Naivety has layers. You either die a normie who doesn't care about privacy, or you live long enough to become a schizo who knows how bad things really are. Try bringing up at the dinner table the NSA dragnet or always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs.
Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.
The other important fact is that there are multiple entities keeping an ever-growing dossier on you which you cannot see, delete, or correct.
Every step you take, every word you write, every picture or video you look at, every single thing you pay for, every place you go, every person you call/message, or are physically near to. And the times when you left your phone behind. For everyone, combined, analyzed, searchable, with machine-learning-everything thrown at it to find and predict patterns and of course to stalk exes, political activists, anybody.
Imagine what the Stasi police could do with all of this and know that your current administration is doing it.
It’s a bit depressing even if put to the music of I’m Watching You by hmmm… the Police.
> Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.
But this nihilistic, all-or-nothing attitude is another kind of naïvety.
There are absolutely still ways for people to keep large chunks of their online presence and activity private. Using E2EE services like Matrix and iMessage, for instance. De-Googling sharply reduces the amount of information Google has about you. Etc, etc.
It may not be accessible—or even understandable—for everyone, but the idea that absolutely everything we say, do, want, and think will be collected and tracked and there's nothing we can do about it is just not true.
I said nothing you can do about logging. Of course you can stop using large parts of the internet (or stop using it altogether) but that kind of defeats the purpose if there's no good alternative, regardless of accessibility. The point is that perfect privacy on the web is impossible, so why should OP worry about amazon storing voice data when tons is already logged in google meet, microsoft teams, zoom, webex, discord etc.
Plus, privacy leaks are plugged one at a time - we'll never get to private computing if we immediately give up because there's more than one thing spying on us, so fixing any one thing won't solve everything.
And it's a lot harder to spy en masse if for each act of spying you risk exposing your chip-level backdoor, instead of just asking Facebook for the data.
"You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise."
This type of statement usually comes from the "schizo" who is "living on the internet", not the "normie" who has a life away from the internet and only uses it occasionally. It is a common "all-or-nothing" perspective that has been shared on HN for at least a decade. Meanwhile so-called "tech" companies spend millions on lobbying against privacy regulation and pay millions in fines and settlements for violations.
Perhaps whether one has "privacy" is not as important as whether one believes they might be able to get it. As long as the possibility of "getting it" exists in people's minds, and people take action toward that end, then so-called "tech" companies face a potentially existential threat. It interferes with the progression of their only "business model". The "all-or-nothing" view of "privacy" seen in HN comments is particularly suspect when one considers that those invested in so-called "tech" companies have a financial interest in erasing the _possibility_ of "privacy", i.e., the motivation to take action, however small and seemingly insignificant, from people's minds.
There are ways to use the internet that send minimal useful data to so-called "tech" companies and there are ways to use the internet that send maximum amounts of data to so-called "tech" companies. Neither is "internet privacy" in the absolute sense. But each has a different effect on the "business model" of so-called "tech" commpanies.
More importantly, less use of the internet may result in less data being shared with so-called "tech" companies. Good luck getting the "schizo" to reduce their internet use. It is not suprising the "schizo" would suggest an absolutist standard of "internet privacy" where achieving it is impossible. For the "schizo" who is wedded to the computer, this is probably true.
Despite your assertions that someone who thinks that lacking privacy online is indicative of a specific hallucinatory mental illness, it may surprise you to learn that plenty of people lacking that mental illness think similarly.
It's less a function of mental illness or time spent online, and more simply pointing out the old-as-writing state of affairs where companies will do whatever they can do to you to make more money. See the "Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir" for a timeline of this.
It is not hallucinatory to observe that companies take advantage of people given the opportunity to do so, and it is not indicative of mental illness to be unhappy about being on the receiving end.
NB. The term "schizo" and "normie" are the parent commenter's choice of words, not mine. Hence each is in quotes. No reference to actual, medically-diagnosed mental illness is made; I presumed the parent commenter's terms are simply another attempt to divide internet users into groups. This "us" and "them" perspective, e.g., "technical" and "non-technical", "schizo" and "normie", etc., as silly as it is, pervades a majority of HN comments.
Au contraire, the vast majority of normies are married to the internet via TikTok and Instagram, the difference is the schizo knows it. The divisive hyperbole is my own dramatic flair bc of my own frustration with the issue, not a conspiracy to divide.
>NSA dragnet
Can you tell me more? What specifically, are they collecting? The porn I've looked at on /s/?
>always-on backdoors embedded in consumer routers and CPUs
Are we talking about IME? That's more of a 'theoretically it could execute code, but they'd need a crazy amount of software engineering to really use it to monitor you'. Besides, you can MITM your network traffic and see if it's phoning home. And I'm sure people do, and I've read no cases of it actually being used that way.
Not that I'm okay with this or happy about it. It's just less dire than could be since, although the infra is there, it's not being used.
Yeah im memeing, i personally dont care but think "privacy enthusiasm" is a cope. Even signal I wouldn't trust, which OPs whole sales pitch. Exchanging a OTP in person is probably your best bet, but i personally have no use case. So yeah hardware telemetry might be an extreme example, but its certainly happening at every other layer.
Not all are naive on some kind of layer. That would imply sticking your neck out and proposing solutions. There are also the fatalists. They are immune to being wrong because they think it is hopeless. That means never being able to be called an idiot, a very important protection for some.[1] They also literally don’t care so there’s that too.
[1] There’s so much surveillance that it is very easy to fall into the trap of being a naive idiot. Not to worry. We can be fatalist and not have to worry about that charge.
You can get hung up on the "attitude" like most people, or realize that the first step to a solution is facing the facts. I'm not being blunt to be condescending, but its tedious how we're constantly sold half-baked "solutions." "Just use Signal!" No I'm not handing all my data over to yet another company because made a super duper promise to respect privacy. I'm still waiting to hear an actual solution except for the obvious: don't use the internet. And even then the world is still full of cameras, microphones and satellites.
Now you care? One comment ago you personally didn’t care. And I’m responding to someone who said that “there's nothing you can do about it”. Where was the in for anyone to take the “first step”? No, I’m not taking the first step towards facing the solution since you already said that’s off the table.[1]
Now you can get hung up on someone pointing out that this fatalism is intellectually a three-feet deep pond and trying to pivot to someone else having their feelings hurt by your badass attitude. But it’s clearly all heat and no light.
[1] For the first step I would ask someone serious about the subject.
Prove what wrong? You keep changing what your message is.
I’m not a fatalist because I believe there’s always a way to remove oppressive measures. The world got to this point through a series of events that favored certain groups. It’s possible to make a world that serves everyone.
You've confused absence of comprehension for absence of argument, but your lack of counter point is abundantly clear as you've resorted to projecting a lot of hot air. Do YOU even care about privacy? I think you're just self righteous contrarian, arguing from feelings, not facts.
My message is clear and consistent, here is your chewed food:
I care about privacy. I don't care for privacy enthusiasm, which means using products like VPNs and Signal that pretend to give you privacy but really don't. It is impossible to have a modern internet experience and real privacy at the same time, and I don't pretend otherwise. I have yet to see a real solution - not a made up hope-based idealism - to this problem. You either use internet and accept it (when i say i don't really care) or stop using the internet and go live in the woods.
GP basically called himself a schizo so they know, at least subconsciously, they went too far down that rabbit hole. Even though they just called us idiots.
My particular hot take, speaking partially from experience, is that indeed, there are insurmountable amounts of data collected - but it's collected by hundreds of disconnected, inhomogeneous and incompetent organizations with conflicting goals. There's no global all-knowing conspiracy, even governmental organizations in a single country have poor data sharing capabilities. And this should be trivial - it gets much harder when you take into account commercial organizations that store user data but it's not their main focus, commercial organizations that want to sell user data, but not for free, commercial organizations that really want to pretend they care about user privacy, foreign organizations, foreign organizations from hostile countries, and everreaching bureaucracy related to getting data from basically any of those.
Not a hot take at all, this is pretty realistic. But notice at no point is pure privacy a serious option, instead we count on hopium. Sure they DO have a lot of our data and they COULD be up to no good, but they wont, because.. reasons. I also never said anything about a conspiracy, just simple facts like how VPNs and social media sites are legally required to keep usage logs in case of illegal activity.
Everything is tracked, everything is logged, its been this way for a long time and there's nothing you can do about it. You have zero privacy in the internet and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.