[throwaway50203]

> Nobody cares.

Repeating this mantra all the time is not helpful.

People have been told that modern computing and privacy cannot coexist. That all software companies spy on them and users can only choose between giving up privacy or giving up technology.

On top of that, privacy, by itself, is meaningless. What matters is information inequality. Inequality is power.

When people can monitor a government you have democracy.

When people cannot monitor a government and the government monitors people you have tyranny.

Unsurprisingly, there are many paid privacy and anonymity services for wealthy people.

Please don't say that people just don't care. People have been educated to be meek to authority.

[BiteCode_dev]

Yes. Now what are you going to do about it?

Nothing.

Because alone you can't.

And the others not only won't help you, but their actions will hinder yours.

Because they don't care.

Are you going to educate them?

Here is a list of all the people that did that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whistleblowers

Most of them got their life ruined.

Nothing changed.

Because nobody cares.

Educated people have been repeating "don't put things on facebook", "use free software", "gov is spying on you".

The answers have been "I don't have anything to hide" and "you are paranoid".

Because nobody cares.

You can craft the best technological solution to that, if nobody cares about it, nothing will happen.

You can give the best information, if nobody cares, nothing will happen.

You can provide the most secure thing, if the competition gain an advantage from not doing it and you gain nothing, you will lose.

And deep inside you know that because:

1 - you are using a throwaway account

2 - you don't provide any solution to the problem

The situation is exactly the same as with all other topics where we gain a lot of comfort individually to do the wrong thing collectively.

Did we slow down global warming? Didn't we prevent 60% of the insects from disappearing? Did we stop delegating slavery to asian countries? Did we even stop buying from all those companies that enrage us in the news?

Nope.

[fsflover]

This is not the only way how political fight happens. There are indeed many whistleblowers with runied lives. But there are also many more people who devote a part of their life to educating others and encrypting what they can. I put GNU/Linux to every computer of my relatives I could reach. I participate in I2P and Tor networks regularly. I also have a day job and I am not going to risk it. But if a tiny part of the population did what I do, the world would be entirely different. People do care about anonymity and privacy. It's just that they have very limited resources and not everyone can devote a significant part of their time for that. Please help them and do not spread the mood of giving up.

tl;dr: Privacy is not binary. You can always increase the price of hacking you and others.

[BiteCode_dev]

You make the mistake a lot of geeks does, thinking it's a technical problem. It's not.

You can have the best tech in the world, if the state is against you, if laws are against you, if society is against you, you'll only have scraps of a life.

It's all about people caring. Because only the mass of human can oppose anything. The rest are just sparks.

And you can state "do care about anonymity and privacy" as much as you want. Words don't matter. Actions do.

And people are still putting their entire life willingly on Facebook.

[fsflover]

I never said it was a technical problem. It is the problem of asymmetry in information and resources. When more people know that you can confortably use devices without spying and violations of privacy, more people will oppose stupid laws removing our basic rights and spyware.

However, not everyone has time/energy to think about those issues. You need to help people by showing them better options, especially if they do not impose any restrictions. And a lot of free software is like this in 2020.

[snarf21]

I wish I could upvote your post 1000x. People don't want to spend time and energy on these things. They just want to live their life. It is only when they can't that people start to care. Despite everything, quality of life in the US and western world is far too high to have people (in large numbers) pushing back in any real way.

[throwaway50203]

Let me remind you that revolutions happened throughout history.

After thousand of years of cynics saying "nothing changed", one day, a tipping point is reached.

[TwoBit]

I've never heard of a bank account being compromised because of lack of e2e encryption by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. When that happens then post about it and I'll start caring.