When I had reddit (deleted a few years ago), I posted a screenshot of my android launcher, and someone pointed out that I was using google apps, and said “protect your privacy”, he gave me some resources and that’s where it all clicked for me. What a nice guy.
When I was quite young I was trying to figure out how to play games on a school computer and must have set off some red flags because the IT guy came in and asked what I was doing.
Sure there’s not much more to it. I think it was a Mac and I was trying to get around the administrative privileges.
On a similar note a different school used Windows but had a pretty good blocklist of sites that had anything to do with gaming or social media. I really wanted to browse some game review but didn’t have another way because of how prohibitively expensive mobile data was at the time and ended up using Tor.
I never heard anything about it but it’s funny to think I used it to read Metacritic reviews.
Well. Isn’t anyone’s business what I am doing. I want to decide on my own what I want to share. Unfortunately some corporations exploit that little willingness, where others are respectful.
Even if I don’t have to hide anything, it’s still no reason given to tell the world. I mean - I don’t live in a glashouse, even when I got nothing to hide.
Homeland, right? I read it too - it was pretty good but that was so many years ago. Only until recently did I realize that he’s a commentator on internet privacy.
i was online before cookies were online, before smartphones connected billions and everyone put their faces on zuckHead’s site to write each other insults while shitting
I’m gay and didn’t want people to know when I was younger. I think everybody who says they have nothing to hide has either not thought very deeply about what they may want to keep to themselves or does not understand the principle that people should only ever know about you what you want to share with them.
Also, if being an open book is the norm, everybody with good reasons to not be completely open (like I used to be) will eventually stand out from the crowd. Keeping everybody else’s private stuff private also means you can keep your own stuff private.
There’s a great quote from Snowden about the right to privacy you can look up here. Excerpt from the page:
"people saying they don’t care about rights to privacy because they ‘have nothing to hide’ are no different than people saying ‘I don’t care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say’ "
Yepppp, as a teenager I was terrified to look at trans resources partly because what if I was caught.
If you don’t have anything to hide you may not have anything to fear (except for being mistakenly identified), but nobody said you get a say in whether or not you have anything you need to hide.
Yeah, people who think they have nothing to hide enjoy maximum privilege: No one ever wanted to use knowledge about them against them. At least not for long enough that they realized telling everybody everything isn’t smart.
I am out to my family but I noticed that the nest display at my parents home would suggest LGBTQ+ related searches when I would talk to them. That would have terrified me when I was in the closet. I could only imagine what it’s like in a household that isn’t accepting
For a while Google+ recommended content that your friends liked or interacted with. I once got a Google Play app recommendation that highlighted the review a friend of mine posted on it. I was TERRIFIED that it did that by default and spend the rest of the day going through ALL settings on ALL online services that allowed connecting with friends in any way. Also, you could go to my youtube profile and could publicly see what videos I liked. A friend asked me about it and I was mortified!
Wanted to “aquire legitimately” a movie and from there learned more and more about how big business and big brothers all over like to invade privacy for power and profit.
I was looking at cool world record gokart pictures in 2008, and the next day the sidebar on Facebook was full of ads for the shitty kart track by the highway. It felt dirty and unsettling as a 13 year old that everything I was interested in would immediately be sent straight to the weirdest meth head carny I knew.
Then the Snowden leaks happened, and at that point I was fully radicalized.
Add comment