If you think you have nothing to hide, imagine pooping with the bathroom door open all of the time.
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Nice resource that goes over the main objections to people who don't value there own privacy:
https://blog.rebeltechalliance.org/common-objections-debunked/
"i have nothing to hide anyways"
"theyre tracking me anyways so it doesnt matter"
"i dont do anything illegal so i dont care if im being tracked"
these quotes make my blood boil
I've also heard
"I'm not important enough for anyone to care what I'm doing."
I'm like honey this shit is automated at population scale. You don't have to be important. You only have to be a human.
I just go full anti tech, which people find ironic since I'm in the tech industry, and they poke fun at that
No matter what you do, no matter what you think or say, people will try their darnedest to poke holes at it
But what you *don't * do? That's pretty hard to poke holes at.
"I don't have a Facebook account" is a brickwall to the conversion. That way in their mind, it's not that I don't trust the company, it's that I don't even slightly value the product. I have a damn phone, I have to am required to_ pay for the damn phone. It has group chats. What is the value of Facebook again?
Marketplace? I buy everything brand new and keep it until it's dead
Doomscrolling? Bad habit, not interested
Family connections? I cut most of them off but maybe 4, who know to call/text
Now even thermostats are getting microphones and listening devices, which will absolutely be used to collect data on people from their homes see ecobees new TOS, and the new HoneyWell/ring camera integrations frankly I'm just done with the bullshit. I'm full blown get any phone home technology the fuck out of my house levels of done
But I don't say that when people ask why I changed my thermostat from the $400 Ecobee, which was a standout feature in my home when they walked in.
No. I say "their servers kept going down and causing issues when I needed it to work", because people who somehow manage to live without concerning themselves of targeted pricing or snooping practices do care about slight inconveniences, and for whatever reason "they changed their TOS to get people to agree to let them spy on them without legal reprecussions, and if you don't agree they'll lock you out of your account barring you from using half the stuff you paid to use" is less logical to their pre-occupied brains than "I got inconvenienced twice a year from down servers"
I just go full anti tech, which people find ironic since I'm in the tech industry, and they poke fun at that
It's funny, because they've managed to draw completely the wrong conclusion. You aren't anti-tech despite working in the tech industry, no - you're anti-tech because of working in the tech industry.
Whenever I hear the "only people with something to hide" comment I reply "oh? Then unlock your phone, hand it to me and leave the room." They always backtrack immediately.
This one is really good. I always say "then why do you have walls in your house" but it doesn't work that well.
"Why do you have curtains on your windows" is a little less dismissable than "Walls" for future.
Gosh... why havn't I thought of saying that

I had to have a hard conversation with my wife and in-laws about posting pictures of my son online. They agreed but didn't get it. Once AI deepfakes became common, they got it.
I mean it's still probably beneficial for a lot of cases. Ad and tracking companies want the easiest route, which is just to farm the people who make no effort to improve their privacy (the majority). Sophisticated trackers do exist, and companies like Meta still do literally everything to get any last bit, but for the most part you'll knock out 90% of invasion with even basic measures and like 98% with greater measures
Ayep. Probably including where you live and what you do for a living.

I always gotta love the “why do you refuse the cookies? The site might not work!”.
Sweety I need you to understand that I do not care whether or not the site works. If it doesn’t then it’s not worth my time.
Also "I don't want to use an adblocker, I find tailored advertising very useful"
Yes I love my brain being hijacked by big tech.
Also I've hardly ever seen a site not work because I rejected the cookies.
guhhh but I love cookies!
arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
- Edward Snowden
But that doesn't give individuals a reason to take action on there own privacy. At least it should mean others will respect you more for valuing your own privacy.
“There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s.
You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records.
You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.
Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.
Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.”
-- Edward Snowden
It's scary to think about how the next generations are essentially being groomed to believe that these invasive applications and surveillance are just normal. But that's the goal of the big tech oligarchs.
Same reason they try and say it's only criminals that want to protect their privacy.
that's what I'm saying, surveillance is the new normal, its trendy, opposition is being an "Extremist" and "Creepy"
Ask people that tell you that only those with something to hide care about privacy whether they shit with the door open or closed when there are others around.
I don't talk about privacy with normies. If they bring it up, I'm happy to discuss.
I think privacy is very slowly becoming more mainstream and a large part of that is thanks to google. Installing "ai" on devices, deleting peoples' accounts, making installing non-play store apps more difficult, will ultimately encourage more people to degoogle their lives.
Yeah. no. "Normies" love AI everything. They definitely don't install apps from outside the Play store either.
Only thing that bugs them from this list is the deletion of accounts. Unfortunately they'll happily hand over ID and other things to get it back, or just create a new account on the same site.
Source: Experience.
No the one that pisses me off are the people who understand that computers take effort and the only way to fix that is to have an organization that takes care of that effort for you.
For example to replace discord your only options are: Corporate shit Startups which are a few extra users away from IPO'ing into corporate shit Something open source selfhosted
I get why normal folk don't wann self host. What I can't stand is the complaints about using other peoples self hosted servers because you can't be fucked to remember more than two URLs/passwords as if your browser doesn't have bookmakers and you don't have a password manager.
Like fuck sure, its cool you don't want to do system administration. But the only way an extra site is inconvenient is if you're incapable of the computer equivalent of wiping your own ass.
These are young anticapitalist, chronically online queers I'm talking about too.
If they're not willing nobody is and its fucking soul crushing to know.
The really creepy one is stuff like 23andme where your genealogy obsessed extended family all does it and now they can statistically estimate your genome from your known family history and it’s all in a database for sale and Trump’s DOJ is likely buying
Most of us have been trying to educate the boomers since the beginning of the internet. Curiously, some people have become more receptive to security since the rise of techno fascism and scam calls. I've convinced several to use a vpn.
Its wild, I remember when my first paycheck came in and a family member posted a picture of it to their social media........ with my name and all on there.
It also doesn't stop with privacy, I remember expressing my distaste for generative LLMs to the same person, and the first thing the next day they post in our discord is some shitty ai meme of me and asked if I liked it? All I said was "ah, I tell you I don't like LLM art and you upload my face to their database, pretty thoughtless of you." The comment went right through one ear out the other.
Look, you might be saying it's the fault of people around you, but look at what you're doing here, you give out your real name without a second thought, Mr. Robot.
;)
Yeah if I talk about how everything is routed through VPN people just assume I'm deep into porn or worse.
It’s genuinely baffling. My spouse is not a very bright guy and sees zero issue with all of our online erosion of privacy, saying all the age verification stuff going on is completely irrelevant and you can just lie about your age so it will never be a problem in the future either… it drives me crazy how short sighted it is
I think people reject that it's as bad as they're told because that don't like to believe it's that bad, or that there's no way companies would do that to them. People don't accept being told "you're making a big mistake" and to feel dumb about it.
That's my take. I had somebody at work ask what I do regarding privacy and I realized I lit up with excitement to share and had to immediately dial it back to not freak them out. I started out small and simple and emailed them since basics after chatting. Said, if they wanted additional info let me know " so that it's up to them to continue the journey (down the rabbit hole lol).
But just glad to see others gaining the knowledge. My journey wasn't immediate, it's gradual, so I have to be mindful of their process too.