Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I got key-logged by an abusive parent when I was 14. If that doesn’t make you take digital privacy and security seriously, nothing else will.
Sorry that happened to you :(
Thanks for the kind thoughts. <3
PRISM, the American empire mass espionage program
I hate ads.
I thought I was doing great protecting my information. Then a former employer was hacked and everything is out there including my mother's maiden name.
But hey I got one year of credit monitoring for free... helpful when my credit has been locked since forever....
Initally Facebook, but then also Google and Microsoft.
Piracy
I've been online since the early 90s, when it was just understood that there were risks, so you had to protect yourself. So it's not so much that I got into internet privacy as that I've never done things any other way.
The only thing that's really changed is that I've had to shift more from passively protecting myself to actively protecting myself, since corporate and government shitstains are constantly scheming to destroy our privacy in order to expand and protect their own wealth, power and privilege.
It's insane how abruptly things went from "Don't share any information, online, especially anything personal" to "You must be a suspicious person or a criminal if you're not on the net with your real name, face and everything about your life" in the advent of Facebook et al.
Snowden
Data breaches and just in general, what every company seemingly knows about me even if I never used their products, and how much reach those companies have on you that's just plain inescapable like health insurance and banks?
Do I really care that Banana Co knows I like bananas? No. Do I care that my health insurance could deny a claim based on what I purchase at the grocery store? Absolutely. Companies use that data to serve their interests first. Especially when it comes to endangered rights like LGBTQ+, people of color and abortion rights, it makes it easy to feed all that data in an opaque AI black box and discriminate against you, with no way to prove it and no legal recourse.
Especially true with for example, Jews during Nazi germany, or right now anti-war russians in Russia. Lack of privacy can be plain dangerous.
Common sense.
Advertisements and how media tends to treats people like they're stupid
If I'm being honest the switch from Reddit to Lemmy and this instance...
I wanted the freedom of Android/Linux, then privacy was easy
Data breaches where my information was leaked and used against me. I didn't know any better unfortunately at the time.
Tech -> Raspberry Pi -> Linux -> New PC -> Mining Crypto -> Monero -> Privacy
Holy shit whats up with all these guys hating here on cryptos? As if all of them would be the same. Sure better go to daddy bank...
NFTs and (x)coin speculation really made a lot of people sour on cryptocurrency, fairly or unfairly.
There are legitimate uses for crypto, I don’t think Mastercard, Visa, or your bank need to know what size dildos you’re buying online. But people treating it like a high value stock instead of actual currency really hampered it’s wide adoption imo.
You are so right about this... Unfortunately...
I use monero for this reason. It has actual usage as a currency and maintains a fairly stable value. Sure, it fluctuates, but it does so rather slowly compared to others. It doesnt drop 15+% overnight.
To be clear: I also hate crypto EXCEPT MONERO.
When I got a new PC it had (and still has) quite powerfull cpu, so I googled if I could make some money from my PC. The answer was crypto mining. Only nice looking crypto miner for Linux was Cudo miner and it only supported Monero for cpu mining. I was mining for a year and got 50€, because of free electricity (parents). In that time I discovered that Monero is private and anonymous crypto and then I got interested in privacy. I was also a localmonero trader but paypal close both of my accounts without a reason :(.
Nice story. There are a lot more cryptos and blockchains that aim to disrupt the current centralized systems. It is rather easy to distinguish between real cypherpunk rooted projects and other useless shitcoins.
Crypto lol
Big tech made me do it. I wish it were the standard procedure.
I was actually praising Google for some reason when I was still in elementary school. I discovered Firefox, uBlock Origin and other stuff then got into privacy at the age of 14.
Windows 10
Performance boost. Ads take up bandwidth and I wanted faster shit. I use a pihole bc it's like a real wifi booster. Who cares about ads?
Always been reasonably aware, but what made me cut as much closed source and mainstream stuff as possible was the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Scandal.
Working at an online video ad server, which was subsequently acquired by Kabletown, with a K.
because i hate injustice, and one day figured that surveillance enables imbalance of power, therefore injustice.
My IT teacher from high school put a major emphasis on online privacy.
He thinks the internet is a major threat to individual freedom and while it brings benefits, the negative effects are too big for him.
While I don't agree with the last statement, I do think privacy is very much under attack nowadays and while I am not very concerned what other people and corporations know about me, I still care about privacy simply because I have the right to do so and because if I don't pay attention, a dozen different trackers will know what I have done without me granting permission.
Corporations basically take advantage of people and give nothing in return and that is bad imo.
From doing network security, configuring server OS and software for security and privilege seperation, it seemed privacy was a natural growth out of doing system and network security.
A combination of over-involved parents when I was younger, and reading about human rights abuses later on. I think I first started reading about personal privacy stuff after there were protests in some part of the world, and then the government tracked down those talking about it online in order to arrest and torture them. People were posting urgently about how they could protect themselves and I didn't know what to say
The uncovering of the magnitudes of the privacy violations of PRISM around 2013.
I started trying to replace closed source apps with open source apps because I liked Godot more than Unity and it was open source and decided to change everything to a Foss alternative
In part because some of my education research led me into looking at how data was being used by social media and big tech and led me to a greater understanding of just how much was being collected and how it was being shared and used.
After learning about the landscape of data collection, I decided I wanted to minimize my part in it.
I’ve known for the lack of privacy online for a while but joining lemmy really made me change the way I browse the Internet. I switched to Firefox with unlock origin, started to use a password manager with randomly generated passwords and got more conscious about my internet habits overall.
the fucking ads. they spooked me as hell.
I was originally just against censorship. I turned to DDG instead of Google because I wanted more open and free search results. That's where it all started.