its just getting vendors to actually do it.

Good ideas… and yeah… the browser vendors have a financial incentive to build mechanisms to collect anything and everything. Javascript itself exposes so much more fingerprinting possibilies.

That’s also why I think it’s so terrible for Google’s Chrome to have like practically all the market share. G can now drive the whole web in a way that’s good for them and bad for us.

Article talks about cookies still being set when user opts out of those.

That’s bad, sure. But TBH I worry so much more about fingerprinting. Cookies, easy to delete in your browser, easy to block. Fingerprinting is done behind the scenes on the server, you can’t block their attempt to. There are “resist fingerprinting” options in some browsers now like firefox, but limited in effect, and much of the fingerpinting is not even something the browser can stop. Things like TLS fingerprints, or exact timings between your system making a request, and the serving system. Or things you can spoof but which cause problems if you do. Even Tor Browser doesn’t spoof some of those things b/c it causes problems to do.

The identity broker companies have a massive financial incentive, and they employ very smart data scientists. Even “opting out” of cookies, I think it’s about 0% chance we have any way to opt out of these behind the scene techniques they use. They will use every shitty weasely trick in the book like the slimeweasels they are.

But those who I know who are into it, just do not care at all.

I have friends like that too. Which is why it’s so hard.

It’s not even a fair fight, b/c the big social medias employ psychologists to design their product to be as addictive as possible. So it pits Jane and Fred Doe of Main Street against a team of psychologist PhD who study every possible way to weaponize Jane and Fred’s normal human feelings and emotions. Jane & Fred doesn’t want to quit, so will find ways to rationalize a use of the products.

It’s a big damn problem. It impacts everyone. All of us. Not just the ones who use FB, IG, or X.

Sure… but the hard part is convincing 2 or 3 billion of my closest friends. Esp when faced with systems designed by teams of psychologits, to be highly addictive.

It’s also a lot more obvious when someone is using a phone to record in public.

Agree. Less obvious with glasses… AND easier to do it 24/7. People get tired holding up a phone. Or they have to put it down to use both hands for something. With glasses, some will record everyone around them, during every moment of their waking life.

True… paparazzi can get to people sometimes.

Totally with you on the idea, btw. I think the people destroying the privacy of everyone in society should feel that themselves, too. They shouldn’t get to hide behind infinite piles of money to guard their own privacy while they destroy ours.

It would be one thing if we could easily opt out. But we can’t. It’s not MY choice that puts me into this. It’s the choice of some other rando walking down the same sidewalk as me.

I kinda think [email protected] is right tho, it’d be hard. People like Zuck, they take private jets from here to there. They don’t fly commercial. They don’t go eat to normal restaurants with the plebs, he has high end privately catered. He don’t do his own shopping. Zuck bought 11 houses around his own mansion, for … privacy!

That goes into an observation. Zuck zealously guards his own privacy. He doesn’t want YOU to have privacy! But HE wants as much privacy as he can get.

XMPP with encryption extensions (OMEMO)

You can easily host a server yourself, no big tech. It’s light weight. Open standard so lots of client to pick from, no lockin. Supports sending pictures, videos if you want.

stones in my fucking shoes it is then.

Everybody says this… but I’m afraid it won’t help or for very long. Gate recog algos measures physical characteristics. Things that are not changed by a shoe stone, like the length of your femur and tibia. The way your hips move as your leg does. Ratio of hip width to other measures. Things things are more fingerprint-ish like that.

It’s a lot like… how facial recog looks at distances between your pupils. Or the exact position of your cheekbones and structure of the face. Making it hard to fool in some ways.

It can all be fooled to a degree. Anyway it’s all probabilities. Maybe it works 95% and fails 5% or w/e, but that’s “good enough” for advertizers and data brokers.

It’s all just an exhausting uphill battle :(

Like in Myanmar

It was horrific, what hapened there with Facebook. Viral rumors would spread, the Rohingya were putting sterilization pills into the food supply. People would believe it. Then they would torture or kill those the rumors were about. They would burn down their businesses and homes. There were mass scale murder and rape, whole viliages burned. Because Facebook had displaced local news. What was on Facebook became the reality for so many people. It became an anti-Rohingya echo chamber, the hate would feed on itself.

I think this effect is playing out in western democracies today. Slower, because the US, Canada, or Europe altogether, are much larger than Myanmar. The big ship turns slower than the small. But the same dynamics are here. Viral social media posts make their own twisted “reality”. It’s not just Facebook, neither. It’s lots of others too.

I don’t know how to stop it.

It is a valid approach and good idea. But also ppl who do it should know… it ties all the accounts together through a domain no one else uses. With a privacy mail provider there could be millions of others on the domain. With a prvate domain, not so much. It’s one more piece of data that helps identity brokers deduce that account A on site A is the same person as account B on site B.

Some might not care about it. Or, they might. Threat models etc.

Very well said. Everything you said I agree about 100%.

We need to get better at convincing non-nerds.

I’m doing my best. It’s hard tho. They just… don’t care. They don’t understand why it is important. Important for their future, and for all of our future. They don’t seem to grasp why it matters so much, and what price we have to pay when we get it wrong.

I try to find concrete examples for them. But when people are invested already in some big tech ecosytem, it’s easy to discount the examples. “That wouldn’t apply to me”.

I’m trying so hard, but it is an up hill fight :(.

visually blocks ads but under the hood clicks on them

I get where they’re coming from on the idea. But the problem I have… it would still run all the fingerprnting scripts and other shit. Sure it makes some bad data added to the good… but still plugs me into huge adware ecosystems. It leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, if any of their shit hits my comp.

I really mostly want to not be part of any of that shit. 🤮 Just leave me alone, surveilance companies, thank you.

Agree. Also it creates a false dichotomy in peoples minds. If you fight the orwellian creep into every kind of tech, you must not care about the children! What kind of sociopath is against protecting children!!

Really, I do believe there are many parts of the world children should be protected from. But NOT by giving away our freedom. NOT by turning the world into one huge mass survielance device. NOT by going full 1984. I can be in favor of protecting children even if I object to dragnet surveilance.

Without that, a lot of apps just don’t behave right,

Agree with what you said. And if I may add a little? Apps not behaving right extends to things average people see as essential in thier life. Like banking apps refusing to run on “untrusted devices”.

Techies can get around most of it. At least today, maybe not in the future. For example use the bank’s web site directly not their app. But my nontechie friends have no idea. From their perspective, something like an alternative to Android simply doesn’t work for what they are used to.

Vendor lock-in.

Can you imagine a company like dell decided tomorrow to only allow installation from their specific vendor locked market?

TBH this possibility does scare me. That we could lose this freedom too on PC.

Today already, most PC come with Microsoft’s secure boot keys in firmware. Microsoft signs the install keys for many Linux distros. It isn’t totally locked down, b/c you can turn this off in UEFI. But most of the pieces exist. Frog and pot…

The PC platform is “open”, oh yes… but when Microsoft says jump, PC mfgs ask how high. We could somday see pressure to lock down all computing, not just mobile. To protect the children, you know…

Yah, there might be something to that. For protection against style + vocab matching.

It sucks though. I recently read where the more people use LLM assisters when they write, the more the whole virtual commons grows bland. It feeds back upon itself.

Sigh. I just want a world where we can have nice things. And assholes don’t try to ruin the nice things we could have.

new circle of Hell for backers of mass surveillance

A perpetual itch between the thumb toe and the next one, and they must wear shoes 18 hours each day so they can’t reach the itch.

Well, sure, but it isn’t JUST an American thing, even today. Like Buelldozer said, it’s starting all over the globe. Some further than others ofc.

Some are starting to ban VPNs to prevent people from bypassing the ID laws. Not sure where it stands rn but some UK MEPs or w/e they’re called in the UK were pushing for that.

Agree. Another benefit is, it’s much less productive to use info-warfare bots against a small forum of let’s say 500 users, than against a global site with 1B users.