41–50 of 59 posts
What is legitimate access and what is not? If life in a real pandemic or in non-pandemic vs in totalitarian state where your social credit by government and your liberty or none is by government … there are difference in kind.
Such confused idea ultimately lead to the collapse of the west liberty and the raise of the east totalitarianism. Continue your confusion ba … you will ruin your life and your civilization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beside the difference in scale, there are also different incentives. The bartender typically doesn't sell your data. They probably don't have a list of favourite drinks which they could share with others, they just have the information in their head. As soon as that data can be collected and sold at scale, there's an incentive to collect and sell as much data as possible, without any repercussions. Spreading rumours…
> The bartender typically doesn't sell your data. Scammers sell your data all the time. Try going to some third world country to some shady hotel, and the receptionist will tell the taxi driver exactly whre you came from and how rich they think you are, taxi driver will then take you to a scammy club, where they'll already know how much they can scam out of you, sometimes even the police is in the whole scam, so even…
I'm the creator of YourDigitalRights.org, a free and open source service in the privacy space. When we started 3 years ago we decided to make the service free precisely because of the reasons outlined in this article. Almost every week I get an offer to monetize the service in some way, but I still think you shouldn't need to pay for privacy (literally as I was writing this comment I got an email offering to pay for…
Are you actually legally a US nonprofit, and if so, which kind, and are your articles of incorporation and board membership available somewhere for the public to see?
I'm the creator of YourDigitalRights.org, a free and open source service in the privacy space. When we started 3 years ago we decided to make the service free precisely because of the reasons outlined in this article. Almost every week I get an offer to monetize the service in some way, but I still think you shouldn't need to pay for privacy (literally as I was writing this comment I got an email offering to pay for…
Your parent organization Conscious Digital says it is a non-profit, but what does that mean? Is it a registered 501c something with the US IRS? Non-profit has a specific legal meaning in that case, mainly that donations are tax-deductible, but to get that designation, you have to incorporate, make public who is on your board, and provide copies of your tax returns to anyone who donates. I tried to look around in your…
There are plenty of worthy non-profits that aren't based in the US. The OpenBSD Foundation, for example.
If the author's premise is correct, that privacy is a marker of class, then a conclusion drawn from that is more people will be striving for greater privacy. TBH, the comments are more interesting than the author's opinion. https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/07/15/privacy_... It's true that "privacy" from "tech" companies is not easy and could cost money if someone tries to replace every "service" that tec…
If I pay cash for something, or use my non-gmail address, people don't understand it's because I value privacy, but just that I'm "weird".
Err, you shouldn't conflate privacy from private companies with privacy from the government. The latter always was and always will be around, you can't hide from the ultimate authority. Nothing will help you, short of living completely off the grid in an RV, maybe. It's not a good thing, but governments everywhere are pushing for more surveillance and knowledge and they will get it. But they also help increase privac…
I'm the creator of YourDigitalRights.org, a free and open source service in the privacy space. When we started 3 years ago we decided to make the service free precisely because of the reasons outlined in this article. Almost every week I get an offer to monetize the service in some way, but I still think you shouldn't need to pay for privacy (literally as I was writing this comment I got an email offering to pay for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The pay version is about $7.50 USD a month, which is not cost prohibitive if you care about it. It’s possible for someone to care about privacy but not have the means to do anything about it. The fact that $7.50 a month _is_ cost prohibitive for some people is the point of the article.
GP's point is that it may be cost prohibitive to some but it's too cheap to be a marker of class in developed countries. It'd be like saying a Netflix subscription is a marker of class.
That's even more true globally.
And yes, Netflix is hard on some people too. I know plenty of people not in the software engineer class who (illegally) share Netflix subscriptions or don't have them at all.
However I'd take it a step further than the author who says it's a signifier to say that, now, privacy is class. (with the cavet that class is multi-dimensional, and not a scalar hierarchy) I've written to the effect before that Apple's iPhone is entry into the middle class because the values encoded in its aesthetics and features separate you from being a worker to being a "creative." This was the vision Jobs sold - that you too could become a sophisticated beturtlenecked urbane architect designer offering valuable insights and observations if you bought this product. The iPhone and its (excellent) privacy and security features elevate you from the problems of office stiffs unsticking printer jams to a world where you don't have to think about that stuff and can focus on your beautiful thoughts without needing to struggle. "It just works." - so you don't have to. Sure it's expensive, but nobody who has one notices. In a microcosm, that's what class difference can feel like. That is, wealth is what you have, but class is what you don't need.
Having privacy means you don't have to spend effort to manage your public persona. The (S)mart people I know do engage social media just enough to be unremarkable, but no more.
I'm not that smart, though my own approach to privacy has not been strong anonymity with opsec either, because the effort to live in-effect as a fugitive just elevates your percieved antagonists to an equal, or in the case of state actors, elevates ourselves to imagining ourselves as super villain threats.
Privacy to me now means actively choosing how to relate to technology and people, with a sense of a personal perimeter of calm that I value, and maintaining personal privacy means I can have things that are mine to share, and that creates value for others. With that in mind, you can just set a low bar and costs to keep out of the way of dragnets and spam.
To have had the knowledge that privacy was an issue at all has meant both having a sense of (often, ridiculous) self importance that I was no mere "user," and spending a great deal of time understanding technology, at a time when access to it was more rare. So from the outside, privacy looks like a class signal. From the inside, privacy is the necessary condition to bring intentional value to relationships, and the people who would take it from you are basically petty thieves - a fact of life in any human environment.
Sure, the Zucks, Jacks, Sundars and NSA's of the world get my information and stuff, but their problems are things I just do not have.