I think a pretty significant part was moving, kind of by chance, to Linux and then watching videos of the content creators that revolve around it, but even before that I think I started questioning the matter more when I played (please don’t laugh) Watch Dogs 2, I know it’s silly, but it had some themes that were really compelling, the techno dystopia going on is pretty accurate in how bad it can be and playing as characters that go against it made me think a bit more about that, then after getting really into privacy I realized how spot on it was in several instances
Oh, glad it’s not only me!
I always wondered why so many seemed to dislike it, I thought it was good, though I never played the first one so maybe they didn’t like how it compared to it
My dad bought Linux magazines when I was a kid. So I thought tech and Linux were cool, I then grew up (still using windows and chromium) and discovered how much those 2 spy on you, I first made the switch from chrome to waterfox (I associated Firefox with old Windows XP PCs) then, I think mental outlaw got me into the Linux and privacy world once again, but I was already at least a bit conscious.
When I was younger I was amazed by how easy it was to track people on the early internet. this is when putting a script tag in a comment section to show images in comments was popular but quickly became exploited and faded away. I also became worried about this in my web development class learning how to use JS and saw how easy it was for a bad actor to execute malicious JS on people’s browsers.
Prying parents, I won’t say they were overkill but they would look through my phone weekly and if I left it unlocked they would browse through my private messages and stuff. Now I have a separate password for everything have all of my important files in Knox on my phone a 1tb encrypted partition on Nixos and I plan to replace my phone eventually with a google pixel running graphine. I hated being spyied on and its sad that there’s people who live like this in general. The only plus is I convinced my friends to use signal and that’s how we call and chat now.
i somehow stumbled across duckduckgo and ended up reading its write up on why we need to use google search alternatives. The big one that clicked with me was how google can (and likely does) manipulate search results based on race and other factors. it immediately clicked why so many people are so self confirmed in their own biases and how to protect free and rational discourse we need to protect privacy.
Long story short. I googled my name and city and was sufficiently creeped out. Ive been online a long time and just didn’t notice how much privacy had eroded around me. It’s like that parable about how to cook a frog. They just slowly increased the temp on me. Fortunately I’ve jumped out of the pot before I got cooked alive.
I forget exactly when it happened, but shortly after Facebook launched to the public. I had an account for a few years but was always uncomfortable with it. Then when Cambridge Analytica and Facebook were exposed I went scorched Earth.
Since then I’ve learned programming, networking, and some basic cryptography in an effort to better understand and protect myself. I’ve been a Linux user for about 25 years, so it wasn’t too hard for me to adapt.
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