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by astrowilliam 2864 days ago
I'm truly interested and curious. Can you explain to me why being on the internet where all your actions are being monitored by your ISP is OK, but Windows is bad? I mean, no matter how many precautions you take, someone is watching you some how. Use web-based email? There's a record somewhere with all your past emails and they are making a marketing profile about you, same with search.

And what about smart phones? Android has you locked into Google surveillance and Apple is closed so we have no idea how much they know. Send a text? Your provider had to send that data and the person on the receiving end... well, you never know how secure their systems are.

Just some food for thought, would like to hear why Windows is so bad, I'm a Windows/Apple/Linux user and I don't hate on any of them.

3 comments

>Can you explain to me why being on the internet where all your actions are being monitored by your ISP is OK

ISP surveillance is not OK, but ISPs only know the domains I access, not what I do on them. I can prevent them from knowing even that by using a VPN, Tor, or any other kind of proxy. I believe encrypted DNS might also become a thing in the future. Also, I'm not locked-in to my ISP.

>no matter how many precautions you take, someone is watching you some how

That's what we're trying to fight.

>There's a record somewhere with all your past emails and they are making a marketing profile about you

A lot of my email accounts are fake-identity and temporary and I try to use encryption whenever I can, but I admit email encryption has a long way to go. There's no lock-in here though.

>Android has you locked into Google surveillance

It doesn't. Custom Google-free Android ROMs are a thing and work well.

>Send a text? Your provider had to send that data

Use encryption. I recommend Matrix/Riot.im for encrypted chat. There is also a program called Silence that can encrypt SMS.

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If you want to know the point of all this, there's a lot of material online, but you can start by watching the short talk "Why Privacy Matters" by Glenn Greenwald

Windows is "bad" for the same reason all that you listed is. It's a fallacy to excuse anti-user, anti-privacy practices under the argument that "Well, others do it too".
ISPs are many, Microsoft is one. Regardless of how corrupted and corruptible ISPs are, that’s a huge difference - especially in parts of the world where you have choice of ISPS.