How to fight the surveillance economy
medium.com
How to fight the surveillance economy
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#2Addendum to the solution 1: "Don't assume that, because you paid for something, they aren't harvesting your data anyway".
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#3> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider.
What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#4Some valid points. At the end of the day, until the governments around the world reign in the offenders with regulations and potential jail time (GDRP and such), nothing is going to change for the masses.
Just like every other cycle in the human history - abuse until a breaking point is reached, regulations come in, find some other niche ripe for "disruption", repeat the cycle.
Unrelated to the main topic - writing about the surveillance economy in a Medium post, which itself is a textbook example of the surveillance economy devaluates the core message a little bit for me.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#5If you're a software developer the way to fight this is financial. Make a ton of money then pay journalists to write about it and pay other software developers to build the tools to evade it.[0]
Regarding VPNs:
What I want is a very small, open source program that I can give my credit card. It will light up little DigitalOcean droplets (and other VPSes to stop potential monitoring from them) and create VPNs here and there. I also want to build my own browser that will be capable of making the rendering happen on these rented-for-a-minute servers then pipe back just the PNG. I also would make certain things local. I can use machine learning to predict which areas of Wikipedia I will probably want to read in the future. This should just be local and occasionally synced. Same with Stack Overflow.
Fingerprint me now bitches. (They still probably can, at least partially. It just raises me up to the top of the trees in the jungle.)
[0] Though I will say I see the downsides. Surveillance is how we stop malice and per-individual power is going up.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#6Or instead make the information public/transparent as possible. To level the playing field. Yes there are going to be many issue arise from this, so it's these issue that need to be fixed instead of trying to fight to make information private.
>They know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them
Right so we need to fight for knowing more information about them as much as they know about us
Governments want surveillance the citizen, fine, the citizen should fight for ability to surveillance the government as well.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#7> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider. What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.
i think they are referring to vpn services that don't require you to create an account with name/contact/etc. For instance, the one I use, they create a bitcoin wallet, once that wallet receives coins, it generates a random string username and random string password, and that is the entire "signup" process.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#8The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies.
At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors.
With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting.
The only counter to this is either:
1: proof that more individual data /= better ad targeting as DDG is attempting to do
Or
2. Changing the default business model for internet companies
Surveillance capitalism is a natural result of our form of consumption driven economy.
The most interesting thing here actually is that there's an argument to be made that this is also a good approach to building very complex artificial intelligence, effectively aggregating how people respond to input.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#9> Look for businesses that accept anonymous payment options and don’t force everyone to share personal information with a third-party payment provider. What anonymous payment options are there (other than many cryptocurrencies)? I do remember the days of sending cash through the post but I don't think that's what the author is suggesting.
On my country at least there is a trend that only registered costumers have promotions and discounts, but what really happens is that the price of the things go up and the registered costumers pay the 'normal' price.
I'm not buying anymore on theses type of stores (markets and restaurants mostly), but this is keeping growing difficult because every other week more and more business are starting to ask for my 'credentials'.
Re: How to fight the surveillance economy
#10> How to fight the surveillance economy (medium.com)
Step 0: publish on your own platform without trackers, not on medium.