It's a simple but scary formula that doesn't make me optimistic for the future.
1. Fight DRM. DRM is a pipe-dream enforced by law (DMCA Section 1201
2. Promote Free Software. Proprietary software does not deserve our data.
But if we embrace surveillance, we can give that power to everyone. It's much harder to do selective enforcement when the same strategies can be turned on the prosecutor.
The tide may be far away, but it's rushing in and you can't stop it. We must embrace the water.
No.
Just because it seems inevitable does not mean I must embrace it. I refuse to embrace it.
While the things that are used to perform secret surveillance improve, the things that are used to uncover secret surveillance also improve.
I am not going to willingly give up my privacy.
Just like how "voting" gave everyone useful legislative influence? A society where everyone reports on each other is the canonical model for dystopia. Tom Scott's "Oversight"[1] is warning, not a recommendation.
> the same strategies can be turned on the prosecutor.
Having evidence about a prosecutor's misdeeds doesn't mean you have the power to enforce anything. We already have police walking away from from video evidence of murder without charges. That will change with a lot more active political involvement. More surveillance wouldn't help.
Or: Russian/Chinese Communism.
At some point we will have to embrace full loss of all rights. Today, only the rich and powerful can literally get away with murder...OK, that's stupid and over-dramatic, but only a little more absurd than what you said.
Living in a panopticon would just make society into more of a jail than it already is. That's not something we should embrace, even if it's difficult to fight against.
I don’t use any assistant apps. I can’t possibly imagine how my life would be better if I did.
Boycotts only work if a significant group is boycotting.
To me it's like someone with a camera attached to their shoe to look up ladies skirts. It's creepy and should be illegal. (Of course, they put in under the label: it's publicly available information... but anyone with privacy concerns will realise that it's not true)
Whenever you have a 'smart' device, there'll always be someone banging away looking for holes in it, especially with shodan.io.
To me, it seems to be the biggest perpetrator in enabling privacy loss.
Edit: typo.
Oh, the dystopia.
And the power switch on the power strip it's attached to if, for some reason, I decide to suspect that the hard switch on the device is a lie.
The same reason why the fact that I'm worried enough sometimes (e.g., major lightning storms) to unplug various electronics does not mean I choose not to own such electronics in the first place: sometimes isn't all the time, and both the costs of potential vulnerability and the benefit of features (and thus the balance between those two things) can shift with context.
Though, in reality, I'm never actually that worried about my Google Home, I just recognize that this there are adequate existing hardware-based solutions that, should I be concerned at some time—which I can imagine being, though I haven't been—an adequate mitigation exists that doesn't involve not possessing the device.
With a closed-source platform, I can't have that.
I have a cell-phone in my pocket, and I am concerned about the privacy implications. Android is free software, but the driver blobs are not. I do hate that I am compromising for that. Hopefully, there will be more affordable options like the librem phone in the near future.
More realistically and already in the wild: ad fingerprinting.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/there...