there are too many frictions overall.
That was my experience too. I can’t remember now what my objections were, but I tried it and did not like it or want to use it.
I am now self hosting XMPP + encryption server which I have got some of my friends to install clients for. Oh, they bitch nonstop about how it isn’t as nice as whatever big tech app they are used to. But they use it, because I am not going to talk to them on $TrendingSurveillanceApp.
That reminds me of a quote I heard once. Probably from Cory Doctorow but I cannot remember now.
“Everyone wants you to have privacy… just not from them.”
I think I need to buy a graphene phone for that though, my android I don’t think is capable of loading a different OS,
I have no experience with it, but they have page here which lists compatible devices, and recommended devices. The recommended ones are a subset, because apparently some older devices lack hardware security features.
Agreed. I don’t carry a phone today, but I am considering getting a dumbphone + Faraday pouch for emergencies.
And yah, “smart bikes”… eww.
100%. If you can bike, that’s both good for your health, AND reduces surveillance.
We need to push for better bikability especially here in North America. Fortunately my city is good, but so many others are not. Especially for older people who may not be comfortable mixing it up with cars if they bike.
Of course also now Flock cameras are everywhere, who watch bikes as well as cars. There is no plate on a bicycle, but I have seen allegations they can perform biometric ID of pedestrians and cyclists.
at least I don’t have to worry about my car’s radio system being a little snitch
I feel your pain. It’s nearly impossible now to buy a disconnected car, and over time, pre-connectivity cars will become old and less reliable.
I need to look out the windows/windshields to back up.
Which is getting harder on some models of hatchback where it’s difficult to see out the rear window. My car is like that. My old car was a 4 dr sedan and you could easily see behind. In my new car I would not feel safe backing up without the camera due to how bad the rear visibility is. Especially in parking lots with the risk that a child below window level had run out from somewhere into my blind spot. That’s what keeps me tethered to my backup camera - the fear of hitting another person I couldn’t see. Otherwise I would do exactly what you are doing.
I bike whenever I can, but sometimes, I must drive.
Another problem is that on some newer cars, the “little snitch” part of the car is the same subsystem as other features of the car you need, like the directional blinkers. You rip out the snitching part, and you also lose safety features you need legally and ethically.
I hate this. All of this. I hate that the default for so many devices now, not just cars, is surveillance.
I rarely speak my full mind, especially online,
I agree with you that caution is good. Yet at the same time, this is exactly the “chilling effect” of mass surveillance, right? People start to self-police.
From the article, the subpoenas went to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord, and are targeting accounts that “lack real names”.
Even if someone has signed up with fake names, I hold tremendous suspicion they can ID people anyway. Of course their accuracy is going to depend on many things. For example, did someone use their own IP, or a VPN? Did they use the app, or a web interface? But some of those sites won’t even allow signups through VPNs.
There is a big industry built around browser and device fingerprinting for “identity resolution”. This tech was driven by the advertising industry, after their ability to use cookies for identification was curtailed. I have no way to prove this, nor evidence for this, but I would eat my hiking boots if the big social media sites did NOT use that sorta tech.
KeyPassXC is the way to go, IMO. It is wonderful. The password db is stored locally on your disk. It integrates nicely with firefox and probably other browsers too. Open source, no spyware, “just works”.
Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.
I just run everything possible locally which helps a lot. Nearly everything my friends do in “the cloud” I do on my own computer. Even stuff like spreadsheets they want to do in the cloud. It flummoxes me, how willing they are to share everything with big tech.
If you have a mid range or better GPU, you can even run a local LLM. I have used one for language translation. I cannot speak German but I was talking to a German speaker who did not speak English about a hobby. We could talk to each other despite not sharing a language. That’s practically sci-fi to me! I used a sandboxed LLM disallowed from any network access, to do that.
Even so, I am skeptical about most of what I see people use LLMs for. I am afraid of what they will allow bad actors to do. I am afraid of even worse corruption of the information space. I doubt the horse will re-enter the barn tho.
Shit, so anyone wearing these glasses is compromising everyone they come into contact with, not just to data brokers, but by extension to the us government, and everyone else the data brokers sell the information to.
That’s what gets to me. In this case yah, but so many other situations too. I can try to improve my own privacy environment. I cannot stop random people from biometricing me as I walk around the city.
My friends tell me sometimes, you were always visible in public, what do you worry about? But it is a vast difference between someone seeing a random unknown person walking who they forget 30 seconds later, and having a permanent record of everyone’s movements attached to their IDs.
I can refuse to opt in. I cannot stop total strangers from opting me in tho.
FFS.
Yah. And in almost no cases does that technically need to be the case. It just actually is the case. Surveillance capitalism. It’s common now the company makes more money from your data than from selling you the device. Even for big ticket devices like cars!
Companies are also very, very good at making people want it. I advise my friends against giving their new IoT shiny any internet access. I am rarely successful. You all know how it goes. “I don’t have anything to hide.”
Offline single purpose devices still work fine. I have two digital cameras, big and small, that use a USB cable to my PC. An unconnected mp3 player. An alarm clock with no connectivity that isn’t a phone app, it’s a thing with a big ole snooze button. It wakes me up fine.