I’m following several privacy focused communities. Mostly as lurker but in few I’m more active. Every time I see a posts like “how to be more private”, I wonder about the reasons behind those questions. What’s the reason you want to remain private (don’t confuse it with being anonymous)? Could you elaborate on your reasons?
Let me start.
I worked (and still working) in a highly regulated industry as a software/devops engineer. I’ve been working with banks, insurance companies, global online payment companies, major credit card vendors, few global corporations. I have seen how data is gathered and (mis)used. Every time someone tells me “I’m sorry but the system…” I know it’s the data gathered by the “system” and my profile created based on that data was the reason for “but”. This is why I care about the privacy, to prevent companies from taking advantage of my current situation and charge me more.
I’m sorry, but that’s private.
- Feeling clean
- Not being exploited
- Minimalism
- Less power drain
- Less data sent
- Freedom
- Everything works better and faster
- I hate spying because they can
- To be honest also because most people don’t care
The only con is convenience.
I hate that most people don’t want to care for convient’s sake… “You’re only making your life harder for yourself”. I simply want to be in control, not the corpos.
It’s kinda like this. Say you lead the most boring, law abiding, square life, top 20% of the bell curve in that zone.
Would you want strangers in your house, even if they couldn’t technically touch or take anything? Would you want them in your spouse’s closet? Your kid’s room? Looking in your fridge?
Creepy and “hell no”, right?
That’s what privacy is about. The right to lock your door against strangers snooping.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
From Cardinal Richelieu
Combine this with the fact that entities which have access to our data rarely have our best interest in heart. Governments change, the political climate changes, and people change. What’s honest and just today may not be next decade.
Also, people change over time, and more and more of our lives are ending up online earlier and earlier.
Do you really want some stupid “hot take” you were passionate about as a teenager effecting how someone sees you a decade or more down the line?
Everyone deserves the right to change their mind and not have old beliefs hang around their neck forever.
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Let’s flip this question. Why do you think an organisation should get my data?
Are they reputable? Are they secure? Are they domiciled in my country and follow the laws of my country?
In a perfect world, data collected by companies would be used to improve user experience. But we don’t live a perfect world and nowadays if a company doesn’t provide yearly income from investment it goes under. And to keep the numbers up, companies screw its users.
Improve user experience?
I don’t give a flying fuck if a web page loads .5 seconds faster.
What u care about is an interface that works, has labels instead of symbols, that doesn’t change every month trying to be more minimalist.
A bank website doesn’t need my browser history or my charges to Amex or what pets I have or what car I drive or the color of my bedroom. But they want all that and a mobile phone number to tie it all up with a common index. VoIP numbers are refused because they change too often.
That’s what pisses me off
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times.
that’s not a world i want to live in…
Too late. If you’re in the US, it is officially known that the feds already can record roughly half of all national internet traffic. AT&T room something or other.
The current saving grace is that the amount of data generated over time is outpacing increases in the ability to store and analyze it all. God forbid that ever changes.
Similar to you, but I also hate the advertising industry with a burning passion and want to deprive them of any and all data possible.
Privacy should be a basic human right.
Data collection could be massively abused by oppressive governments.Not caring about it = Not caring about your rights.
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Ok, but why? And to be clear, I’m not against what you wrote, just wondering about people’s motives.
Well opressivs governments dont work by serving good policys to the people, they work by blaming a part of the people for all problems and then promsing to get rid of them/punish them. A scapegoat basically. The opressors don’t make it better for the people, but the people are happy because the ones they think causing their suffering get punished.
Historically this has been the communists in Nazi Germany, or faschist italy, modern faschists try to make gay people and people from the far east this scapegoat atm.
The problem is: the scapegoat is never the real cause of the problem. After taking them all to the kz, and life for people still not getting better you need a new one. For Nazi Germany those where Jewish people, just because of their religion, has Hitler proposed the “kommunistisch-jüdische-weltverschwörung” (world conspiracy of Jews and communists) When after the pogromes stuff still would get better, they would blame everyone not arian. (Not blonde, blue eyed, northern heritage)
If a fascist government tries to exclude you or not is just a matter of time, at some point they will rum out of scapegoats and come for you.
You never know which aspect someone picks to exclude you (gender, political view, haircolor, Parents, lastname, sexual preferences, religion, mental health, physical health etcpp.) So it’s better to not have someone gather all that info about you in the first place.
Imagine living in China,
where the government is able to request data of each company in their country.Imagine that China would setup an AI/LLM, to feed all private chat data into it,
and automatically flagging opposition of the government regime.Imagine a white van appearing in front of your house and disappearing into a concentration camp because you got flagged after expressing your opposition to the government to your mate in a private chat.
All collected data can be abused like that,
or by other means (E.g. a country at war gets hacked, which could lead to leaking critical private information on political/defensive decisions).To me the question is not if data collected on you will be abused, but rather when will it be abused?
Just having it stored somewhere imposes risks.
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There’s no file system in existence that can handle a text file large enough to include all reasons why people care about privacy.
To be honest. What made me care about privacy was social media apps such as Reddit. Every single day, i used to get reddit notifications promoting “the most popular post in my country”. Look, at first i didn’t care. Now it got annoying, to the point where i replaced Refdit with Lemmy, getting rid of windows, switching to FOSS (free and open source software) apps and also using Degoogled Chromium. While reddit wasnt the only thing i mentioned so far, i hate how Youtube has to know where you live, and giving you directions to the nearest store (for certain ads). This probably may get malliciously used in the future, that’s what i got really aware of. Now it really hurt me when Youtube has killed most 3rd party frontends (such as invidious and piped). So in conclusion, Privacy can really matter for me as a lot of services i used to use can now collect data about you.
That’s so great! Can I just recommend Firefox over Chromium? Perhaps privacy-wise is similar, but at least you send your User Agent to website as “firefox” which tells the websites to still make them compatible
Because without privacy you can’t be a proper human being. You need privacy in order to have the safe space to develop, to dare try, to explore without the constant judgement of others. If you can’t be a proper human being, can you genuinely have democracy?
It’s both a per-requisite for humanity and what the political system that is often considered as the most just.
That’s why I care.
Similar to your experience, I’ve seen several large governments and organizations mishandle or mismanage user data by accident or on purpose many times with little or no recompense. If nobody can do it right they should either make it all publicly transparent for everyone or not store it at all.
Misinformation, not using accounts or accounts with incorrect information, multiple accounts, etc counter ops seem prudent at this point as the information system and monitoring apparatus of some of the most powerful governments and corporations in human history remains largely unchecked.
Privacy is an important right to protect and value because of the damage that can and will be done when groups hold personal information (financial, medical, behavior patterns, etc) and either sell it without explicit consent or leak it because they have no expectation of risk or loss if they don’t protect it.
Tl;Dr The oldest rules of the Internet are don’t believe everything you read and don’t dox yourself.
Do you people sniff into your stuffs? No. So why do you allow companies to make profit on?
And we need the anonymous part too.
Privacy means hiding our legitimate stuffs to others than could spy on. In this way, privacy is a big family that needs anonymity and security to work well
EDIT : Anonymity and security are not different than privacy, they are a way to achieve it
