In sharing this video here I’m preaching to the choir, but I do think it indirectly raised a valuable point which probably doesn’t get spoken about enough in privacy communities. That is, in choosing to use even a single product or service that is more privacy-respecting than the equivalent big tech alternative, you are showing that there is a demand for privacy and helping to keep these alternative projects alive so they can continue to improve. Digital privacy is slowly becoming more mainstream and viable because people like you are choosing to fight back instead of giving up.
The example I often think about in my life is email. I used to be a big Google fan back in the early 2010s and the concept of digital privacy wasn’t even on my radar. I loved my Gmail account and thought it was incredible that Google offered me this amazing service completely free of charge. However, as I became increasingly concerned about my digital privacy throughout the 2010s, I started looking for alternatives. In 2020 I opened an account with Proton Mail, which had launched all the way back in 2014. A big part of the reason it was available to me 6 years later as a mature service is because people who were clued into digital privacy way before me chose to support it instead of giving up and going back to Gmail. This is my attitude now towards a lot of privacy-respecting and FOSS projects: I choose to support them so that they have the best chance of surviving and improving to the point that the next wave of new privacy-minded people can consider them a viable alternative and make the switch.
After so much time of thinking, researching and testing all kinds of technologies and tools, my best recommendation to those who talk to me about privacy is the following: keep your profile public, the one that everyone knows, the one related to work and to all government services, services like Amazon etc. Only use those what you supposedly should and even need to continue moving in society. But, keep a second profile, absolutely isolated and disconnected from the first, and where you have your ENTIRE real private world. The one that you only want to share with those you trust. It’s more or less what should be done in society in the real world. And to all this, personally, in that public profile, what I do is block all communication between entities as much as possible, just because I hate that they make free money from me. I also mold it to my convenience.
Fraid so. The very act of connection lays you open to the world even if you have the latest greatest firewall and vpn
counter-question: Is it impossible to be private offline?
transcribed from video:
I think there are good solutions we can implement to mitigate a lot of the surveillance. And I don’t think the solution is to just lay down and die. If everyone thought like privacy doomers, none of this [privacy related issues] would even be a discussion.
They [pessimists] really just making the world worse place by giving up. And that’s what a lot of pessimism really is, when you dig down deep, just a coping mechanism for covering up the fact that you’re too lazy to take action. All you have to do is take action, instead of doing nothing.
The world needs more people who just care, don’t be a doomer.
