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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 am also german. Of course not everyone here cares about privacy, but in average much more people than in other countries I would say. But the “average german” uses FB and WhatsApp. However, many like me never had them installed.
I think it’s because of our recent history full of spying secret services (Nazis and east germany) and the education in family and in school about the history. My family is from East germany. The stasi (east german secret service) observed everyone they could with hidden microphones in private rooms, reading your lettters, force your friends to spy on you etc. So the people that raised me are very aware of spying… From my grandparents and parents stories I cared about privacy from the beginning. My parents also used Linux since I remember them using computers and gave us phones with lineage etc… …
Of course we do, but for example we use nicknames on Facebook and our government shot down the real name verification they were pushing.
Data privacy acts are actually enforced, and most users are at least somewhat informed about GDPR and their rights.
Meta is not allowed to link facebook and whatsapp user data to get around that, so the data gathered within whatsapp is not nearly as powerful as the connection between the two would be (three, if you count Instagram), etc. etc.
I think it’s kind of sad that we need to ask the question of what got you into privacy, as opposed to what caused you to give up your privacy. I understand why we must the question, but it’s still sad to me. This is my answer, by the way. Because we need to ask “why privacy”, is the reason I want privacy.
Then do not use them. Use anonymous apps instead: Session, WireMin, SimpleX, Damus. I personally prefer WireMin because it has secret groups. Only members know I exist.
I used Session before switching to WireMin. It’s a good choice for a private messenger, but not an app I would use daily.
I have a personal blog on WireMin, so I can post whatever I want. And I think they made interaction much easier, cuz I can explore public chat rooms and other people’s blogs in the discovery section, which give me more stuff to do on the app.
This is the chat space on WireMin I like to check out daily, people usually talks about privacy news there. i.wiremin.com/invite/?g=k50898835053
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
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