There have been times in my life when concerns about privacy kept me up at night. Using credit cards online, social media, email, giving my social security number to get my teeth cleaned, etc. Other times I forget all about it. I recently went to the airport and the TSA wanted to scan my face at security. Yes, I know it's voluntary, but does it really make sense to flag yourself as the guy who doesn't want his face scanned, especially since the whole area is being monitored by video surveillance anyway? I could fight that battle and deny them the scan. What do I accomplish? They have all the power in that circumstance. They have my name, address, and the photo on my passport or driver's license. Rather than let my facial scan join the millions of others that some lazy bureaucrat will never look at, I should instead single myself out for suspicion? Along similar lines, does it make sense to use a vpn for privacy? You are flagging yourself as someone with something to hide. I’m just asking the question. I still use one myself. Maybe we take the wrong approach to privacy. Maybe our fancy tools can in fact do more harm than good.
Resisting a more powerful opponent will result in your defeat, whilst adjusting to and evading your opponent's attack will cause him to lose his balance, his power will be reduced, and you will defeat him. This can apply whatever the relative values of power, thus making it possible for weaker opponents to beat significantly stronger ones. This is the theory of ju yoku go o seisu.[24]
My father used a pc to handle his bookkeeping and accounting tasks for his investments. It was overkill. I tried to convince him to get an internet connection, but he refused. He was convinced he was worried about being hacked and having his privacy exposed. He was always intellectually curious, so I tried to convince him by talking about all the information he would have at his fingertips.
No luck. He was content with his newspaper, magazines, books, and cable TV. He passed away in the early 2000s, so there is no telling whether he would have held out if he had lived another decade.
Making an effort to preserve privacy online is an effort. It is inconvenient. You wake up and read that one of your methods is compromised. Using a privacy focused email address makes you a target. It's suspicious. Same with using Graphene OS (I love mine). Tor too. I don't want to argue the particulars of each method here. The point is they all have their weaknesses and limitations.
I remember reading newspaper stories about the old mafia dons. They would never use a phone for important conversations. They would walk around the block and talk to the person, one on one. If they had suspicions, they would check the guy for a wire first. Telephones were for dinner plans, arranging to have the kids picked up after school, etc.
They didn't spend all their time sweeping their social clubs for bugs. They went outside. They didn't worry if their phones were tapped. They never said anything important on a phone. They knew that David rarely beats Goliath in the real world. The younger guys never learned that lesson. Most of them died in jail.
My point is not to encourage criminal activity. What I'm trying to convey is that jumping through hoops to ensure privacy using the wonders of modern technology is a losing battle. We can't match the technological powers of multinational corporations or state actors. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try. No one wants to get hacked, doxxed, or have your bank accounts drained. Take precautions. I do. But, for really important, private stuff, nothing beats a pen and paper, or a big, heavy safe, or a deep hole in the yard.
I, too, feel like doing things "right" in the world of online privacy is almost impossible. Yet, I fear the surveillance state has increased to such an extent that doing things like a mafia don does them isn't as effective as it once was.
Cameras are everywhere and unless we are well prepared to abandon most of the conveniences of daily life (read: leave our phones at home and stop using a credit card, avoid crossing international borders) I have a feeling analog solutions (paper, in person conversation, heavy safes, and so forth) will not be as effective as they once were. Achieving the privacy of a mafia meeting in a pizza parlor a la Don Corleone in our modern highly surveiled world may be just as difficult as achieving privacy online. (It seems like every intersection in the US has a camera mounted above the traffic lights, and our license plates are pretty much our name, date of birth, and social security number displayed publicly.)
Judo (not that I have ever practiced it--so maybe I mean the american pop culture understanding if judo which may be as close to real judo as grocery-store sushi is to real sushi) is a great way to think about things. But, in the spirit of Indiana Jones, perhaps we should be looking for a gun to use in a knife fight.
Encryption feels like the gun in a knife fight. Perhaps it is my naivete speaking, but I am hopeful that we will come up with tech solutions that level the playing field between the state and ourselves.
reply
Thanks for this perspective. No doubt a walk and talk through lower Manhattan would be picked up on a few cameras.
reply
Speaking about a different topic (bitcoin as a tech solution to the mess of the fiat monetary system) someone on Twitter said this: Either transcendence through technology or total collapse.
I am not a messianic tech utopianist, but late at night when my fears seem more real I do wonder if we haven't built a civilization that will not allow us to opt-out of the panopticon. The world where cash transactions are no longer accepted is close, likewise kyc to use the internet. The trend clearly points toward increasing control. The only way we escape may be through a technical solution that allows us to enforce our rights.
reply
Achieving the privacy of a mafia meeting in a pizza parlor a la Don Corleone in our modern highly surveiled world may be just as difficult as achieving privacy online. (It seems like every intersection in the US has a camera mounted above the traffic lights, and our license plates are pretty much our name, date of birth, and social security number displayed publicly.)
I don't know what you mean. Achieving privacy online is very easy. Privacy is not about hiding your social security number or last name.
I often hear this kind of argumens handwaving away any efforts at basic privacy higiene because "they already know who I am". Such narcissist view that they're "after you" as depicted in movies does not reflect the current reality of mass surveillance.
You can take simple measures to vastly reduce the data points that you send about you and those around you: web searches, current mood, health, movies watched, books read, location, nearby devices around you, and a big, big etcetera. And no, you won't stand out as a terrorist bacause privacy is a human right and there's nothing wrong with choosing not to give it up.
reply
You make a good point. We can and should take simple steps toward privacy. I'm arguing for seeking out tech solutions that make it easier to safeguard our privacy.
reply
Perhaps it is my naivete speaking, but I am hopeful that we will come up with tech solutions that level the playing field between the state and ourselves.
Alternatively we should use less tech in general or at least quit putting microphones and cameras on our tea kettles and toasters.
There's something calming about reducing the amount of tech in your day-to-day life and if more people tried it then perhaps we could change the culture to be less accepting of invasive surveillance devices.
reply
Tech is not bad per se. It's the spyware tech that got naturalized. Fully FOSS privacy-friendly tech is available. There's nothing wrong with having a mic listening to your commands if the software obeys you and don't leak data.
reply
As I always said:
  • what is online "life" is public
  • what is offline life is private
Get used to have 2 "lives", one for public, one for private. Everything you are doing online is public. No matter how much you want to hide stuff, is still public and you cannot do anything about.
Create a boundary between those 2 lives that cannot be put together. And as I always said: start reading this https://livingintheprivate.blogspot.com It will show you the way. The living man, flesh and blood, cannot be accused of anything that a dead entity (fictitious entity) is doing in a virtual world. There's no proof of that. It will be like accusing Mickey Mouse of rape or kill. Animated characters cannot kill or rape.
That's why so many people do not understand what really is privacy.
reply
do you got a guide to start living in the private? like demanding them to burn your birth certificate?
reply
reply
Does international law of the sea exist in Switzerland or any country with no navy?
reply
I just post one above. And follow @Lux daily pills in SN saloon.
reply
Thanks buddy
reply
It’s expensive
A rich person luxury
reply
Is it really expensive to have a private life?
reply
If you use technology yes.
If you eschew technology like the Amish then it’s cheaper
reply
There is no inbetween?
Obama is a private person despite his public celebrity.
Have you seen his fake birth certificate?
reply
I cant believe how many people are ignorant and put their whole lives on facebook.
reply
What about the nonaggression principle?
reply
I mentioned reading Carissa Veliz's Privacy is Power in the "what are you reading" post this weekend, and one of the worst things it discusses (to me) is the way in which other people giving up privacy can also impinge on your privacy (DNA testing sites being an obvious and extreme example, but casual FB posts mentioning seeing you at the coffee shop also impinge).
One of the worst things for privacy is that it's a door that never closes once it's open. I can't do anything about the privacy I gave up twenty years ago other than hoping for it to get lost in the systems it's in. Worse, without live access to any of these systems, I'm not necessarily sure what info is out there and where it is.
(Aside: while I've got a ton of issues with the EU and the way they operate, I appreciate the idea behind allowing people to require companies to purge data they possess for individuals. I don't believe the companies actually do it, and of course the government's excluded, but I like the idea itself.)
And I agree we can over-focus on the tools, and privacy tools are essentially in an escalating war. Every secure tool eventually seems to get cracked (or turns out to have never been as secure as advertised).
reply
I am a victim of family DNA testing as well as my own 20 year old ignorance.
reply
Did you do it? Did you find any interesting results? I dont want to do it because I dont want to put my dna into the system.
reply
No. A family member did.
reply
I saw an interesting thing on that, they were able to identify family related to criminal cases based on dna.
reply
This is great. Knowing where the points of leverage are, at the level of the entire system, vs tilting at some particular windmill, is the under-appreciated aspect of this space. Or of any space, really. Most people never figure that out.
reply
I remember Tom Woods interviewing someone about this a long time ago. He was talking about the immense predictive power of the data we leave online, including the signals we're sending by abstaining from certain practices.
As someone who works with data professionally, I'm skeptical of the accuracy he claimed, but the point is absolutely correct. Everything we do or don't do sends signals that are being compiled and analyzed (even if no one is actually looking at the analyses).
I think making your signals noisy is underrated, as is being very idiosyncratic.
reply
Especially with all of this AI coming out. Imagine if they rounded up all the data you have written on SN and made an AI of you. How similar do you think it would sound?
reply
It could probably do a pretty decent ~meta post in my voice.
reply
I heard open ai can do a pretty good scarlett johanson lol
reply
I enjoyed reading it. Let me tell you that even today I use a cell phone without GPS
reply
GPS is totally private
reply
cell phone GPS or simple GPS device ?
reply
both. just use a phone with no spyware in it
reply
OS and google is spyware ?
reply
yes. that's why people are degoogling their phones
reply
I guess the ultimate goal is to get everyone to care about privacy. Once you make it the norm, you don't stand out.
reply
106 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 23 May
A judo-style mechanism is to give wrong information when you can.
Maybe your memory isn't so good, so you transpose a number when entering your birthdate or SSN, etc.
In the end, data collection and analysis is bound by "Garbage In - Garbage Out".
Wouldn't it suck if there was a whole mishmash of garbage data on you and it caused the analysis to intertwine your personal data with others in such a confusing way that it was impossible to perform any meaningful analysis?
[NOTE] - I'm not advocating lying on legal forms, however 95%+++ of the data collected on you is not legally mandated.
reply
Very good point. In fact I forgot to add this to the post.
reply
210 sats \ 1 reply \ @anon 23 May
I understand the thinking but I disagree. We have to fight for every inch we can. By default my take is this : if they're asking me, it's because :
  1. they don't know (which is good) or
  2. that department (that part of the State) doesn't know.
If the full force of the State was on me, it wouldn't take a second for most important things. However, the more people push back, the more they have to divide their forces.
Plus : they may be able to access information in different ways but not be able to use that info in court, or not have the legal right to use it for other purposes unless you consent, etc. As long as we still live in something that still pretends to be based on laws, it still matters, to an extent. We've seen cases where they prefer to drop charges rather than to have to reveal how they came by certain info.
If one is involved in things that are "drone-able" offenses, it won't matter. They'll just Obamacide or Akancide the guy. But for the other stuff, we still have courts. Therefore, they're bound by laws, regulations, and the constitution.
reply
That's a reasonable way to look at it. I'm going to mull this over.
reply
When I talk about digital privacy, there is always some smug genius who shrugs and tells me, "Who cares? We all know we don't have any privacy anyway." Nothing could be more wrong. Convincing you that the fight is already over to the way people in power get you to stop resisting.
reply
Yes, it's like how much they care about censoring speech online. They wouldn't care if it didn't make a difference.
reply
It's definitely a losing battle and will only get worse. I totally understand your POV and agree with most of it.
But at the end it's still your choice to give up X and Y data most of the time. And provided the choice, i will pick the more private option.
reply
Well, I love the idea of going 'Old School'. Key points:
  • Never talk any business on phones.
  • Never keep finances online
One from me...if I'm right
  • Just be a hard-core Bitcoiner and create small Bitcoin Economies around you.
reply
Great food for thought
reply
well said, a good reminder. opsec is a dynamic practice depending on the info
reply
This is so true. Its an old way of thinking, but the old ways work!
reply