I’ve had people tell me that this is (their words, not mine): “mental illness”
I’m like a test-bed for a) my business customers and b) friends and family. also, “wasting” time thusly is vastly better than my previous “hobby”, namely buying new and exciting shit.
my customers benefit from me knowing how exactly (and why!) I should implement e.g. an unbound instance on-premise. or an in-house prosody communication platform. or the “dev team” (buncha dudes poking at wordpress) getting a slew of used elitebooks with linux for the price of one new windows-with-ai yoga the spec initially called for.
f&f benefit from my early adoption by way of trickle-down tech. no way is anyone of them going to selfhost all this crap, but they get sprinkles of benefits in the form of “get this phone with that OS with those apps” and they’re dramatically better off. you don’t need the new ideapad ryzen that’s “on sale” (isn’t), have this 10-year old macbook I fixed and installed linux on - off you go. you don’t need the new phone that’s “free” with an exorbitantly priced plan, have the cheapest plan with this Redmi/Poco phone I swapped the battery on and installed LineageOS.
as to practical considerations, any and all interactions with the likes of FAANG are and should be adversarial from the get-go, they are out to hurt you by any means necessary. them fucks lost the benefit of doubt ages ago so you not letting them have a millimeter of grasp in your domicile should be your primary task. as their gains are cumulative in nature, every battle won is significant and you’d do well to remind yourself constantly of that.
As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.
If you’re not having fun switching email providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.
are you guys doing this for fun? i take some privacy precautions so i wont be mass targeted for anything i do today in the future.
I’d sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one’s time.
They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions (“what is Google doing this week?!”).
If you’re not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.
For example, I wouldn’t recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be “more secure”, but they have a job to do and can’t keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn’t “phone administration”.
LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It’s okay, I do it too. However, it’s not approachable or understandable to people who don’t share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.
Damn this take needs more love. You will get shouted down And downvoted to the lowest depths if you speak against anything that isn’t graphene. I like the project, it has merit. It’s far far from perfect in so many ways. I don’t believe it’s the white knight in shining armour we like to think it is. Good yes. Saving grace. Not by a long shot. It’s got many fundamental flaws.
Be conscious of your needs, not obsessive. I think a lot of people are obsessive and I get it totally. But FOMO is powerful. Don’t overwork your mind trying to be perfect that you never make moves. Life isn’t static. If your uneducated enough to truly need the utmost best tech stacks with no real knowledge on how to implement and deploy. You likely don’t need to be doing the shit your thinking of, or currently doing.
people are literally targeted by this system today. and i live in the third world, i’m ripe for the taking.
i’m glad this can be a hobby for some of you guys though.
It kind of has to be, if you’re trying to be persistent about the whole thing. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burn out over all of the different threats we’re trying to defend against. I don’t see how you can keep at it for months or years if you feel no joy over it. But maybe being deathly, relentlessly afraid of the dangers around us is enough after all.
If you don’t even like doing this stuff, wouldn’t it be better to focus on measures that require little upkeep? This is what my example suggestion was getting at, something that’s as close to set-and-forget as possible, while getting you 90% of the way there. (Depending on your threat model, sure. If yours says that the sky is falling if Tim Apple gets your iCloud data, it certainly doesn’t apply.)
if you are properly threat modeling, getting away from big tech is a long process but not that complicated. for most people it pretty much just means replacing apps and deleting accounts. eventually maybe installing a rom.
honestly services like icloud are whats truly dangerous, but i digress.
It’s just a conscious approach to tech.
We have people telling us the earth is flat. Them saying so doesn’t make our good old planet any flatter ;)
I mean one can find excess absolutely anywhere, that doesn’t demonstrate much imho.
I dunno, considering that Facebook data has been used to go after people, we’ve got fascists using every method possible to target their current hated group, and police everywhere ignoring or bypassing due process by just buying data, I don’t think it all paranoid to think that privacy concerns are already huge, and could get worse
I came to say, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”
There are probably some people that go too far, but that is true in any community. There are also people with a very legitimate threat model, for example if they are from insert your favourite dictatorship here and they have insert opinion against said regime
Yep, and then there’s probably a good number of people who have no idea of threat modelling who just copy those actions to say they have “good privacy”.
Tbh, I’m closer to the latter.
I mean, it can be a bit of an issue everywhere.
Hilariously this post was just above this one in my feed.
Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there, what’s done with it, and why any rational person would be horrified if they knew the extent to which individuals were tracked. Simply put, short of showing them how their livres are made worse, they don’t care, and can’t be made to care.
For friends and family, you can do things like give them books or send articles explaining it slowly in parts. For everyone else, just ask them if they know how Google tracks what they do in Incognito windows and see what they say. If they say that Google can’t or doesn’t, they might as well say the Earth is flat. You can’t argue with that, even though it’s provably false.
Most people have absolutely zero idea how much data they put out there
As evidence, I’ve heard people talk about worrying their phone is listening to their conversations. It’s not that they don’t care about privacy, it’s that they don’t even know what’s possible. With all the data collection that is happening, the data brokers are already selling a dataset predicting that you are going to be shopping for new baby items and what types of manipulative tactics are likely to work on you well before you talk to your friend about it.
Definitely yeah! If you’re just a regular person living in a fairly democratic country and you’re thinking about physically clogging your usb ports to avoid someone breaking in your room and tampering your device while you’re exploring Barcelona, or if you consider removing camera and microphone from your pixel phone that you use every day, you’re probably taking it too far.
OTOH I’m still having trouble getting people away from Meta apps and I think it’s absolutely crazy how little thought people put into the amount of data that Meta collects.
TBH even in many dictatorships you’re mostly fine just using a VPN and fake accounts if you have government critical opinions. But that’s just my personal experience. Goes without saying if you have a decent follower count or are some kind of journalist you should be very paranoid.
Anyway, the point is, it’s probably good to feel slightly paranoid because most people aren’t paranoid enough, but most of us are also not Edward Snowden or Saudi journalists, so there should be a balance between practicality and privacy.
A year ago: yes.
Today: nope.
Yes and I see two reasonable reasons for that.
One is that, like in most communities, those that feel more compelled to post and comment are those that are more passionate about the topic and/or have more extreme views.
The other reason is that given the sensitive nature of the topic, without knowing the threat level of the reader I can see how one would be reluctant to go for the “good enough”.
Yeh my family treat me like I am a nut job. I only swapped away from google and ask them to think about the orgs they spend their money on for example Amazon.
It’s amazing how many people got on board with Covid conspiracies but questioning where you data goes, who’s using it, what for, no that’s a bit far lol.
Told my older parents I use a custom ROM with a profile for work and a profile for personal and they asked me what I’m hiding, and why I’m so paranoid. I said… it’s not paranoia, it’s organization. Color coding profiles allows my mind to switch gears from work to personal life like mental compartments. I am a boring person. I have nothing to be paranoid about. They didn’t believe me. Oh well…
Edit: part of me thinks the whole mental state switching from work profile to personal is an ADHD aspect as well. Especially the color coding helps wonders.
Once, someone sent me an Amazon link for baby nappies, and fool me clicked on it. Now Amazon showed boomer me baby nappies suggestions for the next six months. AI at its best… These things annoy me, so I try to avoid being tracked whenever reasonably possible.
OTOH, I am old and hope to not live long enough to experience any rogue government or whatever else persecuting me for having clicked on a baby nappies link years ago; so my threat model is short term only. I keep my privacy to a level, where it hopefully prevents as many annoyances as possible, but does not hamper what I am doing online too much. If I was younger, I’d likely do more.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity
Relevant XKCD;
I feel that it is closer to the fact that the communities forgot most beginners are completely new to this in general. They might not even know what exactly a ‘browser’ is, much less cookies and stuff.
Hence when we try to spoonfeed them information, it comes off as overwhelming and forced.
Agree that there are some extremist, but they mostly act in good faith tbh.
Another thing I noticed is there are more preachers of ‘how’ than ‘why’. Having a beginner go down the route of privacy without giving them a purpose to do so is quite off-putting.
I think that “mental illness” kind of comments would come from people whose attitude for safety in many aspects of life is “that’s never going to happen (to me)”. Those people exist, so sooner or later you’ll see comments like that.
On the other hand everybody is trying to find a balance in convenience and safety and the situations and environments and life on general for one person can be quite different from that of some others’. So what’s adequate for one won’t be for another.
It’s like PPE or personal finance or many other things. There’s no one size that fits all and finding the right fit isn’t easy. For a lot of us it’s work in progress. Sometimes you know what’s definitely needed and tweak the details. Sometimes you know something is not going well and needs to change.
Maybe it’s enough to say that it’s complicated and have some compassion and support for people that think it isn’t. Or people that think it’s all too much to handle.
Yes, paranoia is not healthy. When people can’t formulate a realistic threat model then usually to be “safe” they assume everyone is out there to get them … while failing the most basic steps, e.g. not relying on surveillance capitalist fueled tools voluntarily.
