Privacy Isn't Dead. Far from It
eff.org
eff.org
This article is a great reminder that our effort matters, and this is not a win/lose game. There's always more to lose, and we'll find out how much if we don't try. There's no giving up on life, there's no giving up on participating in society. We have to fight for our rights, even if it's small, inconvenient and seemingly thankless battles every day. This is what makes all the difference in the world.
Cynicism undermines our motivation to make progress, and that is why so much disinformation is intended to muddy the waters and make people feel hopeless. The reality is - there is no way in hell any of us should want to have been born 1,000 or even 100 years ago and things will be much better in a century or a millennium if we keep pushing for it.
It's an important question. If the answer is "no," then progress (whatever that means) must continue forever. This has quite a few disturbing implications.
If the answer is "yes," then arises the question of "toward what? How will we know when we are done?"
Now, if you told me that you were going to fundamentally alter human nature such that nobody had any reason to be cynical, well ... but then other questions are raised.
Only if you think we could reach some perfect and never changing state of being that all would agree on for all time would there eventually be no need for progress.
Some people speak of technological progress, others cultural, or ethical. Or sexual mores. Select one and imagine that continuing on. For as long as society lasts.
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I think __criticism__ (not complaining) is a critical component of democracies. Part of it is acting (at least to me) like a scientist. You have optimism that drives you and critique steers you. We can always do better and we'll never be perfect because nothing is static. We too have to change.
I think it is also important to have a normalish distribution of ideas and beliefs. We can get value from looking at the extremes, but too much extreme is crippling (and especially if it is bimodal or multimodal with only extremes). In any democracy you want a few communists, fascists, anarchists, socialists, and so on to poke holes in your system. They're highly motivated to disrupt it, but that doesn't mean turn to them, that tells you what to patch.
I do feel as though apathy is flourishing in modern society, though.
Practical example 1: twitter has become a problem for you? Fine, move twitter to the bottom of the barrel and use some competitor - or change format altogether. Myspace or geocities were insurmontable artifacts in society. Even when they once felt like it. Being loud about it, as the cynic is, is not a bad thing. Giving up ON TWITTER is not a bad thing - and it is promoting progress (toward better platforms).
Practical example 2: the two parties are roughly the same thing? Consistently vote for number 3. Number 3 rarely gets elected - of course - but sometimes it does happen (it's how Macron became president in France - no matter what Macron does or doesn't do, that was amazing). Number 3 wouldn't solve everything either. When - as usual - that does not happen, you have at least made space for the number 3s of the future. Always voting for the usual suspects, on the other hand, is guaranteed to perpetuate the problem.
One strong positive I see in cynicism is the loud recognition that All is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds. THAT would be bullshit.
There might be an assumption that the cynic is passive. Be a loud cynic.
The cynic does not undermine anything but - when loud - reminds people that there is work to be done, and to do a little bit of it. The cynic is a strong positive (yes!), active voice compared to a sea of apathy.
Now, click-baiting - that's a problem but that's not cynicism.
You can find more and more articles arguing why censorship is a good thing.
A. entities conducting surveillance, such as data brokers. B. entities wanting to manufacture consent through campaigns consisting of content that is non-geniune or ragebaity. C. fatherless immature 13-year-olds (or actors at that maturity level) that still think Internet trolling is funny in 2024. D. entities that really want the Internet to behave like a one-way broadcast medium, like television.
No one actually wants A, B, and C other than entities that are A, B, and C. A decent portion probably doesn't want D either. All of these have been increasing in scale on the Internet as time passes.
I'm all for using a global public square, but I am not going to respect it or use it really unless there is way for me to avoid A, B, and C.
The government shouldn't do this.
It'd be nice if the platform could do this automatically as a feature, but it's not a solved problem yet. And that's OK - if the platform lets me manage what I see, I can solve it myself, which it's really a "me" problem anyway.
It'd be nicer if the platform lets me and like-minded individuals subscribe to and manage blocklists, and if I think the blocklist manager is off their rocker, I can unsubscribe to it.
And if the government required "public squares" on the Internet to have such a feature, that'd be awesome, but I'm not holding my breath.
You can call this censorship if you want, but if it's initiated and chosen by me and not the government or other arrangements of authorities where you cannot opt out, then so what?
How exactly did you come to this conclusion? Seems pretty arbitrary.
They censor because they want to control the narrative and to deliver their own propaganda.
Western nations seem to have become attracted to the approach authoritarians have been using since we had a printing press. We saw that with Covid and also with the infamous Hunter Biden laptop as well as with mass shootings --sometimes they disclose info, other times they don't disclose info.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to dissent; you can't have dissent in a society that doesn't allow freedom of speech. Yet the left has become strangely anti-free speech and supportive of censorship.
Both the left and the right are depressingly authoritarian, at least from where I'm standing -but you'd expect fascists (and their supporters) to be.
So it's not only neo-nazis and the kkk and the like who are classified as "far-right" it's just about any one who on social issues does not align with a progressive agenda is labeled far right. Basically Biden of the early 2000s would be classified as far-right today. Clinton's presidency would be labeled far right, if he ran today as he ran in the late 90s.
That said, both the actual far lefts and the actual far rights do love authoritarianism and censorship --no question.
Also, had this username since the Apple CSAM debacle and we all see how that went.
Stay positive!
This is why Democracy exists - voters express their displeasure by voting people out of office. Save a lot of beheadings a la the French Revolution.
In Europe, a similar dynamic exists for armed conflicts between nations and Eurovision.
I think that what motivated the transition to democracy the prosperity made possible by the industrial revolution. No longer we need a population of dumb muscle since machines do better. Instead we need a healthy, well educated population, capable of innovation, so that we can build and operate better machines. And that's not the kind of population a coercitive regime creates.
Still, everytime you shoot a photo with your mobile phone, an impersonified algorithm identifies the faces on the photo and knows how you and your children looked years ago. Most online services you use have built a psychological profile based on your behaviour. They offer you stuff that puts you in unease. Human actors with questionable motivation tune these algorithms.
It objectively did not. Ten years after Snowden nothing significant has changed. In support of their argument, EFF states "some of the National Security Agency’s most egregiously illegal programs and authorities have shuttered or been forced to end" which is a painfully ignorant assumption which is not based on any objective evidence.
> Privacy Options Are So Much Better Today
Today, almost all people are forced to make a choice between two proprietary closed source platforms - iOS and Android - both of which are much worse options for privacy than even the Windows desktop equivalents from ten years ago. Eff goes on to recommend a closed source messenger app from Facebook - the jokes just write themselves. They even scare readers away from the oh-so-hard to use GPG, at which point you really have to wonder what their ulterior motive is.
The whole article is just hilariously out of touch.