Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class
theregister.com
theregister.com
One of the problems is that there is very little funding available for my sort of nonprofits. Even Mozilla with their startup studio program, which is focused on privacy, target commercial ventures. I guess that the bottom line is that as a society we do not prioritize privacy over other ambitions. This is strange to me because there's some truth to privacy being a "maker of class". Not sure how to reconcile the two.
> One of the problems is that there is very little funding
I think your problem is self-made.
> Not sure how to reconcile the two.
Accept money in exchange for the value you create.
Are you actually legally a US nonprofit, and if so, which kind, and are your articles of incorporation and board membership available somewhere for the public to see?
There are plenty of worthy non-profits that aren't based in the US. The OpenBSD Foundation, for example.
Digital privacy is mainly focused upon preventing siphoning of data, PiHole, uBlock, NetGuard(Android) can save data and thereby results in saving Internet costs. NoScript along with aforementioned tools can save compute and thereby power.
Many of the privacy focused alternatives are idealistic passion projects and so is often free. Linux ecosystem can cover almost all of our computing needs without the need for proprietary tools. LineageOS can give second lease to capable smartphone hardware limited by planned obsolescence, thereby saving costs on new smartphone.
I'm sure there are lot more to add here, But I've my point to why I think privacy not only recovers cost but is also capital efficient.
But the real question as the parent asks should be how can we make these projects sustainable? I'm sure the Linux Foundation wouldn't go bankrupt as the commercial implications are huge, Mozilla looks precarious but I feel its largely because of the management but what about that indie developer like the one above or the one developing NetGuard? How can we establish this value proposition to a layman for making a pro-privacy lifestyle choice?
We're always so concerned with machines recognizing us, but what about other people? If I live in a small village, the owner of the general store will surely remember my face just like an ML-laden camera or POS system. We get creeped out when machines suggest things related to our past behavior, but love it when the bartender already knows what we like. People who remember you can spread rumors just like your data can be sold to another company.
I'm not trying to say that privacy doesn't matter at all, of course. I'm just wondering how much things have actually changed, privacy-wise.
“Everyone knows everyone” vs “I know you, but you don’t even know who I am”.
Even though the bartender can spread rumors, when the knowledge is in hands os corporations, can be easily queried by governments, etc. The potential magnitude is way bigger than a rumor in your local village.
As soon as that data can be collected and sold at scale, there's an incentive to collect and sell as much data as possible, without any repercussions.
Spreading rumours doesn't pay the bills, so there's no large scale incentive to spread them.
Spreading rumours absolutely helps pay the bills, it's almost an essential part of the experience of going to the pub in a small town that only has a couple.
You're right to say that there is no "large-scale" incentive though.
Journalism.
Scammers sell your data all the time. Try going to some third world country to some shady hotel, and the receptionist will tell the taxi driver exactly whre you came from and how rich they think you are, taxi driver will then take you to a scammy club, where they'll already know how much they can scam out of you, sometimes even the police is in the whole scam, so even the police officer knows all your data, before you even see them.
The database can be merged with others and queried anonymously without anyone knowing it even exists. The data can be sold, distributed and used against you at a much greater scale, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Meanwhile poor people were known to their immediate neighbourhood, but at a much lower level of detail. Yes, local businesses might know customers, but the knowledge was atomic and disconnected: nobody was integrating the information held by the barman and the storekeeper and the newsagent and the neighbours.
Are you kidding? If I move to a different town, I can take on a whole new identity, a new name, hide my heritage.
Good luck tracking me down in medieval society if I move provinces, let alone countries.
When your information was on paper in file cabinets with thousands of other people it wasn't much better than having nothing at all.
Advertisers want to target you specifically. The better idea should be to feed them incorrect information and intentionally poison the data.
TrackMeNot does a similar thing with google/bing/yahoo, submitting random popular queries to search engines in the background. It even emulates "bursty" search behavior, where you might not input a query for an hour, and then do 5+ queries in 5 minutes. I use this and have actually seen its effects, my "filter bubble" is much less tech-oriented and this effects auto-complete, result ordering and even the news articles I get in my Google Now shelf on my android phone.
TBH, the comments are more interesting than the author's opinion.
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/07/15/privacy_...
It's true that "privacy" from "tech" companies is not easy and could cost money if someone tries to replace every "service" that tech companies purport to offer with a supposedly "private" version. But is that the only way to approach "alternatives". See the comments.
What he is not considering is that luring users into surveillance with "services" ("let us do that for you") is neither easy nor cheap either. Arguably tech companies spend far more time and (investor's) money to lure users into surveillance and trying to collect ever more user data than I do to compiling and running different OS, using different software and actively managing a home network in ways that make personal UX better and tech company data collection and ad tech jobs more difficult. Plus I do not have to waste investors' money in the process or carry out instructions that require compromising ethics ("gentlemen do not read each other's mail"). Thankfully, when I spend time fiddling with computers I reap the results of my own work and follow my own ethics.
If I pay cash for something, or use my non-gmail address, people don't understand it's because I value privacy, but just that I'm "weird".
Whereas using uBlock, e.g., is not weird at all, IMO.
The latter contributes to an improved experience but not the former, IMO.
Using a non-Gmail address is definitely not weird. Millions of people use non-Gmail addresses every day at work.
That said, I wonder if the OP author used cash to pay for his ProtonMail subscription. Also, the OP fails to mention that ProtonMail offers a free tier of 150 emails per day.
His theory seems to be that if you have a bunch of these, they will add up. Maybe, but I can't buy the argument without more and better examples to back it up.
I mean, if you had Protonmail and a $5/mo VPN, you'd still be spending less than the cost of a standard Netflix subscription. And if you stopped subscribing to Netflix because you cared about privacy, you'd be SAVING money.
He does bring up a good point, which is that you need to have a certain amount of technical fluency to do this stuff. The other example he lists is the Pi-hole: does he think the cost of a $35 Raspberry Pi is what's keeping most people from running this software? That's not it at all: it's the obscurity of the project, and the knowledge it takes to set it up. There are plenty of people in the world for whom $35 is a big expense, but the number of people who are prevented from using one because of the cost is very low.
Even that seems like a minefield where you might hire someone that sells you overpriced junk.
But everything you mentioned sounds like maintaining privacy. What’s the time/domain knowledge cost of scrubbing all the crap that’s already there through umpteen opt-outs?
Would make sense if a government body set up a website advising you what to do, or just make a lot of this crap completely illegal, but that would require a massive donation.
It’s possible for someone to care about privacy but not have the means to do anything about it.
The fact that $7.50 a month _is_ cost prohibitive for some people is the point of the article.
That's even more true globally.
And yes, Netflix is hard on some people too. I know plenty of people not in the software engineer class who (illegally) share Netflix subscriptions or don't have them at all.
$7.50 x number of online services you rely upon
It's quickly becomes a lot.
Also not to mention that the biggest tracking signals companies care about are your financials: credit cards, bank accounts, etc. The largest swath of the "unbanked", people who pay with cash, etc. are poor.
Noticeably not having a social media account clearly is a visible behavior that could be a marker of class, as would anything else privacy related.
Privacy, to my mind, boils down to consent. And consent - whether given or not - is a behaviorism informed by context. And individual may or may not consent based on cultural norms, values, beliefs, social cues, political, economical,... affordances and so on. Consent, on the part of the individual, becomes a trade off depending on the context.
Privacy is a social construct, and what makes it so hard to discuss is that the context defines it's interpretation. While debate tends to focus on the "right to privacy", what it actually pertains to is individual agency - or lack thereof - within specific contexts to give or deny consent.
The discussion in the article revolves around two specific hot-button takes of privacy: (a) consenting to the state knowing your whereabouts, and taking restrictive action (b) private businesses tracking consumers through digital technology to further commercial interests. And how both aspects have become intertwined with each other into complex social, economical and political issues in a globalized world.
While privacy can act as a class signifier that doesn't necessarily mean the modern, present-day interpretation of privacy as a class signifier is a permanent or universal fixture of social behavior (I don't think you implied this btw). Rather, industrialized societies specifically have adopted digital technology to a point where their normative context is heavily being reshaped, and existing and rising power structures come at odds as a result. Antonio Gramsci coined the concept of "cultural hegemony" to describe that dynamic in general terms. The discussion among sociologists, activists and political thinkers that spun out of this idea is probably more interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
Privacy as a class signifier is an interesting theory. But it only holds value if you can tie it to identifiable elites and power structures that can leverage privacy as such. Just reading through the HN comments already shows how difficult that is in itself: just defining the scope and breadth of the concept of "privacy" proves difficult as it requires you to be aware of your own context, and be able to suspend in your mind before reframing the notion within many different social contexts in order to get a good understanding of the hidden complexities.
No. The point of privacy is to signal only what I want to, and to people who I want to contact.
Looking for a privacy does not mean staying in a room, never leaving it and not communicating with external world.
I am fine with my friends and family knowing about $PRIVATE_MATTER, I am not fine with my bank/shop/government/employer knowing about it.
Most of the tools that attempt to restore privacy are free open community-driven projects such as pi-hole. Maybe the observed distinction is a marker of class, but money isn't nearly important in the equation for most privacy-seeking folk.
https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives/
Those all list FLOSS alternatives to the services out there. Maybe one or two things needs self-hosting but ProtonMail now has ProtonCalendar, Tutanota is coming out with a calendar too, files can be synced with Syncthing, and so on and so forth.
Of course, it's nice to donate if you have money, but it's not mandatory and that's better than the alternatives.
Don't use Google (except maybe Android, but there are ROMs), Apple, Facebook (yes, that includes Whatsapp), Microsoft and you're already most of the way there.
Even given enough technical expertise, there is still a need for time and effort, plus acceptance of the minor risk of unjustified lack of support from mainstream services (e.g. government apps refusing to work in custom ROMs).
While the investment in time, effort and risk does not require being anything close to wealthy, it does need some level of financial stability.
There are much more billionaires and multimillionaires that are utterly invisible yet they rule over us. Only the couple that want to do publicly visible things, are.
The latter always was and always will be around, you can't hide from the ultimate authority.
Nothing will help you, short of living completely off the grid in an RV, maybe.
It's not a good thing, but governments everywhere are pushing for more surveillance and knowledge and they will get it.
But they also help increase privacy from private entities (at least in some countries), so there's that.
However I'd take it a step further than the author who says it's a signifier to say that, now, privacy is class. (with the cavet that class is multi-dimensional, and not a scalar hierarchy) I've written to the effect before that Apple's iPhone is entry into the middle class because the values encoded in its aesthetics and features separate you from being a worker to being a "creative." This was the vision Jobs sold - that you too could become a sophisticated beturtlenecked urbane architect designer offering valuable insights and observations if you bought this product. The iPhone and its (excellent) privacy and security features elevate you from the problems of office stiffs unsticking printer jams to a world where you don't have to think about that stuff and can focus on your beautiful thoughts without needing to struggle. "It just works." - so you don't have to. Sure it's expensive, but nobody who has one notices. In a microcosm, that's what class difference can feel like. That is, wealth is what you have, but class is what you don't need.
Having privacy means you don't have to spend effort to manage your public persona. The (S)mart people I know do engage social media just enough to be unremarkable, but no more.
I'm not that smart, though my own approach to privacy has not been strong anonymity with opsec either, because the effort to live in-effect as a fugitive just elevates your percieved antagonists to an equal, or in the case of state actors, elevates ourselves to imagining ourselves as super villain threats.
Privacy to me now means actively choosing how to relate to technology and people, with a sense of a personal perimeter of calm that I value, and maintaining personal privacy means I can have things that are mine to share, and that creates value for others. With that in mind, you can just set a low bar and costs to keep out of the way of dragnets and spam.
To have had the knowledge that privacy was an issue at all has meant both having a sense of (often, ridiculous) self importance that I was no mere "user," and spending a great deal of time understanding technology, at a time when access to it was more rare. So from the outside, privacy looks like a class signal. From the inside, privacy is the necessary condition to bring intentional value to relationships, and the people who would take it from you are basically petty thieves - a fact of life in any human environment.
Sure, the Zucks, Jacks, Sundars and NSA's of the world get my information and stuff, but their problems are things I just do not have.
No. Running a service costs money. Everything you get for free is just an unseen loan that you have to repay eventually.
What is legitimate access and what is not? If life in a real pandemic or in non-pandemic vs in totalitarian state where your social credit by government and your liberty or none is by government … there are difference in kind.
Such confused idea ultimately lead to the collapse of the west liberty and the raise of the east totalitarianism. Continue your confusion ba … you will ruin your life and your civilization.