99% of people do not care about privacy. They won't switch programs because a nation state might spy on them.
The other thing that is wrong with this sentiment is that "privacy" is not a binary thing: you don't "have privacy" or "not have privacy". You don't "want it" or "not want it".
Privacy and the need for it, is heavily dependent on context. You want more privacy when watching porn than when watching some sports. You want more privacy when you are a minority than when you are part of the ruling class. And so on.
Edit: so a person wanting to escape religion and seeking online help on how to do so needs different privacy than three friends having an online beer. Everyone has moments and time where they need (some) privacy. So probably 99% (a made up statistic) has a need to replace software in some (rare) context, over privacy matters.
Gmail does not use end to end encryption. Yet it's overwhelmingly popular, and perceived to be secure. Google has a huge incentive to keep Gmail secure, and that's enough for most people.
With respect to Zoom, I am fully convinced that if the PRC (or the USA for that matter) wants Zoom to compromise a given account they'll do it. But that's irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of people. Sure, companies like Google and Microsoft should not use Zoom nor should activists or other people that might attract the ire of governments that have leverage over Zoom. But that is a substantial minority of use cases.
Though privacy is also something people want "afterwards".
Something you'd wish you'd taken care of when its too late. When your identity is stolen, and used to get hundreds of speeding tickets on your name. When your sons pictures were lifted off your facebook to bully him after you had your 15 minutes of fame, and so on.
I agree, evidence shows most people are not willing to go very far out of their way to defend their privacy. But I also think privacy is a genuine virtue, and a desire for it is present and often untapped. Why else would Apple have run privacy-centric ad campaigns? Attempting to tap into the weak but widespread desire for privacy, I think
Also, side note, lgbtq people make up somewhere in the range of 2-7% of the population, not 1%.
If you want to argue that your target does less to further that particular cause than you do, fine. If you want to argue the cause is misguided, fine.
But using the term is just lazy.
https://twitter.com/CraigSilverman/status/522179364767924224 and https://www.theverge.com/2014/10/22/7028983/fake-news-sites-... are good examples of its use pre-Trump. By the time Trump started applying it to actual news outlets, it was already in relatively common use.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politics/hillary-clinton-fake...
December 2016 Hillary Clinton decides to use the term in reference to recent events like her losing the election. The media picks up on it and the term starts to lose its meaning. Then Donald Trump, always with a nose for catch phrase politics, picks up the term and runs with it, a turn of events that someone on HN called a huge "own goal" by the media, and I can't say I disagree with that assessment.
For more analysis of this cultural specimen:
In your examples the word "fake" is used as an adjective to the noun "news site". As in "a fake news site".
"fake news" as it used today is a noun in its own right. As in "that's fake news"
See also "alternative facts".
> Author Sarah Churchwell asserts that it was Woodrow Wilson who popularized the phrase 'fake news' in 1915, although the phrase had been used in the US in the previous century.
> The term actually dates from the late 19th century, when it was used by newspapers and magazines to boast about their own journalistic standards and attack those of their rivals. In 1895, for example, Electricity: A Popular Electrical Journal bragged that “we never copy fake news,” while in 1896 a writer at one San Jose, California, paper excoriated the publisher of another: “It is his habit to indulge in fake news. ... [H]e will make up news when he fails to find it.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news#20th_century
[2] https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/In-a-Word/2019/0726/Su...
Virtue signaling or whatever you want to call that sort of in-group circle jerk is fundamentally unproductive and self-rewarding because it's just a reiteration of existing group beliefs that basically everyone already knows and has. There's no term you can use to describe that behavior that will not make people uncomfortable when you call it out because at the end of the day you're calling the behavior unproductive and selfish.
For example, someone goes on Reddit and asks "should I put economy tire A or economy tire B on my 20yo, $2k car, also I have $250 to spend". The most popular answers will be invariably be "you should have dedicated summer and winter tires" and "you should use jack stands when you change tires" and many duplicates thereof many of which will suggest that anyone who does not do these things is not someone of good character, deserves to rot in hell, is a burden upon society, etc, etc. Neither of these sideshows are productive discussion. Both of them serve purely to signal to the in-group that the signaler believes something the in-group already believes. Of course everybody wants the greatest tires and nobody wants a car on them but the former is not in the scope for budgetary reasons and the latter is not a concern when simply changing tires never-mind that installing tires usually adds no cost over having them put on rims. The people circle jerking it to jack stands and fancy tires are negatively affecting the discussion for anyone who cared about economy tires. Virtue signaling takes legitimate relevant content and displaces it with low quality junk. I'm more technical than I am cultured but I see this kind of behavior across multiple topics and I'm sure that any serious amateur film critic, book critic, etc. probably could come up with a similar example from their niche.
While that example is hypothetical you can see similar ones play out across a multitude of topics and I think this does legitimate damage to civil discourse. It's like how searching for a service manual for an appliance on the internet to yield results but now it yields a million sites that don't have what you're looking for but will try and sell you something. I see virtue signaling as having a similar quality degradation affect but on legitimate discussion. We can no-longer have detailed discussions about complex issues, regardless of subject because they all get derailed, bogged down and diluted by people showing up to signal their virtue on a higher level issue. Take for example the recent discussion about police. Many on the left and right have a litany of small points on which they agree. Any public discussion about common ground, like fewer MRAPs in the hands of suburban police departments, gets drowned out by riff raff showing up to tell the world which team they're on. At scale this is damaging to civil discourse.
In conclusion, I think that having a nice, short, two-word, pop culture word to describe that behavior is useful because makes it easier for those who may not be articulate enough to otherwise do a good job call it out when they see it. Of course some people are gonna abuse it but I think that's just the nature of it being a negative thing since all negative things become a name you can call someone or their actions.
ALWAYS dismissive and reductive. ALWAYS. It's not a good faith argument. If you think someone is all-talk-no-action, accuse them of being performative. If you think someone's cause is dumb, attack that. You can call ANYBODY advocating for a viewpoint a virtue signaller so it is an entirely meaningless attack.
Don’t you realize how ridiculous and useless this argument is?
Buying CFL lightbulbs is performative climate action.
Buying CFL lightbulbs is virtue signalling climate action.
One of them is about the action - buying bulbs isn't effective, the other is about the person - if you buy bulbs you are fake. Perhaps "performative" fails at making this distinction clear enough, but I'd like a way to imply that someone is all-talk-no-action, without undermining their actual belief in something.
Maybe some people are too quick with the term, there always will be people like that for any label. But just consider all the people just as tired of real conversation being shackled by "virtue signaling" as you are of being called a virtue signaler.
Also, you could write your disgruntled comments about any label. We are certainly way too quick to find racism where there isn't any. Yet there are also real racists out there complaining that the charge of racism is really getting on their nerves. Does that mean we stop charging people with racism when we see it? No, we're trying to call out unacceptable behavior.
If we're getting into pet peeves, mine is "gaslighting". Everything is "gaslighting" now. Accidentally spread a small inaccuracy? Gaslighting. Tell a public lie? You're now "gaslighting the world". Sharing my disagreement with you, like this comment? I'm gaslighting you.
If I say "don't be racist" and you call me a virtue signaller, you are implying that I don't actually care if you're racist, I just want social points for being "good". The problem is you don't know if I care or not. I might care deeply. I might dedicate my life to being anti-racist, but you can just label it virtue signalling and move on? that's an intellectually dishonest maneuver.
It can be incomparably frustrating as it focuses on non-issues or minor issues and misses the bigger picture. I personally don't see it used outside of those contexts but it shouldn't be used to dismiss actual action like doing your part against climate change.
Signaling being a term used by some niche fields. We have that happen all the time. It’s how language evolves.
The article says to use show off instead of virtue signaling. Right after the next argument is assuming the person is disingenuous. Which is exactly what you’re doing if you say they’re showing off. The two arguments can’t both be used. They are arguments against different things.
It’s like the derogatory “social justice warrior.” What? It’s bad to give a damn about people and advocate on their behalf? If having empathy means I’m “an SJW” then I’ll gladly wear that moniker.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
If you say you care about privacy but do nothing to protect your privacy, you don't really care about privacy in any way that matters. Since you mildly inconvenience yourself for the sake of privacy, I can conclude based on this very limited evidence that you mildly care about privacy, which is a whole lot more than most people care about it.
Apple markets itself as privacy conscious because that makes Apple look like a trustworthy company. That's a rare and beneficial appearance that a company can maintain to get more business.
Not all gay people care about their privacy. Plenty live in states where they feel more free to open up to their friends, family, and neighbors.
They're are plenty of things that people agree with in the abstract, but don't do enough to make a difference. Probably everyone agrees that the environment should be cleaner. If I agree with that, but "don't lift a finger" to make it better, how am a virtue signaling? It's the opposite.
"Virtue signaling" involves doing some token thing to get the kudos. Smugly saying you only use DDG for web searches. Putting a Tor sticker on your laptop. Etc.
When virtue signalling can become dangerous however is in situations where something based on a mistaken notion of doing good (when in reality it does more harm) becomes a fad and people who virtue-signal keep promoting it into wider popularity.
You think the backdoors that Zoom are likely creating for the Chinese government won't ever be found and used by malicious hackers?
You really think the Chinese-American human rights activists whose Zoom accounts were identified and banned from a private video call with Chinese-based allies and friends and family are thinking "what use is there for inferior products?"
Oh well, we live in free countries. You're free to open your company and possibly your Chinese colleagues/friends to China or whoever else is the boogeyman right now.
I don't know anything about Jitsi. Will research. Thanks.
At the start of the pandemic, my friend at this particular court was tasked with figuring something out. Initial plan was choose a web cam and software combo for everyone to use. And then they'd be futzing with Windows boxes of unknown provenance, trying to do remote tech support, etc. Whose got time for all that? For instance, they told me one of the new Logitech web cams they tried doesn't have Windows 10 drivers.
I recommended they just a cheap iPad for each location, participant. Create iCloud account for each device. Use FaceTime. Buy mounts or tripods as needed.
I haven't heard back what they finally decided.
FWIW, I since learned they were also having uninvited people join their confidential sessions, just like the naked guy showing up for online classes. Such a mess.
Downloading of Signal doesn’t signify privacy concerns. I have Signal because others do. Not because I care about signal’s privacy.