this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Privacy

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Does anyone else feel as if it's over when it comes to really owning your own things?

As of now:

  • You don't have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts
  • You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer
  • You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone
  • You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device
  • Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap
  • Everything is going for a subscription model in general

And now Google is attempting to implement DRM on websites. If that goes through, Firefox is going to be relegated to privacy conscious websites (there aren't many of those). At this point, why even bother? Why do I go to great lengths at protecting my privacy if it means that I can't use most services I want?

It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy. Even more important is to actually PAY for services they like instead of relying on free stuff. I'm not optimistic not just because the non privacy conscious side is lazy, but because my side is greedy. I mean one of the most popular communities on lemmy is "piracy" which makes it all the more reasonable for companies not to listen to privacy conscious people.

I wouldn't say that this is the endgame but in this trajectory, privacy is gone before 2030.

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[–] sexy_peach@feddit.de 72 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You will forever have these feelings, if you have a better world than the status quo in mind. Be careful to not be overwhelmed by them, if you suffer too much long term you could give up or become a cynic. Nothing is perfect, we strive to make better systems (and smartphones).

[–] brimnac@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (7 children)

“Just pretend this dystopia is a utopia and you’ll be fine!”

[–] Sneptaur@pawb.social 20 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Nuance status: out the window

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[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Where is the soma we were promised?

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

No just don't pretend we live in a dystopia, things could be worse. Could be better as well though...

[–] baked_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Lmao but it's real??? They don't need to pretend.. are you aware of the DRM situation?

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[–] Thalestr@beehaw.org 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly? As I get older and as the tech industry chokes itself to death in pursuit of infinite profit, I find myself doing more and more things away from the computer or the internet at the very least. Spending time outside doing stuff, exercising, reading books, partaking in art or other creative pursuits, having pets, etc. I have really dialed back my social media involvement and I hardly ever use my phone now.

The internet is absolute garbage now. It's a completely unregulated trash fire that is only getting hotter as more gasoline gets dumped on it. The internet I grew up with, the internet of seemingly endless possibility and unfathomable amounts of information, is long gone. Search results (from any engine) are all SEO trash, websites are just AI-generated garbage covered in ads, and every app or service is a subscription that promises to suck even more money out of my bank account for basic services. Not to mention that all of the above will also monitor every single bit of my activity and sell it to third party buyers. If tech is just going to exist to be an ad-delivery platform then I can do without it. People did for decades, centuries, and we can too.

This bubble is going to pop eventually. It not might be today or tomorrow, but it is going to happen. This is not sustainable.

[–] tocano@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The internet is absolute garbage now

Well, it always was. The internet was always filled with low effort webpages with ads from top to bottom. The only change is that as people got better at avoiding the old scams, new ones appeared with better CSS and more psychological manipulation.

ad-delivery platform

It is basically this. Most websites just try and dig into your profile, masking it as "personalized customer service", but the real intention is to know what you do, who you talk to, and try to sell you goods & services.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago

It definitely wasn't always that. Sure, there were lazy, greedy, fuckers in the early internet putting up crap content and "you're the 1 millionth visitor, you win an iPhone!" Pop-ups, but for a good decade or more the internet was filled with passion projects. Websites and services built from passion and desire, not for an endless pursuit of money. When corporations were ignoring the internet as a fad, it was a remarkable place. Once they realized how much money Google and MySpace were making, they all jumped in head first and began the rapid enshitification of the digital frontier. The same type of people that ruined the physical frontier ruined the digital one as well. Pinche jotos.

Not always. Believe it or not it used to be kinda like it is now, here.

With the technical barriers to entry pre AOL the people online were outcasts, nerds, and science departments at universities. The ad driven model is the attempt to lower barriers of entry make profit of that and not the other way around. Lots of the Internet ran on generosity and donations.

It's been shittier every day after there was an agreement on how to monetize though. The people at the start didn't ever have the guarantee it would get adopted, so for all the idealism we deal with their compromises.

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[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

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[–] pseudo@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It comes in cycles. 20 years ago, it was a struggle to maintain your digital freedom. 10 years ago, when everyone was basking in free software and low interest rates, it was quite easy. The industry is contracting again, so it's going to be harder to do so while using commercial offerings. But we will find ways and the cycle will repeat.

Persist.

[–] spookedbyroaches@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What was the struggle 20 years ago?

[–] pseudo@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Ughhh long story...

It was the height of the Desktop era. Everything ran locally, and that meant Windows. OS X just got started. Everyone was predicting smartphones, but they were a decade out (note time travellers: drop the fucking stylus). Linux was unbelievably shit. Very few drivers, you had to carefully pick your hardware. External devices were a luxury. Printing mostly didn't work, USB printing was bragging rights. You had to buy modems with a hardware DAC, else it was done in the driver which worked only on Windows. GTK kinda just went from v1 to v2, everything looked 10 years outdated, and even Firefox had glitchy UI on Linux. If you could insert a CD and get it to show up without manually mounting, you were staring into the future.

The Web was on hold, Microsoft having won the browsers wars pt. 1, and proceeding to stall with Internet Explorer 6, correctly predicting that browsers would compete with their hegemony in the client space. There were no services: GMail and Youtube were just getting started. You ran local programs, and there were barely any for Linux. The choice was between booting Windows and dicking with cracks from Astalavista, and booting Linux to rice your E16, then staring at it. General productivity software was almost non-existent — you had a dozen compilers and interpreters instead. Where I'm from, banking required desktop software which required windows, not to mention smart cards, which also required windows.

This was made worse by the proprietary formats, which were the key to maintaining stranglehold. Everyone was emailing .docs around, which you could sometimes open with Abiword or maybe dump just the text and Antiword. Even the PDF viewers were a bit crap. Had to submit a report? You probably booted Windows in a virtual machine to use Office, and the CPU was yet to add instructions helping with that. Media was even worse; everything was MPEG and required royalties. LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder because it wasn't allowed to be. RIAA/MPAA were fighting hard to keep you buying physical shit. Meanwhile, you could only play Tux Racer and Nethack.

Around that time, Microsoft was about to introduce Palladium, an attestation chain rooted in hardware. Everyone was despairing about the same future: in 3-5 years, Microsoft would use it to pull in and segregate an increasing portion of the Internet, until the whole became their walled garden. Hope that sounds familiar.


Meanwhile, older penguins just didn't give a fuck. They simply didn't use the shit they couldn't use, and missed none of it. They worked to extend what they had, the digital commons.

No one could stand TVs, so as an act of disobedience, we invented p2p piracy. Napster, DC, torrents — which are alive and kicking. Xiph gave no fucks and started working on free media codecs. Vorbis became CELT became OPUS. Tarkin became Daala became (merged into) AV1. Youtube is now serving OPUS and VP9 or AV1; our best codecs trace their lineage to DIY stuff done to avoid proprietary formats. H.266 can, and will, fuck off. PDF is everywhere. Jimbo started Wikipedia. Flash went away. The modern web happened. Linux grew up and I don't even notice I'm using it. Free software ate nonfree in most domains; the gardens are now walled through access, not by being built on proprietary stacks. Massive progress happened.


Now that the digital world runs on services — which were a clever ruse to subvert old free software (Google runs on Linux, remember?) — someone is threatening to close a few pipes. So what? Just look at the fucking size of those commons that we have created. Someone will claw back some of that... and? Worst case, we lose a few ways to waste our time, of which we have hundreds. Retract from the mainstream a little, again. Have some difficulties using a few services. Be careful which hardware we buy. Oh noez.

Shit changes constantly. Companies battle relentlessly to undercut one another. We invent workarounds and grow our knowledge. Relax, get yourself LineageOS+MicroG or GrapheneOS or even a Fairphone; get a Framework; use Fediverse; get off those services and sail the high seas where needed; use Linux+Firefox if you aren't already; touch grass; and if someone tries to force you into extracting rent — refuse it.

Persist.

[–] tsuica@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Amazing trip back into time, thank you for the nostalgia trip.

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[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It sucks because the obvious solution is for people to move away from these bullshit companies and show that they actually care about their privacy.

They don't. People don't care, don't understand, and don't care that they don't understand. The average person is oblivious of the way the world around them works, and they're okay with that. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The truth makes for tough reading. Now for the good news: imagine all the free software you use every day, and all the people who built it with passion and countless hours of hard work, and - not least! - how much more powerful that software is than it was even a decade ago.

It seems that the ignorant masses are not entirely in the driving seat, right?

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[–] b1ab@lem.monster 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.

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[–] Hank@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you reduce your consumption corporations can't screw you over that much. Also it's good for the environment.

[–] tocano@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

true. why should I need a facebook account? I only need to talk to the few dozen people I know, not to the millions or billions of mostly bot accounts.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Completely agree in substance and spirit, but not on this framing of everything as about ownership. Personally I don't want to "own" data any more than I want to own a car. What I want is control, rights, privacy and personal freedom. The ownership obsession seems to me a red herring that just proves how much we've been taken in by consumer capitalism.

Forgive the rant. I agree with you on the substance.

[–] kostel_thecreed@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't google's DRM be considered a monopoly? Not in the US, but don't they have laws and regulations against this type of stuff?

[–] rainh@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even if it was, it likely wouldn't be enforced, since it's overseen by lawmakers and judges who have only the barest sense of what a webpage even is.

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[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 year ago

Me in the 90s.

[–] Resonosity@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

There's a phone company out of Europe, Fairphone, that's striving to fix these problems. I can't really say if their specs are up to par or not (fwiw their newest phone can do 5G), but you can repair you phone with their Spare Parts offerings, like the selfie camera, earpiece, rear cameras, speaker, USB-C port, display, back cover, battery, etc.

Issue is that you can't buy it in the US or elsewhere, but there are some tricks where you can get it into the US/CA by going with Clove or Reship.

Phone looks to work best on T-Mobile networks, so AT&T or Verizon users might see terrible performance.

So, not panacea, but a decent solution for those willing to go down that path.

[–] noodlejetski@geddit.social 10 points 1 year ago

it's actually available in the US now, running a degoogled ROM out of the box, from Murena: https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-4/

[–] Aatube@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

help the fact that you only put a one in the first paragraph is bothering me

I’ve never heard of Clove or Reship before though, thanks!

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[–] monk@lemmy.unboiled.info 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Compatibility issues? Unspecified root problems? Nope, I ain't feeling'em.

Tech knowledge is required to use smaller services? Just a fraction of what was required before, just about enough to operate in digital world in general.

Cars are becoming SaaS? Whatever brings them closer to extinction works for me.

[–] pingveno@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Some companies are trying to bring SaaS to the world of bicycles. It's not going well. Or rather, they're going out of business.

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[–] Daisyifyoudo@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥everything is fine🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[–] tocano@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I undertand this feeling. I have a group of friends which use Messenger as a main chat app and they refuse to stop using it for convenience, but most of the features they label as convenience are the exact thing that are wrong with it. Many other platforms, despite not being perfect, have the same/more features and are better implemented.

Even if you transfer to a new and better platform, the big companies don't let go easily. They buy those new platforms and change them or just nuke them. If they can't, they will use ways to detect who is using alternative platforms and alienate them. It is just like the Phoebus cartel, which controlled progress to maximize profit. They are not against you or progress, they are against anything which reduces their potential monetary value.

I disagree when you mention subscriptions as a bad thing. Subscriptions have existed since forever, and work well when you deal with a service, for example paying a subscription to a video creator you like, or maintenance costs of hardware you use.

But not everything is grim. I have seen a lot of new FLOSS projects appearing everywhere, and people are becoming more aware of the many alternatives. I've even seen non programmers using ChatGPT (or equivalent) to create their own self-hosted platforms, showing that even those not techinal people are able to contribute to the general community.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I didn't understand when everyone jumped on Facebook messenger instead of just using their phone's built in text messaging and I still don't. It's like people crave spying or something...

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[–] nottheengineer@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed, I'm currently moving my digital life to free software to escape that bullshit.

While everything else seems to be caught up in enshittification, free software is constantly improving.

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[–] bumbly@readit.buzz 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Things aren't as bleak in Europe :)

[–] tocano@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, we still suffer a bit. A lot of internet content originates from USA and the rest of America. And the big tech companies, who control a lot of the market standards, are also from there.

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[–] lunaticneko@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

They consider revenue streams more important than one-off payment.

So everything becomes service and we are left in this non-ownership economy where we own nothing.

[–] mightysashiman@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You don’t have the option of having a phone with decent specs and replaceable parts

For now it is indeed an issue. It may get better as EU imposes easily replaceable batteries for instance.

You have to have really good knowledge in tech to have private services that are on par with what the big companies offer

Well yes, because technology is complicated by nature. BigTech inject billions in making stuff simple and UX pleasant precisely to attract layman customers. Privacy-focused tech companies have less money, put a lot of effort in privacy tech, and are less mature UX-wise than classic bigTech. Customers also want more privacy, but have a hard time paying for anything. At some point the customer has to come to terms with coherence. Vote with your wallet.

You have to put up with annoying compatibility issues if you install a custom ROM on your android phone

No you don’t necessarily. LineageOS works perfectly on my Oneplus 6T.

You cannot escape apps preventing you from using them if you root your device

Yes you can. Magisk Root + Universal SafetyNet Fix v2.4.0-MOD_1.2 (by kdrag0n, modded by Displax) + editing the deny list properly.

Cars are becoming SaaS bullcrap

Use public transport when possible. Rent cars when really not possible. Problem solved.

Everything is going for a subscription model in general

I understand it’s frustrating. At the same time we either expect a constant stream of updates, or everything-IT requires regular updating if only for security purposes. Companies have employees to pay. Do you work for free?

[–] xiao@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Strangely your post makes me think of the SciFi book written by Alain Damasio - Les Furtifs. 😬

Not sure that it has been translated in English...

[–] originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Technology creates fiefdoms where rentiers extract value from the rest of us. But I’m not losing hope

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Don't blame technology; blame capitalism. Technology could equally well be used to benefit everyone, but doing that doesn't vastly increase the personal wealth of the already wealthy.

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