in a collective way
i.e. it's 'easy' for a individual (even a smallish similar group). But in society-scale? difficult.
i.e. it's 'easy' for a individual (even a smallish similar group). But in society-scale? difficult.
Tech has the most impact on user privacy, but there's no financial incentive to uphold privacy and so the slow political stick is required.
Meanwhile users can do their best installing ad blockers, navigate the snake-oil fields of VPN vendors, estrange themselves by quitting social media, set a different search engine on all their devices (which probably still use Google/Microsoft), maybe look into TOR and Whonix, ensure they use email masks and unique usernames for every service, buy Twilio numbers for account sign-ups, get their contacts to use E2E-encrypted messengers and PGP, get a dumbphone that doesn't have GPS enabled at all times, a laptop with camera/mic killswitches. It's not clear which of these steps are excessive or impractical for the layman, aside from ad/tracker blockers.
So the tooling to uphold user privacy is there, but it's nuts to think the solution is for everyone to adopt better privacy-preserving habits rather than slowly killing the business model of the personalized ad industry. A great byproduct of this is that governments will see less surveillance tech vendors to buy from.
Right to the heart. The personalized ad industry has exacerbated the issues of privacy, because it's in their interest to do so.
Having enforceable ground rules in place, in the form of laws, will be difficult because of the money involved; and also the sizeable number of software engineers feeling like they're above the politics.
I remember when both Intel’s CPU ID and Microsoft’s system updates (because it sent your info to their systems) caused an uproar.
Now we don’t blink when talking about telemetry.