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Comment by coldblues | Hacker News Reader

Even without Chat Control, I still self-censor even in private communications. The majority of people you chat with show complete disregard for your privacy. They piss on it. There are very basic requirements that a minuscule amount of people follow, like: full-disk encryption, using a password manager, being aware of your rights to protect yourself against searches, having good computer hygiene and competency. The level of incompetency and ignorance when it comes to privacy & security makes me deeply angry and frustrated to a level that brings me to nihilism and misanthropy

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"People showing disregard for your privacy" is a matter of scale when going from analog to digital, it's at least not inconsistent.

e.g. If you engage in private spoken conversation, most people are not going to treat your conversation as if it's privileged, avoiding any mention of it in casual conversation, and refusing to divulge any details to law enforcement.

You need better friends. Most people I chat with regularly absolutely would not volunteer anything to law enforcement.

Yeah, bullshit. "Tell us this thing or you are going to jail. Might have a trial in a week or a month."

I promise you you aren't the main character in your friends' lives and they will absolutely give up information on you to save their career and their family.

Even in places with generally strong protection against state search you have almost no privacy if someone drags you into civil court. Not only can state opponents attack you there including through pretextual claims, but you're also open to attack by numerous non-governmental entities.

Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate surveillance through ad data, while largely ignoring threats via hacking or civil litigation.

The best policy is to not record things that shouldn't be made public. The next best step is to not retain recorded things longer than needed. Modern software/operating systems largely make either of those steps quite difficult, leaking tons of data with every use, making it impossible to reliably delete material, etc. But nothing less is effective against the full spectrum of threats, not even strong encryption. (but obviously strong encryption is good and critical for what you do record and retain!)

> making it impossible to reliably delete material

That said, SSD's have improved the situation a lot with TRIM. While previously deleting a file wouldn't actually destroy any data until it was overwritten. With TRIM in most cases for files more than a few KB almost all the data will be physically destroyed soon after TRIM is called. It depends on settings. But that's commonly either immediately, or about once a day (the default on Android).

If you read the forensics literature TRIM has caused them enormous problems by radically reducing the amount of data available.

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