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.
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!
Corporations love for you to be distracted with the methods that are futile.
That’s why saying not to vote is pro-corporation.
Then you’d be wrong, because voting is futile and a distraction, as I already said. Refer to the rest my comment for direct action methods that aren’t futile:
unionizing, striking, protesting, blocking traffic to our stores, boycotting
Unionizing and striking are effective, but they’ll stop being effective if they become illegal. They’re already less effective than they should be, because of legal restrictions.
Protesting is only useful for getting in the news and convincing people to consider certain issues when they vote. They will never directly cause change.
And boycotting is just plain worthless. You’ll never get enough people to join a boycott for large corporations to care.
Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up.
Can someone please explain how they are doing this?
- Use Adblocker
- Use DNS filter
- DoH to prevent MiTM/use your own resolver in Unbound.
I’m still trying to look up how to prevent ISPs from logging my SNIWell, it seems Cloudflare and other domain service providers have implemented ESNI.
This post left me thinking in something. What if we could organize, so a city-owned ISP with a built-in pihole exists? What if we can just block tracking at the metropolitan level as we do in our houses? What if we don’t just stop at DNS? What if we made just one city more private? What if we start with that?
You’d basically be harassed by law enforcement and the NSA until you agreed to spy on your users. In the US at least.
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.)
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.
I’ve never used /e/OS before, so I don’t know what it feels like to use it, and I really don’t want to shit on a FOSS project for no reason, but the frequency at which they deliver updates is terrifying. I wouldn’t recommend people to run an OS that is constantly out-of-date and has unpatched security vulnerabilities. But I would appreciate it, if you could tell me what is so awesome about /e/OS. I did some research and as far as I can see it’s just LineageOS with microG and a skinned Aurora Store, and a Launcher that desperately tries to look like iOS. You can recreate a better version of all of this with ease on GrapheneOS. The Sandboxed Google Play services implementation is miles ahead of microG, and has better app compatibility, while not compromising on privacy. Also, Graphene has many low-level security improvements to the system like a hardened memory allocator, hardened SELinux policies, etc. I like that Murena ships /e/OS on Fairphones, but I will always prefer GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel, because of the hardware security features (Titan M2 Secure Element). TL;DR: /e/OS has better privacy than stock Android ROMs, but pretty bad security, because of a lack of frequent security patches.
I don’t mind being slightly behind other android ROMs in terms of updates, I get updates every once in a few months on e/OS. One of the main freatures is that there is a feature caled advanced privacy you can block all trackers, spoof your GPS location and Tunnel your IP Adress through Tor from the settings or from its Widget at a per App basis without root out of the box. It also comes completly degoogled and with microg all default apps replaced with a foss alternatives. Its fork of Aurora store “app lounge” has privacy ratings for all the apps calculated using the permissions they require and trackers they have, it includes FOSS and pwa apps too.(also must admit I mostly just use fdroid). There is a lot to love about it and it is compatible with a lot more phones than grapheneOS. I know that you can achieve most of it, if not all of it on graphene too but /e/OS makes privacy “convenient”.
at some point, we are going to have to boycott everything
consumer boycotts aint shit. we need tech workers, some of the people with the least class consciousness and poorest ethics, to refuse to create and maintain surveillance tools.
Communism is ad free
How stupid is u?
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.
Firebase really is the curse of modern software development
