But surveillance can hurt productivity, too. YouTube, for example, is really good at predicting which videos I will find interesting, and I end up wasting a lot of time. When I started using Invidious, which doesn’t track your watch history, I wasted far less time.
Productivity vs. Privacy
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Productivity vs. Privacy
#12But surveillance can hurt productivity, too. YouTube, for example, is really good at predicting which videos I will find interesting, and I end up wasting a lot of time. When I started using Invidious, which doesn’t track your watch history, I wasted far less time.
Youtube isn't trying to make you waste less time? In this case, I think youtube would consider you to be very productive within their software/system
Re: Productivity vs. Privacy
#13I decided against using ProtonMail precisely because of the lack of full-text search (you can search across email subjects, but only because [they aren't encrypted][1]). However, there is another zero-knowledge email provider who does have this functionality: [Tutanota][2].
Also, there is work on an interoperable standard for E2E-encrypted instant message: [MLS][3]. These are just two examples, but I wonder whether the gap between "standard" and privacy-preserving software is actually shrinking as demand for the latter rises.
[1]: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/does-protonmai...
Re: Productivity vs. Privacy
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. But even not all harvesting is privacy invasive. As a search engine I can know that 3.054% of users search for sex toys. As long as they don’t know or harvest who is doing these searches, there’s no privacy violation.
Valid point, but this doesn't amount to a very convincing promise to many users imo. You're relying on the service provider to not abuse their power. If that were sufficient I don't think we would see these e2e services pop up to begin with.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. Unfortunately services blatantly and openly violate their customers privacy and by and large customers don’t care. I would also prefer zero trust as a first choice, but for now would be happy to settle for trusting companies that just seem decent. Sadly those are few and far between and the norm is to harvest, sell and abuse customer data.
Re: Productivity vs. Privacy
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valid point, but this doesn't amount to a very convincing promise to many users imo. You're relying on the service provider to not abuse their power. If that were sufficient I don't think we would see these e2e services pop up to begin with.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. Unfortunately services blatantly and openly violate their customers privacy and by and large customers don’t care. I would also prefer zero trust as a first choice, but for now would be happy to settle for trusting companies that just seem decent. Sadly those are few and far between and the norm is to harvest, sell and abuse customer data.
> I would also prefer zero trust as a first choice, but for now would be happy to settle for trusting companies that just seem decent.
It's an incentives problem. If the company can always make a bit more money by harvesting data, then why would it not? Especially if it could avoid getting detected or at least avoid getting in trouble.
That's the benefit of E2E - I don't have to trust the middleman. I still have to trust the other end (and that has a whole can of issues to be sorted) and I have to trust myself (and again, that has plenty of problems) but it at least removes an entire vector.
Re: Productivity vs. Privacy
#16But surveillance can hurt productivity, too. YouTube, for example, is really good at predicting which videos I will find interesting, and I end up wasting a lot of time. When I started using Invidious, which doesn’t track your watch history, I wasted far less time.
Completely agree, and I haven't thought about that angle enough.