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Comment by superchroma | Hacker News Reader

It is time to go back to treating the internet like it was scary and hostile, because it still is, except it now has a thick veneer of slick marketing to suggest otherwise. Young people should be counselled to stay anonymous online and shown examples like this, because zero good can come from giving personal, compromising information to a company along with your real name in this way.

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I think this battle has been lost already. Pretty much all of the non-tech people I know firmly believe the "why do I need anonymity if I'm not doing anything wrong" line of thinking. The powers that be really don't like online anonymity, and the public at large just doesn't care enough to do anything. Maybe this will change some minds, but I'm doubtful it'll be enough.

I hold onto hope that an alternative system of privacy-protecting internet (e.g. Freenet) takes hold to a bigger tech-nerd audience, and then eventually bleeds out to mainstream just like the internet was doing in the early 90s. At which point, the government will be completely incapable of all the bullshit they do today, and will be as powerless over that system as they are over crypto.

> as powerless over that system as they are over crypto

I see this claim made a lot, and I don't understand it. When the canadian trucker protest (please don't make this discussion about that, I am not saying it was good or bad, I am just using it as an example) switched to crypto after the gov froze their bank accounts, the gov also froze those crypto wallets. That seems like the opposite of powerless.

I think it's really naive to think that the gov won't just be able to bully any type of new system into submission, like they always do. If there are people running the system, then those people can be coerced.

Those crypto wallets were custodial wallets stored on a centralized service operated by a private company. Cryptocurrency can't help you if you don't use it the way you're supposed to -- that is, keeping your wallet on your own hardware with your own keys.

> Cryptocurrency can't help you if you don't use it the way you're supposed to -- that is, keeping your wallet on your own hardware with your own keys.

So for most people this can just be shortened to "Cryptocurrency can't help you".

I agree, but it kinda sucks that we're about a decade into the Cryptocurrency Future and it's still too hard for random angry truckers to use it correctly

> "why do I need anonymity if I'm not doing anything wrong"

These people didn't do anything wrong either:

"They Told Their Therapists Everything. Hackers Leaked It All"

A mental health startup built its business on easy-to-use technology. Patients joined in droves. Then came a catastrophic data breach.

https://www.wired.com/story/vastaamo-psychotherapy-patients-...

That's why we need to stop being purely defensive. Blocking trackers and personal data is not enough; browsers need to start providing "noise" to websites to render tracking/profiling results useless.

You can't use most popular online services without providing PII in the form of a phone number.

On some of the most popular ones, you can lose your account and all data/connections at any time that they demand your government ID and you refuse to provide it.

I don't use services like this, myself, but many people use these popular services as their exclusive destination on the internet.

The major services are heavily incentivized to de-anonymize and if the opposite ever became a problem, these governments would legislate to force their way through.

It would not be enough for the young to care about anonymization. They would need to care about it far in excess of their desire to interact with common platforms, celebrities, pop culture and their peers. It is an unreasonably high demand for kids.

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