Everyone should care
Yeah, privacy is not political.
If you didn’t realize the importance of privacy after the patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism, it’s definitely time to get on board asap. Get yourself and your community on signal instead of texts and tuta or proton instead of regular email, use a vpn (mullvad or proton are solid), and depending on what kinds of actions you may or may not be interested in, learn how to use tails os and tor (try to find a copy of the darknetmarket bible for a good intro)
Edit: simplex is a good alternative to signal too, and if you have a google pixel, grapheneos is solid. Next time you’re getting a new phone, get a used pixel and install it. On your computer, there’s a lot of telemetry and sketchy stuff windows does, either research and disable that or switch to linux if you can
I’ve gotten nearly my entire circle on Signal and it’s incredibly satisfying. No more worrying about seeing ads based on my text conversations.
patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism
The Patriot Act was an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill.
The two were separate signs of the increased need for privacy
@[email protected] don’t forget the CL:OUD Act either - that has serious privacy implications for countries outside the USA
I think people outside the US are fair game
If you don’t like it then don’t send your data to the US
I don’t want Authoritarianism period I don’t care if it is left or right. Specific political beliefs are a distraction
Fair, but at least in the US right wing auth is a much more direct and realistic threat to people and their privacy, although left auth is bad too
I call BS
Both major political parties in the US are different degrees of right wing auth.
Then you must be extreme left
Please don’t use Signal, the US government has all the keys. Self host XMPP, Matrix and SimpleX servers and make sure encryption is properly configured. If you’re not generating your encryption keys, why should you use them?
I’d really like to see the source for the first claim
Agreed. That’s a really bold claim to make without citing (credible) sources
What do you mean you don’t see the trustmebro.com link? /s
Source? And fyi, if you use Signal you are generating your own encryption keys. Your private keys are generated on your phone and stay on it. So what gives you the idea that
the US government has all the keys
?? Sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory
Plus, the signal client is open source. You can literally be 100% sure that your keys are being securely generated.
I don’t think Signal is unsafe, but agree that it is a weird middle ground. Depends on threat model, of course, but overall I would prefer something selfhostable - for the sake of independence, easier anonymity and censorship resistance. Plus, Signal by default doesn’t allow desktop registration (and desktops are much easier to make private than phones), so you’d need either a VM or a command-line application for it, which is a big pet peeve of mine.
I think the best option is to communicate about alternatives. Maybe get a few close friends on each and then decide
Source that confirms the US government has all the keys to decrypt all Signal chats?
Everyone should care
Declarations of an intent to reimagine social media are all well and good, but joining the actually existing Fediverse is probably a more effective place to start.
It may not be precisely what you would’ve designed, not the People’s Democratic Social Media of your dreams, not exactly like whatever Tarnoff imagined, but it is what we’ve got and as it continues to evolve it has considerable potential for new kinds of Internet-based social organization.
Organizing a boycott of Twitter is beside the point. All we need is for more people to join us in building up the better alternatives we already have. How is it even possible to put so much thought into the subject and not mention this?
Playing devil’s advocate here: bringing awareness to the problem (and explaining why it is a problem in the first place) to more people is a pretty important step into carrying out this ‘social media reform’. Ultimately though I do agree that at least some mention of viable alternatives like the Fediverse would’ve been nice.
If you truly believe you have nothing to hide, please post your full name and address, telephone number, email, bank balance, an assessment of your relationship to your parents and a link to your complete photo folder as a response to this comment.
While i agree with the sentiment thats a ridiculous comparison. Thinking you have nothing to hide from the government is not the same as thinking you have nothing to hide from random entities on the internet. You already give the government all of that stuff when you literally just exist. Go get a social security card or a drivers license. Absolutely asinine to try to compare the two.
But increasingly, the data you need to care about not being private isn’t from the govt. airs from those random entities. And their security is godawful.
Such as?
…google, Microsoft, Facebook…need I go on?
In the early 2000s, the issue was primarily the government. Patriot act made sure of that. And yeah, it’s still an issue with regards to the amount and types of data they’re storing and who the government is currently comprised of, but in 2024, the much larger privacy issue is from private data holdings. All those random fuckin apps you have, every cell phone carrier, every goddamn car now. Your data is the product now. And capitalism is the problem.
Yes you need to go on. You dont just get to name apps and that just point blank proves your point lmfao. What is the data these places have that you didnt willingly give them that needs to be kept private
And that has nothing to do with the post. What is the information they are collecting that is sooo dangerous? That its akin to my social security and home address being posted to a social forum.
In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we’re not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don’t know if we can actually get there.
I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you’re interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google’s original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.
In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.
As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.
I’m pretty sure Communism is definitely not an option. I don’t want to starve or die today.
Always cracks me up to see people who champion open source alternatives hate on communism.
There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.
They are not related
You can tell yourself that but communism is very different from libre software
I agree that there are differences, but I feel there are more similarities. Especially with anarchocommunist or collectivist theory.
You shouldn’t feel that way, because communism has absolutely nothing to do with open source software.
Communism is a political ideology.
Open source software is a licensing technique for creators and developers. Mostly so that no one has to worry about getting sued if they want to implement or modify said software. You think a communist government would even allow the use of open source software over government issued/approved software?
You personally cant draw comparisons between two separate systems? Seems like a limit of imagination.
You shouldnt presume to know better than others, especially when you dont appear to understand anything about the ideology outside of your bias.
Always cracks me up to see people who champion open source alternatives hate on communism.
This isn’t about “drawing comparisons” this is about how you don’t understand why someone would champion open source software and hate on communism…because of course people hate on fucking communism, you dope.
It’s proven time and time again that communist governments bring suffering to their people. Like, some fucked up shit. Like starvation, inequality, and lack of basic human rights.
Whereas open source software can be educational, build cost effective solutions for people and businesses, and empower people’s lives.
You see the difference?
How?
I don’t want to starve or die today.
Yep, that’s why we need Communism and not Capitalism.
Its funny that people dying of starvation, in the USSR, is seen as a crime of communism but the exact same people will refuse to accept, by their own “logic”, that would make the rest of ALL the starvation in the world a crime of capitalism.
How do you even start to deconstruct that kind of indoctrination?
Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don’t yet fully know how it would work, or how we’d get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn’t working.
You might be thinking of USSR, which sought to create a communist state, but was subject to internal corruption and outside threats (not to mention, Wilson sought a pact with the European states – some of which were still monarchist – to sanction trade with USSR, so it was at a considerable disadvantage from the get go.
But while USSR was going through its growing pains, the rest of us were going through the great depression, and those of us living in cardboard boxes and stacks of paint cans were wondering if Lenin had a point, the industrialists boozing and gambling with Hoover were admiring the Austrian fellow. Eventually those industrialists decided they need to create a propaganda package and teach it in our schools.
Huh. I can’t post images anymore. I wonder if it’s a browser problem or a Lemmy problem.
Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don’t yet fully know how it would work, or how we’d get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn’t working.
I don’t see how Communism can be built without actively building it through Socialism, so that bit’s pretty much solved, and the rest can be figured out by Socialist societies.
A big part of communism is about who owns the means of production. One way to alter this aspect of society is through cooperative economics. A state-less form of socialism (edit: democratically controlled) that’s already proven effective in small pockets of our own country (assuming US here) and around the world. One common example is Mondragon in Spain, a cooperative business and the seventh largest company in the country, that has proven its even possible for the cooperative model to reach levels of scale capable of competing in a private capitalist world.
Cooperatives are cool, but unfortunately Markets lead to class contradictions even with cooperatives in place, which is why the goal still needs to be full Socialism.
Cooperatives have different structures to help mitigate class conflicts, but either way the model essentially, or practically, has a baked in, or something akin to a, union by giving members voting rights while not outright excluding the presence of a union.
I don’t disagree with having a goal of full socialism. I just see cooperatives as a practical stepping stone in that direction.
They certainly can be a practical stepping stone, and probably will be in some countries, I just wanted to indicate that competing worker coops does not defeat the issues inherent to the profit motive.
Ah right. I see. This is why I think we need to couple this with something like the economy for the common good as an alternative to measuring growth of an economy by GDP.
God damn this is a beautiful fucking website
the left is/will suffer more of the consequences
Great article actually. Thanks for sharing.
Are people are using WhatsApp, Discord and Instagram because it’s left or right, and not because that’s what they see everyone else is doing?
I use discord because that’s what social circle use to communicate. No one is going to follow me if I switch apps or care about my suggestions.
Why do they use it, if you follow the chain of people using it for other people back to the start?
Because that’s what the core of the group that are generally making all the plans want to use. Some of us were trying to get everyone to use signal instead a while back but it never went anywhere. At this point I’m just grateful they aren’t using facebook to coordinate everything. Or at least enough of them aren’t that I can still find out whats going on via discord.
I suspect many people here are not the core of their social circles and that’s why they never make any progress. We should tell them to fix that first more.
Not everyone has a personality suited to that. I certainly don’t and most people just aren’t that concerned with privacy. Just finding people that didn’t rely on Facebook was difficult for me. I don’t really have the time or energy to dedicate to convincing them to go further.
So we focus on targeting those already suitable.
I thought the left was the ones who cared, and the right was all like “If you dont have anything to hide you shouldnt be worried” bootlickers.
I never understand the presence of right wing people in privacy discussion actually. After everything they deliberately give up to either a fashist state or corporations
they like having a private space where they can be as racist and bigoted as they want to be
They want to use the public space for that.
that too, but they want to carve out a little hole for themselves where they can be even racister without people opposing them.
I’m pretty sure your view of the right skewed. To be fair it is very hard to see clearly.
I know my name will be on future lists when fascist purges start. Not because I’m some great though leader or anything. Just because they hate people with my beliefs.
Nice username
Title gore
