>The internet isn't a "surveillance network". It's just a network.
I posit that the internet is a surveillance network. Not only because its surveillance is a now primary function, but because it was always designed to be susceptible to various forms of surveillance.
It should be clear to programmers that the flaws in the internet and related protocols are numerous and tied to it's fundamental structure.
This webpage discusses a number of them: https://secushare.org/broken-internet .
Additionally, the economic incentives adjacent to the internet and related protocols encourage the use of fingerprinting, as they don't otherwise have a means of dis-incentivising unwanted messages (this manifests itself in spam, denial-of-service attacks, botting, etc.)
>Also, what on earth does email or internet traffic have to do with any of this?
That paragraph was to make fun of the parent comment (crazygringo's) statement: "Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy". the parent commenter seemed to suggest that it would be a good idea to share a dangerous amount of information with an organization like amazon simply because they are trustworthy (or rather, simply because they have not been proven to be untrustworthy) despite the fact that they have no incentive or regulation to prevent them from abusing that information in the future.
I joked that if crazygringo was so eager to share his personal information with third parties, then he should share his information with a stranger like me, as I've not yet been exposed for abusing my (non-existent) client's information.
>They use secure protocols in the first place, and they all already rely on large companies like Google and ISP's. And Amazon sure already knows everything I've bought on Amazon.
The fact that you would make a comment like this is unsettling. Think about what you are stating. Email is secure? Secure for whom? How does TLS prevent your email provider from reading your emails? How does it prevent the government from reading your emails? How does TLS help if connections can be downgraded to insecure and broken protocols? How does end-to-end encryption prevent attackers to see what you're doing when they need only know what domains you access? How does public key infrastructure prevent MITM attacks (Hint: it doesn't, it just outsources the problem to certificate authorities)?
The exploitation of the internet and related protocols is not some theoretical tsunami. It is a global flood that is occuring right now a million times a second under authoritatian regimes around the world.
I agree that many of these protocols already rely on large companies such as service providers; The fact that a transaction of information between two parties on the internet requres such a great number of
arbitrarily powerful third parties is why we must dismantle the existing infrastructure (and replace it) in order to free ourselves (and future generations).
The age of blind trust will end one way or another.