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Comment by edrxty | Hacker News Reader

I find myself already contemplating the websites I visit, the videos I watch and the things I post, even anonymously, because my interests include military electronics among other things. Even when I'm not worried about attracting unwarranted attention I still hesitate because my life is being hoovered up by big data and if I accidentally watch one click bait video suddenly the algorithms are hell bent on only feeding me fake news, alt right indoctrination material and conspiracy theories...

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I mean it would be great if you could configure your device to just refuse to even load these banned items. I don't want that shit on my things.

Who decides what the banned items are? Can we be sure these items won't suddenly change, when an authoritarian government gets voted in?

If it's things that will get me imprisoned why would I want them? If there's an authoritarian government, I'm not planning on protesting by viewing childporn.

Sorry, you seem to have visited hacker news more than 30 times. This website is frequented by criminals who share hacking tools and information about illegal encryption technologies used for CP. You have been reported to the authorities.

Don't cower in fear. Learn to use about:config, VMs, VPNs, and TOR.

Not everyone is able to do this, but you're technical enough to be spending time on Hacker News.

(Also, this doesn't preclude lobbying for restrictions on government and corporate surveillance. It's not a dichotomy)

What about smartphones? Increasingly, an up-to-date and unmodified Android or Apple smartphone is required to interface with the modern world. Want to use a Linux phone? Sorry no banking app for you. No check-in for flights. So you either need to accept massive day-to-day inconvenience or subject yourself to surveillance and control. This era of computing is a disaster from the perspective or user-control. You know what, Stallman was right.

> Increasingly, an up-to-date and unmodified Android or Apple smartphone is required to interface with the modern world. Want to use a Linux phone? Sorry no banking app for you. No check-in for flights. So you either need to accept massive day-to-day inconvenience or subject yourself to surveillance and control.

On my desk right now there are five Android phones (two of them don't even have SIM cards). I use them for different things. I wouldn't dream of signing in to all of them with the same Google account.

If you want to retain some degree of privacy and use Instagram on your phone, you need to get another phone for that.

They're cheap.

First, having a Free computer doesn't prevent you from also having a corporate terminal. Devices are inexpensive these days, especially used devices that can have Free software installed onto them.

Second, phones are a terrible platform for privacy preserving technologies, both currently (mobile OS dumpster fire) and intrinsically (lower resources, poor input, well-known network identity). Anybody who cares about digital privacy should have a real computer laptop/desktop that they use for the bulk of their activities.

And that is why having an open web is important.

Not being locked-in into apps is critical nowadays.

How does open web make it better? Then your data is swimming on a server outside your device on an unknown operating system with god knows who looking at it.

Someone earlier astutely stated the metaphor “the thin edge of the wedge”; the movement to the “cloud” via the open web over the last decade was the thinnest part of the wedge.

Without one we would be forced to use apps on a locked down OS and unable to switch to any up-and-coming alternatives at all.

Even to the extent web is open today, I’m able to run Linux on all my PCs/laptops and not to have an extra one to run proprietary OS in order to participate in modern life.

My bank has a customer portal website. My airline has a check-in website. Using a website instead of an app is a minor inconvenience, certainly not a "massive" one.

That's not a realistic "solution" for any more than a minuscule fraction of users.

If we don't want to live in a surveillance-based dystopia, we need to push back against it politically as a society, not play cat-and-mouse as individuals.

> we need to push back against it politically as a society, not play cat-and-mouse as individuals.

And for that to work, we have to counter the usual "but think of the children!!!" narrative with one of our own - prevent CSAM creation at the source. I have written about how to get started previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114076

I’ve been a loyal VPN user for a decade plus. The problem is the web’s becoming increasingly unusable for anyone who comes from a VPN IP. Every single search and website click results in 90 seconds of barely decipherable captcha challenges.

Presumably the widespread proliferation of (ironically!) iCloud Private Relay and the like will help alleviate this.

One is better off suffering that and letting it inform your behavior (avoiding sites that implement that trash, to the extent you can), than continuing to buy into the surveillance web and making it ever harder to separate yourself.

How do you know if the VON you're using is trustworthy though?

I've recently tried Express, Proton and Nord. They all seem to have the same issue. Don't know if anyone has any suggestions of VPNs that don't lead to captcha hell, but I'd appreciate any pointers if there's one out there.

What you say is agreeable and true. But privacy is a collective problem for society! If I have privacy for myself, and can express myself freely, but essentially nobody else can, what kind of society do I get to live my so-called free and private life in? A cyberpunk dystopia, that’s what.

There's something weird about this line of thinking. You know it's the very people who invented those boogeymen that you're afraid of becoming associated with, who are also the ones that want to do this to you? It seems like you already bought into their propaganda for justifying surveillance but you don't like the result.

> It seems like you already bought into their propaganda for justifying surveillance but you don't like the result.

I think one can arrive at the opinion they would prefer not to have their recommendations flooded with stuff from from alt-right or conspiracy Youtube/Twitter/whatever without buying into propaganda.

I believe the demonization of the term "conspiracy theory" is propaganda. Aren't we in a thread discussing a theory that organizations that are not apple will eventually conspire with apple to utilize this invasive new technology? I find it so confusing that the idea that different factions may be working together in non-public ways is such an impossibility to so many people.

Sure, fine. But one would not arrive at using terms like that if they were not being exposed to and buying into the propaganda being put out there. The proof that they're affected by the propaganda is them using the jargon of it. Before that, no one was going around saying "God I hate it when I see conspiracy theories!" It wasn't something on anyone's radar.

I can see that, but that sense of the term (which is, I'm confident, the main one in use by a long shot) dates to, like, the aftermath of the JFK assassination and early Roswell-related groups, no? The term itself is older, but I mean the colloquial use of "ideas expressed by kooks and crackpots with excessively-complex and unlikely explanations for things, with an intense resistance to even clear evidence that they're wrong, and far too strong a prior that their unlikely idea is correct". IOW I think you lost that fight by the 70s, at the latest—it's been on people's "radar" since then.

Meanwhile, groups/people/movements that completely match that description are real and it's handy to have a term for that behavior, even if you think it's applied too broadly (and maybe it is). We've got the similarly-abused word "cult", but abuse aside it's still handy to have a way to refer to groups that actually do closely fit the colloquial, pejorative meaning of the term, and there's no way you're going to get people to stop using the word that way.

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