There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.
Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!
Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.
Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!
And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.
Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.
the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough
I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.
So go vote, be in unions, call your representative about these matters.
This should be how the message ends.
Not only this. Just by existing and living like this around your friends, family, and coworkers and they’ll notice and get interested. In the span of a year of just using Linux, firefox, adblockers, password managers, and email aliases I’ve unintentionally gotten the attention of two of my friends and they’ve now started on their privacy and security journey. I share privacy articles around to my friends because I think they should be aware that stuff like 23andme can leak your entire genome and could be targeted for a racially motivated attack. Just exist and share it around with people around you and some may catch on.
Unions, sure.
Voting and calling representatives is a futile approach. They’re a distraction at best. Unions are an example of what I mean by uniting our efforts and taking action.
Voting and calling representatives is a futile approach. They’re a distraction at best.
That’s conservative, pro-corporation propaganda.
Quite the opposite, actually. Corporations love for you to be distracted with the methods that are futile. Don’t you ever think about unionizing, striking, protesting, blocking traffic to our stores, boycotting, or any of that. Just do the things that don’t hurt our profits!
“Go vote” and “call your representative” presupposes you both believe there’s a genuine, believably electable option out there that’s gonna really fight for you on this subject, and that the electoral system you live in is legitimately going to represent your vote. There’s an argument to be made against both points, depending on where you live.
It doesn’t presuppose that at all. The only way to get that option is shift the overton window to the left, and the only way to do that is to vote for the candidate on the left, even if they’re not as far left as we’d like.
It absolutely presupposes that you give some level of legitimacy to an electoral system to partake in it. Otherwise, how does one have any internal consistency?
I want to add to this: In my country (Poland, but probably many others) you are sometimes almost forced to be tracked by FAANG companies. For example our mObywatel app, which can be uses as driver’s license replacement requires you to download it via Google Play and have Google Services installed. Of course it uses firebase to send notifications.
It’s yet another service in the hands of Google and a proprietary library, far too many apps depend on it to send push notifications, which isn’t unexpected when Google, which owns Android, has made it the only standard push service by leveraging their position of power and in turn Unified Push and all its free implementations had to come from the community, but almost no app uses it, because everyone is used to Firebase by this point.
That’s the open platform aspect, it is also a privacy concern because it means that most apps will have your notifications pass through Google’s servers, I don’t think they can necessarily read the content, but the time of reception and sending and where it comes from is metadata that they certainty see
There are definitely some steps you can take for your personal privacy. Get a phone with GrapheneOS, use LibreWolf as your browser, switch from Windows/Mac to Linux, use a DNS filter like NextDNS and try to communicate with people over Signal. You can also use a reputable VPN like IVPN or Mullvad and switch away from Google/Big Tech services (Google search -> DuckDuckGo, Gmail -> ProtonMail, Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice, Google Drive -> Proton Drive, YouTube -> Odysee, etc.)
They allow for anonymous registration without an Email address. They just give you an Account ID. They also allow you to sign up via Tor. Mullvad even has an onion site.
Just chiming in, that the biggest selling point of Mullvad (and IVPN also, I think) is the possibility to pay with cash-by-mail or with crypto. Also, Proton has an onion site, too (at least I used it for ProtonMail, not sure if it’s for Drive too).
I personally feel like Mullvad provides a better, faster and cheaper service than Proton. However, Proton has other very interesting products such as ProtonMail, ProtonPass and Drive. I’m interested in all that, so I ended up moving to Proton.
I don’t have a single bad thing to say about Mullvad, excellent service and pricing policy.
What about reading an article that has a Facebook share button or independent trackers? Using your credit/debit cards, buying anything online. There’s a million ways to track people’s habits
If you have an adblocker, you can block the Facebook embedded spyware and other trackers. You can use Monero, a privacy-focused crypto currency to anonymously buy a prepaid credit card, and then use that to make your payment.
“You can use Monero…”
Can I? Most places don’t accept it, or any cryptocurrency for that matter. It’s just not a viable alternative currently.
GrapheneOS only supports pixel phonea therefor /e/OS is a great option too. I don’t recommend Librewolf. Any firefox fork is unnecessary just use arkenfox and ublock origin set it up to block scripts. Except fennec or mull, they are necessary on mobile firefox is atrocious. I have never heard of IVPN before so I question how private it actually is and Odysee is filled with alt-right wastes of space. Linux Experiment tried using it a while ago ended up leaving. So there is no true alternative to youtube but privacy frontends like Libretube and Newpipe on mobile and individious or piped on PC. Or you can use freetube on both as well.
/e/OS is a terrible option, they sometimes take half a year to ship basic security patches. If your device is not supported by Graphene, you can check out DivestOS. Sure, you can use arkenfox, I just included LibreWolf, because it’s easier to set up. +1 for Mull on Android. I use it too. IVPN is one of the most private VPNs, I’d say it’s on the same level as Mullvad in regards to privacy. Check out the Privacy Guides article: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/#ivpn Yes, there are currently some really weird people on Odysee, but the more normal people like TLE leave, the worse it gets. I hate these right-wing bastards as much as you do, especially in the comments, but that’s the reason why more people should use Odysee instead of YouTube. We just need to outnumber them. Odysee is definitely not perfect, but it’s better than being dependent on YouTube, who currently try to shut down all private frontends. They sent a lovely cease and desist letter to Invidious, and they IP-ban Piped instances (which LibreTube relies on).
I see, you might be right about Odysee. though /e/OS actually is really good, don’t be so prejudiced about it. I didn’t try to disprove your guide or anything BTW, tried to expand it a bit.
You’re aware of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, right? It’s one of I’m sure several groups that organizes & strives to push back against malicious action from tech companies, as well as over-encroachment from governments (at times itself coming from tech company lobbying). It’s based in the United States though, if memory serves, so others may want to chip in and mention similar groups for their region/nation.
At the same time, services/platforms that don’t rely on ads pretty much always welcome donations, e.g. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Gutenberg, as well your resident Fediverse sites, so also keep those in mind.
