this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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What is not mentioned... there's no privacy when the device itself is compromised. For instance, Android phones can read and phone home data from your notifications. In that case, any messenger app wouldn't be private from Google's eyes.
...and once you get to "AI" with system level access that is supposed to scan for "bad content" (like with Apple's supposed "CSAM scanning" and Google's Android System Safety Core), all bets are off.
All of the major platforms owned by corporations (including Apple) are or will be compromised.
The only way out is degoogled Android (for now) or, better, a true Linux device.
There's a commonly used Russian metaphor "to not see the forest behind the trees".
What you are calling a device is in fact a system. It's a local system, that you are carrying in your hand, but it's functioning due to a very complex global system which is not. That device in itself is like a 1960s' town in complexity. In itself, but there's also the global system.
And these are a result of quite a lot of people employed by various organizations with hierarchies and dependencies. And most of the power in those organizations doesn't want you to have privacy and autonomy as much and when you want. If you want those, you should produce your own hardware and everything above it. Or build organizations interested in your full privacy and autonomy which will do that. It's about structure, so just creating a few of them (a goal hardly reachable in itself) with manifests saying "we want to be good" won't change anything.
So, if you were wondering why contemporaries of Stalin's regime were reluctant to divorce it with Marxism and call it something else, - that's similar to this. They really wanted to believe there's a Marxist superpower, just like some people wanted to believe Google is a good corporation, and before that some people wanted to believe Apple is a counterculture corporation, and so on. And, at various moments in time and space, in various dimensions, sometimes these were. Just like in some ways the British Empire was really bringing civilization to the world.
The more life and diversity there is, the likelier we are to have good things. That doesn't mean we'll ever have full privacy, full autonomy, fully civilized, peaceful and honorable world, and so on. We won't.
I think that metaphor is quite universal because it's also used very commonly in English and Estonian at the very least.
It's common in Russia. It's common a lot of places, but it's common in Russia
But yeah, I've used that and the inverse depending on the context plenty of time.
Well, that something common in Russia as a metaphor is also common in Estonia wouldn't be a surprise, but in English seems a bit less common. Anyway, that wasn't the point of my comment.