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.
Most people aren’t aware of these things, and even if they are, they don’t want privacy to hinder their normal life in any way.
Lack of privacy and concerns around the government (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) spying and private corporations essentially spying too but calling it data harvesting and whatever else has been pretty widely reported on and shared for well over a decade. I’m in my mid 30s and clearly remember the patriot act being proposed and rammed through the first time with constant outcries about the blatant human rights and privacy violations it would lead to which of course Snowden confirmed explicitly years later. This stuff has never been a secret, really, it’s just people legitimately don’t believe it matters to them. They think either “oh it just has to be this way” or “terrorism brother!” or “but why doesn’t Zuck deserve to sell my butthole pics, you commie?” That’s why it’s incumbent upon those who are experts, which I am not for the record, to always be on the look out and propose enforceable laws to prevent private corporations from doing this (with personal liability for executive level officers ie Zuck goes to prison for 50 years) and to strip back and break the reactionary spy networks which existed before 9/11 but became insanely worse post-9/11. All that spying which has resulted in zero prevention of shootings or any type of terror plot. People gave up freedom and gained no security… just a thin veil of theater of security and daily indignities of half stripping at the airport so some Neanderthal can see your junk in the radiation spinny device. Or the knowledge that every thing you say or type online (and offline with phones everywhere) is or has potential to be recorded or monitored and if you stand against some key positions and offer solutions of actual change and intent to enact it… well, it leads to self-censorship. Just ranting now, but I think most people do broadly know about this stuff they also justify it to themselves in the delusion of “well, I gotta use something like Twitter!” when you obviously do not (I’ve never had a proper real Twitter account because the platform has always been dogass and a terrible idea for any real interaction. Useful for quick news updates but worthless and just harmful imo for anything further)
Twitter… has always been dog ass.
I felt the same. When someone first told me about Twitter there wasn’t a web interface, you had to text message from your old school feature phone and waste multiple texts at like $0.10 a piece to send roughly 100 letters. I never really saw the point. By the time Twitter was “worth while” I still didn’t get the appeal. I made an account for a project I was working on, but I hated it, so I stopped and never signed in again. That account has been idle for so long that literal elementary kids after I last signed in came of age and are drinking in bars now.
I try, but at this point I think it might be too late. I’ve been on the internet pretty much my whole life and didn’t realize how big of a deal privacy was until I was in my 30s.
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.
It’s more that the average person doesn’t have a clear understanding of what the cost is of not protecting your privacy.
The Internet is basically a privacy economy, where you sell your privacy in return for free services, and to most people this feels like a very one sided exchange. They’re giving away something that to them has no percieved value.
What privacy advocates need to get better at is actually explaining to people what the value of their privacy is.
I think they either don’t care or don’t know. I hady partner reread the tos she clicked away without reading and was horrified
Privacy is complicated and often a luxury. Not everyone has the technical understanding to protect their privacy, nor the money to always choose the privacy-conscious option (which are almost always paid options). And to be honest, they shouldn’t really have to if governments did their jobs and brought in effective privacy protection laws.
No shit! Think of how stupid the average normie is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
The average person is basically a cow that has no interests besides easilly accessable movies. They watch things. They don’t actually create anything or have any hobbies or interests. They have no friends outside of work. They have no goals. They do what the people around them tell them to. They are like this because of Christianity and the Patriarchy. Those things are the reasons that the normies suddenly hate me when they see me in lipstick. That is why there are no good parents. Normie consumers want to raise other normie consumers.
I care. I’m just increasingly convinced it’s too fucking late.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Say I wanted to find out what my profile looks like?
Live in the EU.
I do. Now what?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
I’ve been online for years and years. Enough to know that, we’ve been giving our data away before social media took off. Social Media and search engines like Google, have accelerated it and made it a farming thing as the basis of their foundations.
So what I’m referring to about giving our data away before the social media era, is that we have registered on to forums and we have registered to chat rooms and other services. We willingly gave them our names, even beneath the screen names we registered under. We willingly discussed a lot of ourselves within those forums and we can’t preemptively assume that they aren’t keeping some record of what we’re doing and saying. We know all sites keep a stamp of our IP addresses, so it’s a safe bet that they’re also collecting everything we do within their site’s boundaries.
I’m not trying to say that we should all just expose ourselves, en masse. But I will say that you are responsible and you’ve been responsible for what you decide to put there online. You are right to be questioning and working against things like Google needing your street address to recover a simple password when there had been other proven methods to recover your password by. However, it comes off a little ridiculous when you’re griping about privacy while also being someone who dumps their life stories on that platform or this platform.
There was always a line though between “i’m sharing this personal information with you privately” (i.e. registering with your name and e-mail address), and “I’m sharing this information with the general public”. You also were able to remain somewhat anonymous, by registering with your real name but making sure other users only saw your screen name.
While there was always the threat of someone finding your publicly shared photos or stories and using them for nefarious purposes, the idea of the company you’re giving them to analyzing all of that private and public data, across the entire web thanks to tracking cookies, and using it to manipulate you or packaging it up and selling it was never really a concern. No one had the capabilities to analyze that much data 10-15 years ago, and if they did it wasn’t yet profitable.
The idea that you now have zero control over how your personal and private data is used, or who it’s sold to, is terrifying.
@BraBraBra Convenience will always win out with the masses. There needs to be more tangible benefits for doing something more inconvenient than losing privacy for that to change.
Not really true, people are willing to fight for a better life and a better world. We just need to organize, to fight together. There is a lot each of us can do make using these decentralized apps more convenient, including simply making valuable content on these networks, but also translating it into different languages, reporting bugs and trying to fix them or write tutorials on how to use it or get around a bug.
Average person does not understand why privacy is important. They were lucky enough not to (yet) experience repression, censorship or surveillance and often throw banal one liners like I’ve got nothing to hide.
It’s only once you lived a while with someone (person or an institution) watching your every step you realize how it definitely changes you. You decide not to state your opinion, not to raise your hand, not to make the choice you would of you were truly free.
Same goes for welcoming your data against you… But you’re on fediverse. I’m packing to the choir here.
But you’re on fediverse. I’m packing to the choir here.
You would like to think so, but one thing that’s become clear to me is a large number of new fediverse users are only interested in escaping what Reddit/Twitter have become in recent months, and have no issues supporting competitors who will abuse them algorithmlically just the same.
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Normies are cancer that make EEE & surveillence possible
wow, prideful much
We are all normies
Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
It was “dumbfucks”. In context, people who trust Zuckerberg with their personal information are dumbfucks. His words.
