The Greatest Enemy of Privacy

I hope that we can agree that the U.S. constitution has important things to say on the questions of speech and privacy.

The first amendment says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."

The fourth amendment says that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."

How we accomplish these aims might be subjective, but I would like to think that we agree on these fundamentals.

Ever noticed how they always bring up the threat model discussion whenever someone asks for or provides a serious privacy and anonimity advice and they try to persuade us to lower our expectations and use less private tools, but never the other way around?

I have yet to see a single thread where someone with a low threat model is told that their threat model doesn't make sense and that they should try to put some effort into avoiding NSA/feds/actual adversaries and not just "surveillance capitalism".

This is a psyop to make us stop caring about avoiding actual surveillance.

Stop threat modeling. Always try to achieve the best possible privacy and anonimity.

As someone who gets a lot of derision from "normies" when even the basic choice to use linux for home computers comes up, I agree with this article that the impression you make of privacy tech and advocacy by being sanctimonious is probably counterproductive, but think the impression that most people who care about privacy or open-source things or, generally speaking, owning the means of computation to any degree are just all like that is not entirely the fault of the vocal minority of people who are. There are significant benefits gained by numerous other "enemies" of privacy in propagating this stereotype, and it's easy to find people outside those groups who do so

It's similar to the way "wokeness" has become a point of obsession in the political world. There are absolutely a lot of crazy beliefs and demands about social justice floating around on the internet. At times, these have even become social norms within larger subcultures. Nevertheless, the impression that activism for the rights of minorities, or indeed, certain minorities themselves all act like or even share policy demands with the most insane online commentators that share their demographics is pretty ludicrous on its face, and yet the image of a "blue-haired tumblrina with pronouns" or whatever is apparently enough of a powerful stereotype that it has motivated a pivot in political messaging in a lot of the anglosphere

I'm not trying to paint these problems as equivalent, but I think that in both cases it can be useful for individuals to notice people's negative perceptions, to evade those stereotypes as a means to convince fence-sitters, and it's tempting to view doing this as both necessary and sufficient to solve the problem. I would argue this is naive. Stereotyping is a form of negative branding, and it is a strategy that benefits from its virality. It's a battle-tested strategy for molding public perception, and unfortunately combating the fallout is not as easy as simply bucking that perception on an individual scale

That said, I do think this article has some good points about outreach and privacy education, and about not assuming everyone has the same needs. I just can't really view this as privacy's "Greatest Enemy". After all, privacy's enemies are so many, and so powerful right now