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Privacy Tools: Encryption against global mass surveillance

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Re: Privacy Tools: Encryption against global mass surveillance

#22

Not choosing US-based hosting providers is sound advice for various reasons, if not only for the reason that the US has invented crimes that do not exist in other countries or the sentences for existing crimes are 10 x higher than anywhere else. (I do not want to defend criminals but some of those "crimes" also affect people who e.g. write p2p programs or decompilers. You get what I mean.) As for the value of encrypt…

> Government snooping and privacy decay is a social and political problem and should primarily be addressed at that level. Please don't attempt to bolster support for one approach by discouraging another. There is no "primarily". None of the approaches have worked so far, so it's premature to say that fewer approaches are necessary. Personally, I don't see how the NSA (never mind Google) would ever be politically pre…

A social mechanism can work to prevent privacy invasion. It requires that societal attitude change. Imagine how big a scandal it would be to have bribery or corruption in the govt'. If we give these privacy issues the same weight, then problems can get fixed

Re: Privacy Tools: Encryption against global mass surveillance

#23
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Government snooping and privacy decay is a social and political problem and should primarily be addressed at that level. Please don't attempt to bolster support for one approach by discouraging another. There is no "primarily". None of the approaches have worked so far, so it's premature to say that fewer approaches are necessary. Personally, I don't see how the NSA (never mind Google) would ever be politically pre…

A social mechanism can work to prevent privacy invasion. It requires that societal attitude change. Imagine how big a scandal it would be to have bribery or corruption in the govt'. If we give these privacy issues the same weight, then problems can get fixed

My point is you've got to overcome the attraction to "only processed by a computer or under lawful process".

For example, NSA surveillance has no direct effects on the average US citizen. It is a setup for bad things to happen, has possible political meta-effects, and is a worrying trend. But if the process is successfully constrained by law, then to your average person it represents a capability rather than a vulnerability. This has little to do with your average person not understanding technology, but instead with their feeling safe as part of a majority.

Re: Privacy Tools: Encryption against global mass surveillance

#24

whenever i turn on my VPN i imagine it was secretly set up as a honeypot by the NSA. it would be a perfect strategy for them: implement a low-cost, high quality VPN with great service and bandwidth, from a country with legal privacy protections. how would anyone find out?

"Never trust any company with your privacy, always encrypt." Source: https://www.privacytools.io/

Re: Privacy Tools: Encryption against global mass surveillance

#25
post #7

All great tools (ghostery is missing, although there is Disconnect), but the lack of a great search engine like Google is a big deal. I don't use DuckDuckGo regularly because, although I believe it's a great search engine that works mostly fine, sometimes the results are somewhat unexpected, and you need to be fast and focused. The rest is okay, there seems to be a good amount of email providers, but Search Engines?…

"ghostery is missing" for a good reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Business_model

Re: Privacy Tools: Encryption against global mass surveillance

#26
post #7

All great tools (ghostery is missing, although there is Disconnect), but the lack of a great search engine like Google is a big deal. I don't use DuckDuckGo regularly because, although I believe it's a great search engine that works mostly fine, sometimes the results are somewhat unexpected, and you need to be fast and focused. The rest is okay, there seems to be a good amount of email providers, but Search Engines?…

"ghostery is missing" for a good reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Business_model

Does this happen when you opt-out the GhostRank feature? My understanding is that if you decide to support them, then they'll use such data. However, I think I will start using Disconnect. Thanks for your hint!
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