There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.
Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!
Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.
Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!
And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.
Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.
the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough
I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.
Welcome to the team, comrade. Wait til you find out why they demonize China and it’s approach to the internet
I am interested in hearing more about this if you’re willing to elaborate
This makes china out to be the good guys, but that can’t be right…
Because as we all know Chinese companies never collect people’s data
Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up.
Can someone please explain how they are doing this?
- Use Adblocker
- Use DNS filter
- DoH to prevent MiTM/use your own resolver in Unbound.
I’m still trying to look up how to prevent ISPs from logging my SNIWell, it seems Cloudflare and other domain service providers have implemented ESNI.
Friends, family, and even people you briefly meet, rat you out. Often without them even knowing by sharing their list of phone contacts.
And what happens when you change your phone number? Does that become a new shadow profile? What of they change your name in their contact list? I’m trying to gauge how Facebook handles the inconsistencies of navigating contacts who don’t have Facebook accounts
We can only guess. But they can probably detect contacts for which the phone number is updated or which have several assigned phone numbers.
Also all Android / iOS apps with Facebook and Google trackers in them share device info and data easy to correlate, icw sites having FB pixels also.
They do more than just the phone number and name. https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/
It talks about the use of photos, people mentioning you in a post, etc. Sure, facetook publicly said they would be backing off of visual recognition, but how much do you really trust that company to do jack-diddly if there is potential profit? Anyway. If you change your phone number, but the same group of people still have you in a ‘field of contacts,’ their tools can almost certainly fit those puzzle pieces together. Same if you change the phone number. Identifying people is easy if you have metadata.
This is starting to look like a major problem. Are there any tips on how to solve this issue?
Communism is ad free
How stupid is u?
How about you make an argument, instead of spewing rude teenager-like bullshit?
Propaganda was so good Russia is still using the methods and clowns like sharkfucker saying stupid shit like above.
Very naive understanding of “communism”
More like propaganda is so good that most people don’t even know what communism even is, let alone that what the USSR did wasn’t it, even said so themselves.
Tankie spotted
Name calling, classy.
Soviets crimes have nothing to do with communism… Mao isa saint?
U is very stupid, because U is just a letter.
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Hulu doesn’t show ads though?
have been on the internet since before you could even pay to have a dialup account.
It isn’t really that hard.
you are incredibly out of touch with the average person’s literacy on these matters.
I agree with you in all your points and I have also look into why people just give up their privacy so easily , most of the time what I have noticed is that they (we all) love convenience. You want a plug and play camera? Buy ring , Need a plug and play router with a nice App? Buy google and Amazon Eero. Need to promote your business? Where is everyone at? Facebook , Twitter and Google. Most regular people give up their privacy for convenience, they don’t have time dealing with thousands of option on a PF sense router , no time to create VLAns.
look into why people just give up their privacy so easily ,
because we made it easy to use technology and nobody has time to be an expert in every field.
What may be needed is to first promote the basic idea that doing the right thing is most often harder than not. It applies to a lot of areas including this one, and it’s a hard one to make a habit of. I figured this out many years ago and yet here I am typing this out on an Android phone, wishing that I had spent that money on a more privacy respecting one when I had the chance. But people have to get into the habit of not always choosing the “quicker, easier, more seductive” route all the time, because we all know where that leads.
This is why you vote in every election.
I gave up on voting when I realized the last however many times I did it changed nothing. I want a real solution, not a distraction.
In 1968, a bunch of hippies opened up a ‘Dick Gregory for President’ office. They had enough money for the first month’s rent and phone, and figured that they would make a small impact. Somehow, someone kept paying the office rent and phone for months.
You not voting is exactly what the people you hate want you to do.
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The would candidates care if people bring up the issue.
If lots of people let their voices be heard, the pols will listen.
You can wait around for the perfect candidate to come along, or you can work to make the change happen.
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If voting doesn’t matter, why is Trump so mad about automatic voter registration?
You not voting makes Donnie and his friends happy.
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Then I’ll explain it.
Laws decide what large companies can and can not do to gather data. Politicians decide those laws. Who you vote for decides what policies are enacted. If the current parties aren’t working to help you, you might have to go out and search for better candidates.
If you’re not American, substitute any pro-Fascist candidate you choose for ‘Donald Trump.’
what the fuck world do you live in where that take reflects reality?
*everybody *knows the TSA is bullshit that doesn’t help anything and yet nobody would dare suggest getting rid of it despite how deeply unpopular it is. Weed isn’t federally legal despite a majority of americans supporting decriminalization in some form. Universal healthcare is also >50% support and they won’t legislate it.
there are similar issues and cases in all liberal democracies, you understand nothing about how politics actually work.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/politics/marijuana-decriminalization-white-house-joe-biden/index.html
Almost as if voting works.
lol you might want to read past the headline on that one chief
which party do i
for if i want antitrust suits brought against tech companies and which party is running candidates who know how to write hello world in any programming language?https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/26/tech/ftc-sues-amazon-antitrust-monopoly-case/index.html
Amazon antitrust lawsuit going on as we speak.
where are the rest of them
We are empowered with our own path in life but we do not have full control of it. And that is ok, it is ok to not be able to control everthing.
The best way to counter publicity is to simply erase from your mind. Turn it into white noise.
I don’t have a clue how I’ve learned how to do this but I can have multiple publicity spots thrown at me that I won’t retain a thing. Sometimes to the point I get a song stuck on loop in my head and I can’t figure where I heard it.
Using tools to dodge or simply eliminate ads is also an option, especially online.
You can take back your freedom of choice to take part of an audience for publicity if you are willing to put some effort to regain it.
This was clearly spelled out - quite by mistake - by one of the very sumbitches stealing our privacy all the way back in 1999:
https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
The sumbitches have since learned to work quietly and boil us frogs slowly. But they sure have been busy since 1999.
When I heard Scott McNealy utter that obscene statement back then, I laughed and I remember telling a coworker “That guy is off his goddamn mind”. A decade later, I understood that he actually let slip something we should have paid a lot more attention to. But it was already much too late.
Another user, in a similar thread, shared this speech on enshittification. Addresses a good bit of what you are talking about and why mass action is hard in the current legal framework. We need better laws.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rimtaSgGz_4?si=pdDRwugtHefZACcd
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
at some point, we are going to have to boycott everything
consumer boycotts aint shit. we need tech workers, some of the people with the least class consciousness and poorest ethics, to refuse to create and maintain surveillance tools.
when i say “boycott everything”, i mean everything. nothing short of a secessio plebis type of deal
Devo wrote a song about it.
I mirror your concerns but as long as there’s money to be made, the thing that makes money will continue to happen. Advertising is part of that, and if they can harvest our data to target ads, they will.
We won’t win the fight against money. What we can do is block/avoid advertisements, avoid (as much as possible) services that are known for this behavior, support services that are known to respect privacy, and educate those that are receptive.
After reading about Snowden leaks and what world governments are capable of technologically, I’ve come to the same conclusion that privacy is now an illusion. Sure, one browser might send less data to corporations, but the government can see whatever they want on anyone’s computer with an internet connection. The answer is to take a step back technologically. Interact with people in person. Read books at the library. Shop locally instead of online or at big box stores. Buy thrifted DVDs. The further you remove yourself, the more private you will be.
I want to add to this: In my country (Poland, but probably many others) you are sometimes almost forced to be tracked by FAANG companies. For example our mObywatel app, which can be uses as driver’s license replacement requires you to download it via Google Play and have Google Services installed. Of course it uses firebase to send notifications.
Firebase really is the curse of modern software development
Could you eli5 what’s bad about it?
It’s yet another service in the hands of Google and a proprietary library, far too many apps depend on it to send push notifications, which isn’t unexpected when Google, which owns Android, has made it the only standard push service by leveraging their position of power and in turn Unified Push and all its free implementations had to come from the community, but almost no app uses it, because everyone is used to Firebase by this point.
That’s the open platform aspect, it is also a privacy concern because it means that most apps will have your notifications pass through Google’s servers, I don’t think they can necessarily read the content, but the time of reception and sending and where it comes from is metadata that they certainty see
Can’t you use a normal license instead?
