the world even more. And that’s a nightmare, I know. Metaphorically it’s like intensive farming. “I eat meat because I love it and I can’t give up on it” and as soon as no one sees what actually happens to the animals inside those farmings, no one cares.
They are my mother, father, and everyone else. Life’s hard, and too many things compete for our attention.
You’re right. Indiscriminate data collection is like the meat industry. Some people may find abhorrent how animals are treated, even how destructive the whole thing can be. But ultimately, out of sight is out of mind, right?
Like you said, the same with privacy. Apps are shiny, addictive, and seem to be given away for free. Then life happens, the mind becomes busy with what holds its attention.
We’re doomed because the game being played is simply too complex for anyone make sense of it. Any competing insight is immediately drowned under the massive torrent of data we’re all subjected to.
One problem is that it’s very hard to quantify how much our privacy, our data, is worth. There’s money to be made with it, but we, average people, have no idea how any of that works. This leads to general indifference.
Another problem I see is that most people don’t correlate their continuously worse online experience with being spied. Every facebook change led to lots complaints, but people didn’t quit, they just ate shit until they stopped complaining. Same with Twitter, Insta, Google, Youtube. Since the enshittification happens gradually, they fail to correlate one thing with another.
I’ll go a step more general. People can’t be inconvenienced. Climate change,politics,etc…
If it slightly inconveniences people you’ll need a good leader to push it
All many people care about is bread and circuses. Unless their sustenance and distractions are taken away they are complacent.
Veganism is the perfect example
Nah, many of us non-vegans don’t see animals as having a right to life. I know I don’t.
People join massive protest all around the world for these things. They are willing to spend a day walking around and yelling even if it is an inconvenience.
It is lack of organizing and having a trust that if we just vote for right politician it will be solved. For decades of elections, nothing changed.
We need to organize ourselves as the people, like they do in some countries. Stop the traffic, organize in shifts to stay on road blocking all gas powered trucks. You need to stop businesses from operating normally to give the system some reason to change, instead of just ignoring us and promising us that next election it will be better.
Same for soical media, do the internet equivalent of blockades, DDOS them like anonymous did. They can’t arrest us all. And organize to block police cars when they try to make an example of the few.
Ultimately, even for me as someone who cares about it, it’s just become one of those things that I don’t prioritize. Life is hard and at some point I’d rather get something cool done with gmail reading all my private conversations than struggle with my own email server.
Not saying it’s a great choice but ultimately life is short and we need to focus on doing what feels right. People have to pick their battles and that’s life.
That’s kind of a fatalistic view on life.
You could have just used Protonmail or something.
Most of these battles are very interconnected. Destroying one part of this horrible system will leave a flank open for the rest to fall.
They need to spy on us, so they can stop any real fight, riot against other issues that are plaguing us, like inflation, climate change and etc.
Zuck is proof that sociopaths and narcissists run the world. This is obvious theater at this point.
Privacy 🔏 What are you trying to hide something /s every Karen ever
You are the kind of person that openly insults people and then gets mad when people insult you huh?
Your mom would have had a happy life if she swallowed, instead she’s stuck with a 10k calorie a day NEET who white knights for Zuckerberg. Either that or you’re Zuckerberg, not sure what’s worse
Confirmed. You are that type of person.
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So the only two options you see are to insult someone by calling them a sociopath/narcissist or you are a sympathizer… very myopic.
I guess your guys are all highly trained psychiatric professionals. It must be me that’s wrong…
Carry on insulting people that have built more then you ever will I guess. Zuckerberg sucks but not as much as your guys.
Congratulations! You have been my first downvote on Lemmy! You said a dumb thing.
The Average person, in my experience, doesnt give a shit about their privacy…because they are stuck on the notion of “what do I have to hide? I didnt do anything wrong!” with a heaping helping of not wanting to give up convenience on top of it.
And all attempts to explain them that you dont have to have anything to hide for your privacy to be important and be protected fall on deaf ears and accusations that you, the one trying to protect them must be some kind of bad/evil/criminal person to be that concerned with privacy.
These people tend to be absolute delights to deal with when their shit gets stolen, and they expect everyone else to fix it for them.
Well okay, with my piracy habit perhaps I do have something to hide😂
But I also think most people don’t realise they do have stuff to hide.
Everything should be private by default. All this shit about nothing to hide is the opposite of that - trying to justify why something should be private. The question is rather why it should be public.
There companies profit enormously on our data and we get exactly nothing in return except the ability to use their service, under the conditions that they put in place. We have zero power to change anything at all about what they provide for us.
A user in that context is similar to a loser. Someone who has no ability to control what happens.
I mean if you want to start paying a fee to use social media… that’s just the choice they make
In my opinion, they do care about privacy from people around them like you and me, they just don’t seem to care when it’s big tech companies like Meta or Google. Like for example, they won’t show you or me their “sensitive photos”, but it’s fully backed up to iCloud or Google Photos, yknow.
They care about visible, or tangible privacy. It’s hard for some to grasp internet privacy and why it matters if “you’re not doing anything wrong.”
But barge into their house at 4am, or open the door while they’re in the bathroom, or listen at the door while they’re having sex, and you’ll get a whole different response.
Ask them about their finances and most people won’t talk about it, but they don’t realize that facebook and google know all about it.
Exactly. It is not that they don’t care about privacy it is just that they trust them because they are the standard, they are big and government is supposed to keep them in check.
People trust the system way too much
I think this is relevant for anyone that has not read it,
A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto Eric Hughes March 9, 1993
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.
Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.
Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.
Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.
We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.
We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.
We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.
Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.
For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.
The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.
Onward.
Eric Hughes
I don’t see how data collection is a privacy and not secrecy issue by his definition.
My name is not secret, lots of people know my name. My name is private, I want to share it with the people I want to share it with, not with everyone on the internet/every corporation I interact with.
I think that’s why data collection falls under the ‘privacy’ instead of ‘secrecy’ category for the most part.
I think the abortion and trans kids situations are putting into sharp relief the danger of large third parties knowing too much about us. Facebook is absolutely scanning its servers for signs of unwanted pregnancies and relaying that information to red state law enforcement. Other platforms may be doing the same thing.
Women in the US are advised not to use period-tracker apps, given they do often sell the data they glean, and don’t discriminate against far-right interests. And anti-abortion organizations are shopping.
I’m not saying I don’t believe you and I wouldn’t put it past right wingers. But I gotta ask if you have a source for any of what you said here?
Welp, a short internet news search of period tracker led me to this interview on Slate
On TechDirt (which I use a lot for tech-industry news) reported this in 2021, so before the Dobbs ruling was leaked or released in May / June 2022.
So, it depends on to what degree you need it confirmed, but it doesn’t seem to be buried.
My most recent trans privacy freak-out was Texas AG Ken Paxton requesting a list of all Texas drivers license / state ID records that have requested a change of sex on their ID, which can also be found searching news.
Actually, the guy was only asking for how many they were, and the report was never made anyways.
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What about a watching self promotional videos that promote ads on an advertising company? Is that okay?
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Even if you get them to care once you show them all they need to do to have a shred of privacy they shrug say something along the lines of “well I don’t have anything to hide anyways” and go back to their merry way. The path of least resistance will always win sadly
Literally saw a comment like that yesterday. Drives me up the wall. I’m in the process of accepting that the average Joe/Jane just doesn’t care about anything but their little bubble. I used to spend so much emotional energy on trying to convince people to stand up for something greater or to at least think more than 2 meters ahead, but now I’m just done. I’ll watch out for myself and the people close to me, everyone else can just evaporate for all I care.
Congratulations, you now have your own little bubble.
Lol true but teaching people better ways is like swimming against the tie. Heck is even hard with people close to me !
I literally just had a friend tell me he joined Threads and how neat it was, etc etc and when I explained why I wouldn’t be joining him, he basically just gave me the old “Well I already know they have all my information so it doesn’t matter”
…like wtf? So you just…give up having any privacy whatsoever? I just couldn’t respond to him after that, I don’t really know how to respond to that. There’s a disease spreading in the world unfortunately and it isn’t just COVID. It’s one called Apathy and too many people are coming down with it.
Honestly he has a point. I was born right before Y2K. My entire life has been online. I’m sure with enough digging this account can be linked back to my IRL identity. They already have any and every bit of information about me, what’s a little more?
People don’t care and are never going to care. They can track us by anything already and don’t need you to give them any info. The algorithms that they use can identify you if you sign up or not.
It’s not apathy per se, it’s more resigned acceptance. There is no privacy anymore, even if you do everything in your power not to be tracked. Unless you live completely off the grid, cash transactions in places without security cameras only and no bank account/online accounts you’re going to be tracked by big tech.
I don’t agree, whenever I take someones phone and start reading their private messages or browsing history, they always get nervous, even if I can’t find anything.
People certainly care, even an average person is aware of problems with digital privacy and they would love to get it solved. But people care about a lot of things, global warming, homelessness, police brutality, they just don’t organize well enough to fight those issues and fighting them alone is hard.
Also don’t forget the amount of propaganda there is to live a certain way, to chase promotions on your job, earn more money and have a high social status. All of these things get in the way of deleting instagram,whatsup and etc.
There is also a problem with lack of marketing of alternatives, most people haven’t heard of lemmy or XMPP chat.
I suggest we try to get people to start using these alternatives first, until there are enough users that they actually have a choice to choose either network and then a lot of people will delete mainstream apps. First step is to make it popular, second is to delete these bad apps. However even getting someone to use a new app is hard, since they are bombarded everyday to install some new app and are even financially motivated (with deals and discounts).
It is a hard battle, but a necessary one. Without privacy there is no democracy, voting is secret for a reason. We need a real democracy, where we choose laws directly, not by someone else we are forced to vote for due too lack of better choice. That requires safe and private digital communications. In person communication is very limited.
Without privacy there is no democracy
I mean, would be nice if we actually had one.
Or both, really.
It goes hand in hand. We need to fight for privacy in order to have direct democracy
In a country where 98% of the voting population picks based on team color, we don’t have either, and it’s because neither side will hold anyone accountable.
The reason we don’t have democracy is not because we don’t fight enough with each other, but because we can’t fight together for a common goal. 98% want a democracy and would prefer privacy. We need to stop letting politicians pin us against each other, but let us understand that despite our differences, we have a lot of common interest and that they are the actual enemy.
As some did in Russia during conscription for war in Ukraine, shoot the officer that made you fight in a war, not the unwilling solider on the other side of the border. People don’t want to fight each other, it is politicians that throw other people’s lives away while they sit far away from action, pretending to be actual war heroes.
No, I disagree. When you ask the average person to show you their private chats, emails and passwords, they will refuse because of privacy.
Instead of not caring about privacy, people prioritize convenience over privacy. Big tech companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft offer really good, stable products which are mainstream and generally don’t cause problems. At least, Windows 10 is way less troublesome than Linux and it’s easier to use the stock Android with Google instead of installing a custom ROM such as GrapheneOS.
To really push the privacy friendly alternatives towards the mainstream, the alternatives should become more user-friendly, less tech-savvy, and preinstalled.
I agree, but I’d add that they don’t really understand how valuable their data really is. It’s almost like being in a different country with a different currency and not being able to really do the math in your head of how much it would cost in your own currency. I grew up with the early internet where, you assumed you were on a world stage and any post you made was on display for anyone to view, but you could navigate it in relative anonymity. Now you have tech companies not only track you online (where you browse) but also in the real world. You carry a personal tracking device at all times.
People don’t quite comprehend that this is what countries spend billions of dollars on with intelligence operations. And this is the currency you are spending when you sign up for these “free” services. Just because it doesn’t come out of your bank account doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. I’ve had discussions with friends and family and they don’t seem to understand, if your not paying for the product, YOU are the product and they are being paid for you. But because of this obfuscating of roles people will keep willing hand over their data, not understanding that these companies are building profiles to hack your psyche and influence you into doing or buying things.
I mean, ActivityPub as a whole sucks at privacy.
Show me where activitypub actively tracks how much time you’ve spent looking at content, what content makes you stop scrolling, factors that contribute to you interacting in content, or any demographic information about you, etc.
Privacy is given up on the fediverse when you choose to post such information, (e.g. “I live in Ohio”) not actively harvested as a means to craft ads for your eyeballs and sell to whoever has money.
Your comment is akin to “oh you don’t like eating spoiled yogurt? And yet, you eat bananas… Curious.”
I’m assuming they’re referring to the recent post about how Lemmy stores your upvote/downvote history in databases accessible to all instance owners and not just the owner of the instance your account is on.
I get the feeling that the average person doesn’t understand what privacy means in relation to the Internet.
Privacy doesn’t matter on the Internet unless you want it.
