I have nothing else to ask in this community..... how did I get here? 🤔
For the past year, I've been immersed in the topic of Privacy. I switched to Linux, flashed my phone to LineageOS, changed all my software to one that respects privacy, switched my family and most* friends to Signal, started hating megacorporations and pretty much every government in the world, asked a lot of questions on tiddeR and here. Everything makes sense to me now. I'm a privacy guru🥹. How to move on? What's the next step? 😁
P.S. if you're just at the beginning of your journey, I don't think you'll find a better resource than PrivacyGuides. Highly recommend it!
unironically and without bad intentions saying this: touch grass. what good does maximum privacy when you don't do anything with it? one major take away for me from caring about privacy was the realization, that i tended to be "terminally online" (given my job needs me to sit in front of a computer during most working hours) and started to live more in the "analogue world". enjoy reading books again. take your family more out, explore your city, the countryside - and turn your phone off. just pretend it's 1998 again. good luck & see you out there, space cowboy!
what good does maximum privacy when you don't do anything with it?
There is absolutely something to be said about increasing the noise level for interesting signal. If only the people who truly have something to hide (activists, whistleblowers, journalists, etc) use privacy tools, then they stand out like a beacon in the night. If we all take the same measures they are much much harder to pin point.
the internet and it's tools shouldn't be the centerpoint of our private lives. use it when you want/have to or just feel like it, but don't let it dictate your personal habits and relationships. if you want to fuck over big tech and the all-seeing eye of the glowies, just stop feeding them instead just trying to avoid them.
A lot of people have a lot more problems with it than I do. I guess I'm lucky. And I'm very happy about that. I like Signal, the way it works, looks, etc. People like it too, by the way. Especially the sound quality when talking. Compared to Telegram, it's heaven and earth.
It used to be way easier to get people to switch before they eliminated SMS. No idea why they thought getting rid if their key differentiating feature was a good idea.
SMS support was a big part of that. I could install Signal on my 70 year old mom's phone and say "here, this is where you message people". Sure she had a hard time distinguishing when a conversation was private, maybe. But that was irrelevant the people who used signal on the other hand knew. That move was truly awful. And now six months later here we are still without non phone number accounts. 😡
I just told everyone from this list that I would only correspond with them on Signal from now on. And I explained why, of course. Everyone understood and downloaded. At first they wrote in Telegram by habit, but then they got used to it. We have good relations with our parents, so there were no problems.
And if not teaching in the traditional academic/classroom setting, at least spread awareness about why privacy is important, why one should care, and what can be done to protect one’s privacy to friends/family/others who will listen
Yeah. Some obscure tiddeR that a lot of us wrote something on. Something from the past, obviously, can't remember.
That's what i am doing already. Privacy awareness to the masses!
You really believe that you've become a privacy guru over the past year? You better teach then. Write blogs about your journey, make it easier for the common but interested folk or even make it tangible for the common folk so they will begin to show interest.
That's more of a joke than something else. I am already spreading the idea of the importance of digital privacy among my relatives, friends and acquaintances like a virus. And I'm pretty good at it. But I recently recommended a Pixel 6A to a friend of a friend of a friend to use without flashing custom rom, so I'm an amogus in some sense 😆
Imagine privacy online was like these glass doors that turn opaque once you turn the lock, so Facebook stops tracking you everywhere when they detect that you are currently taking a shit (they probably already know when you do)
If they would stop tracking at least in this case, it would be already much better. Instead of a toilet there would be a request not to track. But unfortunately in our dystopia this is not foreseen at all, so we continue the resistance 🙂
Really, I would want a web 10.0 that enforces anonymity, privacy and good UX by design by restricting what features "web" developers can use to a minimum nescessary set. And ideally it would all be P2P or at least some form of decentralized. Like if Tor, I2P, Zeronet and the Fediverse had a baby.
You could do 99% of all the things you might want to do on it as a user on a daily basis. You could have a search engine, a wikipedia, a facebook, a reddit, a youtube, etc and whatever else people use the internet for 99% of the time, but the features of this Web 10.0 are restricted to only the minimum ones to enable those sites. And the only way to be tracked is if you intentionally or unintentionally reveal your own identity.
Then you might also have hardware that exclusively only connects to this Web 10.0, ideally on a hardware level.
I couldn't do the transition to Signal because of the family/friends. And the LineageOS thing, I couldn't do that to my brand new Pixel7, lol.
But others are pretty much done at this point. Thanks for PrivacyGuides, didn't know that!
It was not so simple, but kinda ultimatum take worked out. Talk here or nowhere. There is way better option for Pixel phones, GrapheneOS. Truly awesome peace of software. You should definetly try it. PrivacyGuides is basically the best and biggest portal to privacy as of now. Competent explanations, recommendations, criterias. It is successor to privacytools.io which was turned in to trash by main dev in 2021 with ads based recommendations of software that have nothing to do with privacy. All biggest contributors moved on to PrivacyGuides 😉